Delphi collected works o.., p.357
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 357
She lifted her hair off her forehead, thick, clustering, soft hair, that was a weight to her small head.
“I do not know; I am tired. Is Maryx angry with me, that he does not come?”
“He is gone into Rome. No: he is not angry; perhaps he is pained.”
“I am sorry.”
“You see, he meant to give you pleasure, and he failed, and another succeeded. A small thing, perhaps: still, a man may be wounded.”
“I wonder if he would think this good,” she murmured, her eyes still on her Penthesileia. “Do you think he would see any strength or beauty in it at all?”
“Maryx! But surely you must know! He never says what he does not think, nor ever stoops to give you mere flattery.”
“I did not mean Maryx,” she said, and then she turned away, and went to a desk in an inner room, and began to translate the legendary portions of Pausanias relating to Endæus, — a kind of employment which her master had given her to change at intervals the posture and the position of work at the clay, which he thought were not good too long together, for one of her sex and one so young.
I let her alone: it was of no use to speak. I went and talked a little to the old woman who sat in her wooden shoes in the beautiful chambers, and who looked out over Rome and wished she were hoeing in a cabbage-plot.
“Is the girl here to-day?” asked the mother of Maryx. “Ah! she has not been to see me this morning.”
“Does she always come?”
“Always. We manage to understand each other. Not very much; but enough. It is good to look at her; it is like seeing the vines in flower.”
“Shall I call her here?”
“No. Let her be. Perhaps Germain wants her.”
“You have grown to like her?”
“Yes; one likes what is young. And then she is very fair to look at; a fair face is so much. It was hard in the good God to make so many faces ugly; to be born ugly, — that is, to enter the world with a hobble at your foot, — at least when you are a woman. Will my son marry her, think you?”
“I cannot tell. Who has thought of it?”
“No one. Only myself. But a man and a girl, — that is how it always ends; and he is not quite young, but he is so noble to look at, and so good, and so great. I think that is how it will end. And why not? It would be better for him — something living — than those marble women that he worships. You see, he is very great and famous, and all that, but there is no one to watch for his coming and look the brighter because he comes. And a man wants that. I am his mother, indeed. But that is not much, because I am very stupid, and cannot understand what he talks of, nor the things he does, and all the use that I could be, — to sew, to darn, to sweep, to make the soup, — that he does not want, because he is so great, and can live as the princes do. All the world admires him and honors him, — oh, yes; but when at home he is all alone. But do not say a word, — not a word. Love is not like a bean-plant: you cannot put it in where you wish and train it where you like. If it grows, it grows, and it is God or the devil who sets it there: may the saints forgive me!”
Then she folded her hands, and began telling her beads, a little, quiet, brown figure, like a winter leaf, amidst the splendors of the room, with her wooden shoes sunk in the thick Eastern carpets, and the leaden effigy of the Madonna, that she had bought for a copper at a fair in her girlhood, still hung round her throat as more precious than pearls.
She was a good soul; she would have taken to her heart any creature that her son had loved, or that had loved him; she was old, and ignorant, and stupid, as she said, but she was upright and just, and what was pure, that she thought worthy. The greatness of her son she could not comprehend, and of his works and of his genius she was afraid, not understanding, them; but she would have understood if she had seen him happy with the simple common joys of innocent affection.
“But I am fearful; yes, I am fearful,” she murmured, with her hands clasped together. “Because, you see, he has been good to her, very good; and my life has been long, and never yet did I see a great benefit done but what, in time, it came back as a curse. The good God has ordered it so that we may not do what is right just for the sake of reward.”
Then she told her beads, unwitting of the terrible irony she had uttered.
I left her sorrowfully, and went down the hill, past the bright Pauline water, down the old Aurelian way to my stall by Ponte Sisto, for the labors of the day.
A sorrowful constraint fell upon us all after that morning, and marred the happy, unstrained intercourse with which our time had gone by so pleasantly. Maryx said nothing, and nothing was altered in Giojà’s mode of life, but still there was a change; there was that “little rift in the wood,” which with the coming of a storm strikes down the tree.
For me, I sat and stitched in the driving of the winds, which began to grow very chill, and the neighbours round said that I had become churlish.
One is so often thought to be sullen when one is only sad. Anxiety is a sorry bedfellow, and when one rises in the morning he has chilled us for the day.
Palès snapped at her cats, and worried them, and gamboled before her lovers, and growled at them, and said, as plainly as her sharp black nose and fox’s eyes could speak to me, “Why not come away to the Falcone and eat a bit of porcupine, and enjoy yourself as you used to do, and never trouble your head?”
But I would not adopt her philosophy, even though Fortune did so favor me at that time that in a roll of old vellum I bought to cut up for shoe-linings I actually found a fragment of a manuscript of a Tractatus Matheum of St. Hieronymus, written by an Italian scribe, and with some of the floreated borders still visible.
“Your lot should have been cast in those times, Crispin,” said Hilarion, who saw it, and would have given me a roll of bank-notes for it if I would have taken them. “What a monk you would have made! I think I see you, spelling out the Greek manuscripts, collecting miniatures for the library Gospels, keeping an eye on the wines in the buttery, tending the artichoke and the sweet herbs, talking to Erasmus in Latin when he passed your way, and getting all the artists that had work in the chapel to do something or other for your cell, which would have been sure to have a painted window and a vine climbing about the window. You were meant for a sixteenth-century monk. There is no greater hardship than to be born in an age that is too late for us.”
But I could not jest with him, for he had come down from the house on the bridge in that hour of dusk when Giojà’s studies were over. It was worse than useless to object in any way: he would only have laughed: and, after all, as Maryx had said, we were not her keepers, and how could we insult him by saying that he should not approach her?
“Have you seen her Penthesileia?” I asked him.
“At the studio? Yes.”
“And what do you think of it?”
“It is wonderful, like everything that Maryx does; entirely noble, and pure, and classic.”
“Maryx! He had no hand in it; he never touched it! Unaided she composed and executed every line of it! What are you thinking of?”
“My dear Lupercus, that is no woman’s work, — and a girl’s, too, a mere child’s! How can you believe it?”
“I believe it, as I believe in the sun that hangs in the heavens!” I said, savagely, and feeling ready to strike him. “What! a man all truth and candor, and a girl who is truth itself, conspire to thrust a lie upon us like that? The very idea is an infamy! I tell you it is as utterly her own as the stitches in this shoe that I have stitched are mine!”
“You excite yourself; and I meant no infamy at all. Only, of course, it is Maryx’s brain that has guided her hand everywhere. What shame is there in that? It is an impossible work for a girl of her years to have conceived and executed alone.”
“Have you told her so?”
“Of course not. I never tell truth to any woman; and she has genius of her own, no doubt; more is the pity.”
“The pity. And you are a poet?”
“Am I? The world has said so, but I have been very doubtful all my days.”
And indeed he was so with reason, for, though he had a magical power of magnificent versification, and a classical grace of structure that amazed and awed his age, he was in no sense a poet, for he had no faith, and he derided love.
“Tell her what you have told me of the Penthesileia, and she will hate you,” I said to him.
“Will she?” said he, with a little smile. “Tell her, then, if you like.”
I went a little later, and found her. There were some logs on the hearth, and she sat dreaming before them, drawing lines in the embers with a charred stick. Her face was flushed, her eyes were abstracted and humid.
I had never before found her losing time, doing nothing, — she to whom the past was so full of inexhaustible riches, and the future so open for all accomplishments, that study was to her as their playtime to children and their love-tryst to other maidens.
“He says that you did not do your Penthesileia,” I said to her, abruptly. “Hilarion says so. He is certain that it is the work of Maryx.”
She colored, and shrank a little as if in pain.
“He is wrong,” she said, simply. “But it is natural he should think so; and what merit there is in it must of course be most due to my master, — that is quite true.”
I felt my blood boil in my veins, for I knew that she shrouded her own pain in that patience, because she would not acknowledge that this stranger who misjudged her was cruel.
“I see you will be only a woman, my dear,” I said, bitterly. “I thought you were something above your sex, — aloof from it, — born for art and nothing else, a very offspring of the gods you love. But I see you will be only a woman, after all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you suffer wrong, misjudgment, and even insult, in patience, when you like the giver of them.”
She looked thoughtfully into the red embers on the hearth; her face was troubled. “If he knew me better, he would not doubt me at all. It is not his fault. I think he has lived with false people. But he ought not to doubt Maryx; he has known him so long, and Maryx could not lie. But I dare say he only says it to try me.”
“And you forgive that?”
She was silent a moment.
“There is nothing to forgive,” she said, after a little. “It must be such pain to him to doubt so much, — if he do really doubt. I suppose that is what you meant by the snakes of Heine.”
“You have a noble soul, my dear.”
She opened her grave soft eyes on me in surprise. She would have understood praise of her Penthesileia, but she did not understand it of herself.
I left her in the dull glow of the wood ashes, with the tawny-colored sunset of the winter’s eve shining behind the iron bars of the casement and tinging the Pentelic marble of the Hermes to pale gold. When I got half-way down the stairs, she came after me.
“Do you think he does really disbelieve?”
“He disbelieves everything. It is a habit; many men are like that who have been spoiled by Fortune. What does it matter?”
But if I did some greater thing, — something the world called great, — he would believe then?”
“My child, go on with your noble fancies, without caring whether he have faith, or good faith, or neither. Hilarion will always say some gracious thing to you, some captious thing of you to another; in his world, sincerity is rusticity. What does it matter? The artist should never heed any one individual opinion; to do so is to be narrowed at once. If you must have any one in especial, have that of Maryx alone, — a great master and a just judge.”
She did not seem to hear. Her eyes glistened in the yellow light of the Madonna’s lamp.
“I will do something greater, very great; then he must believe,” she said, low to herself; and I could see her heart was heaving fast.
“As great as you like; but for yourself, not for Hilarion, or for any man,” I said to her. “If your likeness in Borghese had kept the clue and the sword in her own hands, she never had been stranded on the rocks of Dia. Remember that.”
But she did not heed me; her eyes had got in them a faraway gaze, and her young face grew resolute and heroic.
“If I had the clue and the sword,” she said, softly, “I would guide him through the maze of doubt, and I would kill the snakes about his feet.”
I bade her good-night. She had no more than ever any thoughts of human love; he was to her Apollo Soranus; that was all. What else but harm could I have done by shaking her awake and bidding her beware? This might be only a dream the more, — and so fade.
“If only he would go away!” I said to Palès and the faun in the fountain.
But it was the cool crisp beginning of winter, with all the shades of purple on the hills, where the grasses and flowers had lied, and the virgin snow upon Soracte, and the cyclamen in the hollows where the buried cities lay; and in winter and spring Hilarion loved Rome, even if he had ceased to love his duchess with the broad imperial eyes, — ceased such love as alone he knew, worshiping the false gods of Apate and Philotes.
“Does she hate me?” said he, that day, with a smile in his calm blue eyes, — eyes that had so much light in them, and so little warmth.
“No. She is only sorry for you,” I said, bluntly; “ sorry that you have the pain of doubt, and the meanness of it; nay, she did not say that last word, — that is mine. Do you understand a great soul, great writer that you are, and vivisector of men and of women? There is not very often one in this world, but there is one up yonder where that lamp burns under my Hermes.”
Hilarion was silent.
One might almost have said he was ashamed.
He bade me good-night gently, and did not go up towards the bridge. He would take rough words with sweet temper, and own a truth that went against himself; these were among those gracious things with which Nature had made him, and which the world and its adulation and his own contemptuous temper had not uprooted.
“If only he would but go away!” I said to Palès and the faun in the fountain.
CHAPTER XV.
“MY SON,” SAID his mother to Maryx, one day, in the twilight, “is not the girl changed? She comes so little to me. And why do you never read to her in the evening-time, as last winter you did? I did not understand the words, but it had a fine sound; I liked to listen to it.”
“She is a year older,” said Maryx; “and do the same things ever please long?”
“Fools, — no. But she is not foolish; she cannot be fickle, I think. Do you ask her to come?”
“She does as she likes best. She knows that she is always welcome.”
“And what does she do instead?”
“She sits at home, in her room, and studies.”
The old woman spun on at her wheel: she was remembering the days of her youth.
“Is there no one there,” she said, sharply. “Is there a youth, — a student? any one young as she is?”
“No; that I know of. No.”
“There must he some one, or else —— Germain, you are a great man, and wise, and go your own ways; but may-be you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars that they set their foot on the lark that would have sung to them and woke them brightly in the morning, — and kill it. Are you like that, my son?”
He changed color.
“What do you mean?”
I mean this,” said his mother, ceasing to spin, and looking up at him in the firelight. “Why do you let the girl escape you? Why do you not marry her”
His proud brows bent together and grew warm.
“Why say such things to me? Do you think — —”
“Yes. I think that you have some love for her. Perhaps you do not know it; — very well.”
Maryx was silent, communing with his own heart.
“If I did,” he said, slowly and sadly, at length, neither denying nor affirming, “that would not be enough. She has no thought of me, — no thought at all, except as her master.”
“That you cannot tell,” said his mother, simply. “The heart of a girl, — that is as a rose still shut up: if it be too much frozen it never opens at all. Look you, Germain, you have been so busied with your marble women, and those vile living things that bare themselves before you, that you have not thought, perhaps; but I remember what girls were. I was a girl so long, long ago, down there in the old village, washing my linen in the brook, and seeing your father come through the colza and the rose-fields. Oh, yes! I can remember; and this I can tell you: women are poor things; they are like swallows numbed in the winter; the hand that warms them and lifts them up puts them in the breast without trouble. If you would be loved of a woman, give her the warmth of love: she will be roused, and tremble a bit, and perhaps try to get away, but she will be like the numbed swallow: if you close your hand fast she is yours. Most women love love, and not the lover. Take my word!”
Maryx had grown very pale. He smiled a little.
“For shame, mother! That is what the wanton Pauline Venus said in Crispin’s dream in Borghese. And if it be not ourselves, but only the passion, that is loved, where is the worth of such love?”
“Nay, if you begin to question, I get stupid. I keep to the thing I say. I know what I mean. She is asleep. He who wakes her, him will she cling to: there is an old song that says that in our country. Why not be the one? She has a great heart, though it is all shut up, and silent.”
Maryx made no answer.
“Why are bad men the men that women love the most?” muttered his mother to the distaff, her mind plunging into a depth of recollection and stirring it dully. “Only because they are foremost, because they have no modesty, because they burn women up in their fires, — as the children burn up the locusts in summer nights. Oh, I have not forgotten what I used to see and to hear. Why let another come up with the lighted tow, while you stand by and say nothing?”
