Delphi collected works o.., p.366
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 366
I had little hope that he would be faithful to her, or merciful in any way; yet sometimes I fancied that that perfect love of hers, and her entire innocence of evil, and her many high and rare gifts, might so gain even on him, that it would not be quite with her as it had been with others. So I fancied, hoping against hope, and sitting stitching by my old place under the shadow of the old ecclesiastical walls.
Hilarion came no more to Rome.
It was not fear that kept him away: he was one of the boldest of men. It was, probably, that dislike to moral pain, and instinctive avoidance of it, which was very strong in his temperament. It was also, perhaps, some pang of conscience; for his conscience was always fully awake to the evil he did, and the worst thing in him was that, knowing it, he deliberately selected it. But then, indeed, to him and to his school there is no clear right and no clear wrong in anything. All men were irresponsible in his sight, being born without any will of their own, and all adrift in a chaotic darkness that had no beginning or end.
Hilarion came no more to Rome, and the beauty of Daïla was wasted on the empty air and on the peasants, who had no eyes to behold it, but only saw the locust on the wheat-stalk, the beetle in the vine-leaf, the fever-mist in the reedy places by the rivers, and all the other sore and various curses of their daily lives.
If any asked for news of him there, they always said that they knew nothing. Perhaps it was true. Hilarion was one of those who have many houses in many lands, but have no home.
They are common in your generation.
Of little Amphion, also, I had seen no more since that fatal night.
All about me the life was unchanged. My neighbors played their trisella and zecchinetto as of old; Ersilia scolded and labored, with a wrinkle the more betwixt her black brows; Pippo cooked, and Pipistrello played; and the youngsters skipped upon the stones to the twanging of lute and viol and the thump of tambourine; and the nightingales sang in the gardens; and the goats rang their bells with early daylight down the streets.
But to me all the world seemed dead, — dead as Nero’s slaughtered millions were beneath the soil.
A year had gone by since Maryx had left Rome, and it was summer again, — full summer, with all the people going out, in merry, honest fooling, to the country, and the lusty-lunged reapers coming through the streets all the night long, singing, with the tasseled corn in their hair, and the poppies behind their ears.
Ah, the poppies! — Love’s gift.
When I saw them I grew more heart-sick than before, and all the loud sonorous reaping-songs beat on my ears with a stupid hateful sound.
One night they came by me over the bridge, louder and more mirthful than ever, and the girls of our streets were dancing the saltarella with some young fisher-fellows from the boats below, and all of a sudden the harmless, noisy joyousness of it all smote me so sharply that I could not bear it any longer, and I rose up and walked away.
All the day long, and some time before, I do not know why it was, but a sudden restlessness had seized on me, and that kind of feeling of something strange about me which one has at times; nervous depression, wise men say, and weak men call such things presentiments.
I felt a loathing of those blithe guitars, and shaking tambourines, and handsome maidens. I rose and called Palès, and strolled away in the white still night along the familiar ways. By night Rome is still a city for the gods: the shadows veil its wounds, the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel leaves brush the marble as in Agrippa’s time, you will see the immortals passing by. In earlier days I had seen them, — days when no human affection chained my thoughts to earth: now I went over the stones bent and blind, and only thinking, — thinking, — thinking. When we can only think, and cannot dream, then truly we are old.
I went along through the Forum, and past the arch of Trajan, and through Constantine’s, out on that broad road between the mulberry-trees, with the ruins of the innumerable temples standing everywhere amidst the fields and gardens, the reapen corn and the ripening cherries.
The road curves to the left, as every one knows, and goes to the baths of the poor madman, Caracalla; and there are shapeless mounds of brick and stone and rubble everywhere among the turf and the tilled soil, and you know that they were all sacred one day, and beautiful, with domes, and porticoes, and columns, and high-springing-arches, and thronging multitudes worshiping in them, and the smoke of sacrifice ascending, and the great statues standing with serene faces immutable and calm amidst the uproar of emotion and of prayer.
The night was still and luminous; a million stars were shining in the violet blue above; all was quiet, with only the sound of hooting owls that flew from the looming mass of the Flavian theatre behind me in the dark. I thought of the broad burning noons, of the gathered people, of the knife of the priest, of the fall of the ox, of the fountain of blood, of the frenzy of death, of the worship of Attis, of all that came with the accursed Syrian races to ruin Rome with its lusts.
I thought, and shuddered, and went on, and forgot them: what mattered the fall of the gods or the nations? — I had not been able to keep pure and in safety one short human life.
It was midsummer time, and the scents of the land were all sweet and heavy about one; the reaped wheat leaned against the broken altar, and the cut clover was piled by the forsaken lararium; the air was alight and alive with fireflies, and the crickets alone answered the owls singing among the stalks of the corn.
The mighty red masses of the baths rose in sight: they were not red now, but brown and gray, stripped of their marbles, and bare in the moonlight, with the bushes blowing on their summits, and the many things that only venture forth by night, creeping over the mosaic floors that once had felt so many million soft, white, useless feet glistening with the unguents and the perfumes there.
In that warm summer night the scents of the innumerable bird-sown plants and flowers was sweet upon the night as ever was the stream of fragrance poured over patrician limbs in these recesses, now so dark and drear and given over to the stoat and the newt, in that eternal irony of mortal fame which seems always to laugh aloud through Rome.
It was a hiding-place for thieves in that time; but I could have no fear, I, old and poor, without a coin of value on me. I walked through it, unthinking; thinking only of that long-abiding sorrow which had fallen upon me and others because I had meddled with the great goddess of Præneste.
Now, at that time the place was perilous and quite unguarded; beggars slept there, and thieves also if they chose; and so it was not strange that away from the broad moonlight, just where the mosaic pavement slopes down under the fragment of marble cornice in the central hall, there was rough work and some evil thing being done: there was an old man being held and searched by two sturdy half-clad rogues.
I was old too, but very strong, and I had my knife. The thieves were but two: they fled without my touching them, thinking the guards were behind me, — fled, and having no wound worse than that from Palès’s sharp teeth. The old man muttered many curses and few blessings: he had been robbed of a few copper coins: he was very poor, he said. Looking in his haggard face I saw that he was the old man, Ben Sulim, of the Ghetto.
I gave him back his curses, and set him with his face to the moonlight, and, bade him begone.
Then he would have thanked me; but I strode away from him out over the vineyards where there used to be all those open marble courts for the Romans’ sports and daily gossiping. A hare ran before me into a sheaf of corn, a broad-winged owl flew slowly like a puff of smoke borne on a slow wind: they were all that held the place of the Roman people now.
I walked homeward by many a mile across the pale Campagna, sweet with flowering thyme, and rife with fever, and backward into Rome by way of the Lateran church and palace: it was full dawn when I reached my stall and slept. I thought no more of the accident of the night, — save now and then I wished I had not meddled with the thieves.
It was far into the vintage month, and the first dreariness of rain was falling, when a messenger came to me from the Fiumara, and bade me, as a good and Christian man, go down into the Ghetto to see a dying man who asked for me. At first I would not go; then I thought of her and went: heaven forgive me for such hardness of soul! Before death all men have title to our help.
I went, — indeed, I hastened; for I knew not what it might not bode for her. But, with all my haste, I was too late: my momentary hardness and reluctance had made me too late: the old man was in the agonies of death when I climbed to his wretched door, and, though his sunken eyes looked at me with pain, he could not speak, and in a few seconds more his last breath passed his lips.
It was in squalor, nakedness, and misery that he died; died indeed, they said, rather of want of food, and from unnatural deprivations of all kinds, than of any malady.
Yet there was a notary waiting there; and when he indeed lay stark and lifeless and gray in death’s rigidity upon the planks of his miserable bed, the man said, softly — for men who are not reverent of death are reverent of wealth,— “He was the richest man in the Ghetto.”
And thus it proved.
What he would have said to me, no man could tell; but by all the people round him his large possessions had been long suspected.
The Syrian Jew had died as so many a miser has died in this world, a starved and wretched skeleton, but leaving a mass of wealth behind him, and no word of any kind to will it, for death had come upon him unawares, and no doubt, like all men whose treasures lie in things of earth, the very thought of death had always been shunned and put away by him.
There was a great outcry in the place, and great agitation, for he had lived and died a bad and cruel man, and had been much hated even by his own people, and had always been thought a usurer, and now it seemed there was no kind of wealth he had not owned in secret, — gold and silver, scrip and bond, and, though none of his persuasion can own house or land in Rome, many of those Ghetto leases, one of which is thought a fine fair fortune.
Would the wealth all fall to the State, lapse to the Church?
That was the excitement of the quarter as the men of law, when the lean frightful body of him had been shoveled into the earth of their burial-place going towards Aventine, spent all the long hours of the day unearthing all the evidences of his riches, and, though sunset was near at hand, yet were far off the close of their labors, searching and sealing from morn to eve.
I said nothing to any one, but went home, got those papers which she had first put in my hands in those early days when she had lived under the shadow of my Hermes, and took them to those chambers in the Vatican where dwelt my mighty friend, who had risen to be a cardinal, and very mighty and powerful, and was a good and generous man withal; for in those days one could do nothing without a voice from the Vatican, and with it could do everything in Rome.
He was a good man, and a great man, and had never forgotten that but for my poor service to him in his youth he in all likelihood would never have lived to wear the broad scarlet hat above his level classic brows.
He was kind; he was even interested; he kept the matter in his own hands; he could propel the law, and fulfill it; in a word, he so acted that the chief treasures of the dead man awaited her whenever she should claim them.
I only told him I had lost her, and all clue to her. I could not tell him of Hilarion.
Why do all things come too late?
The Eastern people say the gods sit above and laugh to see the woe and perplexity and the pain of men: verily, devils themselves might weep before those two little words, “Too late.”
When he told me that this should certainly be so, — that if I could find her living, and bring her into Rome, she should become possessor of all this strange accursed wealth, got together, none knew how, throughout a long lonely life of horrible barrenness and hatred of all human things, — when he told me, I say, I felt giddy.
I remember coming out from his gracious presence, and passing down those gigantic staircases between the Swiss in their yellow jerkins and their cuirasses of steel, and going out along the long stone passages into the daylight like a drunken man.
Had it been but a little earlier, only a little earlier! Had it come only just ere the earth had had time to bear and blossom and be reaped for harvests these two short summers!
What was the shield of Athene beside the shield of base gold?
What power had love or the arts to shelter, compared with the mere force of wealth?
I cursed the dead man in his grave.
Brutal it might be, but I was so, — brutal as one may be who in savage wars sees the daughter of his heart and hearth dishonored and lying lifeless, with a sword-thrust in her breast, when so little could have saved her, just a moment, — just a word!
I went down out of the Vatican into the noble sunlit square, where in a high west wind the fountains were tossing like waves of the sea, all foam, and blown aloft in a storm; and the black shadow of the mighty obelisk was traveling slowly across the whiteness of the place, like the shadow of the arm of Time.
Within, in the Sistine vaults, there were the multitudes come to judgment, and the opening heavens, and the yawning graves, and the awful greatness that is veiled in the dusk, as the voices chant the “Misere misere.” When the day prefigured there breaks, will none rise to ask why salvation came too late?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
I WENT TO Pippo, and I said to him, —
“You are an old friend, and a true one: will you lend me a sum of money?” and I assured him that for what I wanted there were things enough still in the chamber to give him back his loan, if that was what he feared.
But Pippo scratched his head mournfully.
“Dear one, do not ask it,” said he. “Friendship is a sturdy plant, a sweet herb and a savory, but when it touches the purse-strings — somehow it shrivels. I should be loath to love you less. So let us say nothing about money.”
It was wise in him, no doubt, and he proceeded to show that it was because of his very love for me that he spoke so, after cooking for me more than a score of years, and charging me at pleasure.
Ersilia, who had listened as she washed her clothes on the edge of the well in the yard, hung her linen to dry, then followed me out.
“I have money; take it,” said she,— “if it be to find her, or to do any good for her. And when you see her, tell her that I have promised her Lady six candles as tall as I am if only she will bring her back; but, to be sure, she never cared for these things, nor believed in them. Nay, take the money. I am not like Pippo. You will pay me back; and if not — not. I have cursed her many a time, but I would walk barefoot to bring her back.”
I saw the hot tears in her fierce black eyes with the brown wrinkles round them: she was a stern and hasty soul, but her heart was true.
But I would not take a woman’s money, and I went and unlocked the chamber of mine, that I never had entered since the day that I had sold Hermes, which had been to me as the bidding to bind his son to the altar must have been to Abraham of old.
And I took the other things that I had, the Etruscan armlet, and the bronze catacomb lamp, and the beautiful fire-blackened flower-crowned colossal head, and sold them to men who have the heart to chaffer and deal in such sacred things, — I never had been able to do it, — and put the money that they gave me in a leathern bag, and set off on my way to the gilded city that Hilarion best loved.
For there I knew that quite easily I or any one could hear of him, and know at once whither he had gone, and who was with him.
“Bring her back!” Ah, dear God! from the path she had taken there is no return.
Yet I went to search for her, having these tidings of her inheritance.
I took the money, and made up my little pack as in the days of my wanderings, so that it strapped tightly on my back, and called to Palès to come with me, and left Rome once more. It was in the light shining weather of early autumn, when the air is once more elastic after the swooning; heats of summer, and there is the scent of fresh wine everywhere upon the wind, and oranges begin to fall at your feet, as you walk, and the arbutus begins to redden its berries, and the maize has its embrowned plumes, tall as the saplings of maple.
It matters nothing how I fared, toiling on through the white dust along that road by the sea, with the blue waves underneath and the green palms above me.
I walked all the way: the sum of my money was small, and I could not tell how soon I might need it. Often I paid my night’s lodging and supper by an hour of stitching at broken shoe-leather, and Palès if tired never complained.
I knew a dog once who, taken from its home in Paris to new owners in Milan, ran away from the unknown master, and found its way on foot all those many weary miles, across the mountains, back to Paris, and died upon the doorstep of its old home. This is true; no fancy, but a fact: will you heed it, ye who call the animals dumb beasts?
I only did what that poor lonely little dog found possible, hunted and baffled, and tormented with hunger and thirst, as no doubt it must have been, all along the cruel strange highways.
I walked along the sea-road first, and then across the great central plains of France, and it was fair autumn weather always, broken only by noble storms that swept the land majestically and made the swollen rivers rise.
The air had the first crispness of winter when I entered the city of Paris. I was weary in limb and brain, but I went straight to the house of Hilarion.
I had not seen it since the night that Lilas had died there. It was in a by-street, being an old small palace in a noble but antiquated quarter: it had belonged to his mother’s people in other centuries: it stood between court and garden, and was darkened by some stately trees of lime and chestnut. I found it not without difficulty. It was evening: I rang at the large bronze gate-bell, without thinking what I should do when it was answered.
