Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 303
“Oh, dear God, — all Palma’s prayers!” he thought. They had been all in vain, like so much futile breath spent on the empty air to unresponding space.
The mockery of it stung him, as if God himself were jeering as a man might do.
He looked up stupidly at the broad noonday skies. There was the same sun, the same earth, the same water; beyond the plains, on the hills that he knew best, men and women were leading the same life, drawing the wine from the presses, driving the oxen over the green sods, gathering up the ripe olives, with the bells ringing over their quiet world. It seemed to him so strange. Everything was unchanged except himself, and he seemed to have become old and tired, and full of pain.
Only one night before, there had been no happier living thing in all the human world than he; and now — he wondered that the sun did not stay in its course, that the waters did not rise and cover the land, that all the flowers were not withered off the ground — since sin so cursed the earth.
The hours rolled by; he did not count them. The long hot day burnt itself out as passing passions do. The boats came and went; the sun sank and the moon rose. His own stars — the stars of the Winged Horse — shone down in the first faint darkness of the early night.
He sat lonely on the solitary shore, watching the breeze‐blown water without sense of what he saw.
He could not understand the anguish that blotted out for him all colours of earth and heaven.
All life had been to him as the divining rod of Aaron, blooming ever afresh with magic flowers. Now that the flame of pain and passion burned it up, and left a bare sear brittle bough, he could not understand.
Love is cruel as the grave.
The poet has embraced the universe in his visions; and heard harmony in every sound, from deep calling through the darkest storm to deep, as from the lightest leaf dancing in the summer wind; he has found joy in the simplest things, in the nest of a bird, in the wayside grass, in the yellow sand, in the rods of the willow; the lowliest creeping life has held its homily and solace, and in the hush of night he has lifted his face to the stars, and thought that he communed with their Creator and his own. Then — all in a moment — Love claims him, and there is no melody anywhere save in one single human voice, there is no heaven for him save on one human breast; when one face is turned from him there is darkness on all the earth; when one life is lost — let the stars reel from their courses and the world whirl and burn and perish like the moon; nothing matters; when Love is dead there is no God.
Signa sat by the wind‐tossed lake waters.
He did not know what had killed his soul in him. He only knew that his music was no more to him than the sound of stones shaken in a shrivelled bladder by an idiot’s hand.
Bruno was avenged.
“Give me to the worms; let only my music live!” he had said again and again in his one prayer to Fate. Now — what use were his fame or his art to him? They could not undo what was done.
Achievement holds its mockery, no less than failure.
The evening deepened; the stars of Pegasus grew clearer; a lovely silvered radiance spread over the face of the waters and the sides of the mountains. He had no sight for it and no care. He sat where he had wandered; the hill thyme under his feet; gold‐fruited boughs above his head; the lake before him.
Through the soft gloom a white form stole towards him, a rose against her lips, as silence has, to hide her smiles.
She came and watched him a moment, and then laid her hands on his bent head.
“You went away without a word to me,” she said. “I have looked for you since sunset, Signa.”
He trembled from head to foot and sprang erect, and stood and gazed at her.
She waited a little while, then sank on the rough stone seat hewn out of a fallen rock where he had sat.
“Well?” she said, softly. “Have you nothing to say to me? — nothing?”
“What can I say?” he muttered. “I wound you, I hurt you — or I seem a fool.”
“A noble fool,” she said. “Such fools as heaven is peopled with, if the saints’ tales be true.”
His face flushed with the joy of her praise,
Yet what was any praise of hers worth? — what value any word?
Her words were as the tinkling cymbals of brass which lead men to destruction. Her beauty was bare to all the world as Phryne’s on the canvas of Gerome.
He had been reared in the stern judgments of the old Dante temper which still lived in the recesses of the hills; the temper which flung the nude marble and the voluptuous image in the flames at Savonarola’s bidding.
“Why did you go away — so?” she said to him. “I left you for a moment with my women, and when I went back you had fled, no one knew where.”
“Knowing what I know, your house stifles me.”
“That is how you repay me for the truth. I should have lied to you.”
“You have let him paint the truth in scarlet letters for all the world to read.”
“Istriel? Oh, that is so long ago!”
“He was your betrayer?”
“What does it matter?”
“He was?”
“What does it matter, I tell you; I have forgotten him. He is far away painting in the Ukraine, waiting for the great snows, they say, to draw the forests and the wolves. Perhaps the wolves will eat him. Let him be. He painted me in a hundred ways. The first thing he did was of me standing like a little saint holding a dove and with those white roses that we call of the Madonna; he named the picture Innocence; that is how I had the name.”
“He is in the snow‐fields you say — now?”
“I heard so — yes. What does it matter? What would you do if he were here?”
He only looked at her. His face was very pale; his great eyes had an answer in them that she understood.
She laughed a little to herself.
“You would kill him? Poor Istriel! Why? Since did not?”
“You would have done if—”
“If I had been Palma?”
She laughed again; aloud this time.
“If you had been — a woman — as God made them.”
“How is that? God made Eve — if He made anything, Do not use phrases, Signa. You learned that of your priests. You will die in a monk’s robes, after all?”
He turned from her with an inexpressible pain.
“Oh, my God! You can jest!”
“Why not, dear? All my life is a jest. It goes merrily like bells. You will not understand.”
“I will not believe! You cannot be so base.”
“In a man it were philosophy! why in a woman is baseness?”
“You play with words! if you be happy why say a few hours since you were in hell?”
A faint smile broke across her face. She banished it before he saw it there.
“You know women so little if you ask that. We are in hell one hour and in heaven the next. ‘Flower of an Hour.’ That is a woman. I am happy — very happy — when you will not make me think.”
He looked up at her again.
“Ah I if you would but think; — but let your conscience wake.”
“We said enough of that,” she interrupted him, with coldness. “To‐day I answered you, once and for all. If you want conscience, and terror of the saints, and all you call true womanhood, you have it all in Palma — whom you leave! As for me — I told the truth to you, judging you other than you are. I thought that you were fair enough, tender enough, sinless enough yourself to stay with me a little for our childhood’s sake, without reproach. I have lovers where I will. I have no friend. Because I am no hypocrite, and will not take up at a moment’s bidding sackcloth and ashes, and say the seven psalms of penitence, you shudder and leave me to my fate. You have no patience, no reason, no compassion. You cast me off because I am not ready to go back to the old, hateful, bitter, famished life, and say my mea culpa at the feet of Palma. You are mad. And do not speak to me of sorrow. If you had sorrow for me you would say ‘this woman is alone in all her wealth, desolate in all her power, without a heart to trust amidst a troop of lovers.’ You would say:— ‘there is a gulf between us, yes, and any word of love from her to me, or me to her, is now impossible; but I will serve her still. I will not forsake her because she does not pile the cinders of a false repentance on her head; I will have more faith in the latent strength of patient purpose to win her back from error.’ That is what you would say — were you, indeed, the gentle boy I thought you. But you are like all the rest who imitate the saints. Tenderness with you means flattered vanity; you speak of your gods and act but for yourselves; you think you arm yourself with virtue, but your strength is only your own self‐love sharp‐wounded and irate. You preach to me; you bid me leave my world: you say you best had never see my face again — and why! Because you hate my sins? Ah, no! Because you hate my lovers!”
His face flushed scarlet; he sprang to his feet.
The brutal truth, which yet was only half a truth, and bore rankest injustice with it, pierced him to the quick.
There were honour, fair faith, and purity of intent in him, which flung off the words, in honest rage, as calumny. Yet, like all words that lay bare any truth, they had the electric shock of lightning in them. Passionate repudiation sprang to his lips; then paused there; he was silent.
Was it less her sins he loathed than those who shared them?
He searched his heart in vain; all seemed dark there. He stood indignant, yet abased. He knew her words a lie, yet were his own all truth? He did not know. He was a mystery to himself.
To himself; but not to her. She watched him, knowing each pang that moved him, knowing each doubt that stunned him and confused him. The lovers of her world, though often their passion was high and their emotions violent, could give her no such sport as this young soul which had dwelt in solitude with art and God, and was bewildered in the maze of passions that she dragged it to, as any antelope caught in the hunter’s toils, when the forest is ablaze with torches and alive with steel.
“You do me cruel wrong — God knows,” he said, simply; and so turned and would have left her then for ever.
He knew she wronged him; but how much — how little, — that he could not tell; he was sure no longer of himself; nor of anything human or divine.
“What!” she said slowly. “You cannot even forgive me, then?”
He sighed from the depths of his heart
“I do forgive you — everything. But who is to know the thing you really are? You seem so vile and soulless, all one moment, and the next — Ah, let me go! It kills me to be here. Perhaps I hate your lovers, as you say. Perhaps. Your brothers would.”
A dark scorn gathered in her eyes. He — who had felt her hand amongst his hair, and on his drooping brow — could speak so!
“My brothers! they would be glad enough if I gave them gold to spend at loto, and new wine to drink, as far as I remember them, which is but little. They bit and pinched me; and I stole figs and nuts to bribe them with, if ever I wanted them. If you have no better thing to say, than quote my brothers!—”
“Say what I will you quarrel with it. Gemma — if you be Gemma; sometimes still I think you cannot be — let me go.”
“I am not Gemma. Gemma was a little stupid child, fed on black bread and tumbling with the pig. I am Innocence. The Innocence of Paris.”
And she laughed.
The laughter was like ice; and made him shiver, flesh and bone.
What had she not known, what had she not done, what brutalities of license had not she bent to in willing bondage, what cruelties and luxuries of vice had she not tasted, invented, been prodigal of — what memories had she not, what horrors must she not have steeped her fair white beauty in — he thought of all that, hotly, dully, as a drunken man will think of things that for ever pursue him, and yet are always vague to him.
The moonlight was about her; the crimson amaranthus flung its tall feathers around her: some marble sculptures shone behind her in the dark leaves of olive and of orange. She was so perfect to look upon; no sculptor ever made a fairer Clytie for the God of Song; and what had her life been; what were her memories; what was her foul knowledge? She was like the casket of silver that held the ashes of death.
It broke his heart to look on her.
To others she might be only one fair false woman the more, gone the way that all loose women take. But to him she was the very ruin of earth, the very mockery of heaven.
He clasped her hands with a great cry: “Oh, Gemma! — have you no pity!”
Had she any?
She looked at him, thinking for the moment that she would be pitiful, and let him go — go, whilst there was yet time; while she could still become to him a thing seen in a trance, a phantom soon forgotten, a mere name; go, whilst the horror in him was stronger than the love.
He was only a score of years old; he heard beautiful things in his dreams; he was loved by the people and cherished; his future would be greater than his present; he had the semi‐divinity of genius; he had the virgin gold of an unworn heart; he had the fond mad faiths of a poet: if she let him go there was still time: — time for him to leave in peace, forgetting her, in his art, as a feverish dream of the night is forgotten in the breaking of morning.
Would she have pity? it was but one plaything forborne; one leaf of the laurel ungathered. But she had said to herself, “Palma shall die of want of him, and I will be his god.”
She said it again in her heart.
As much of warmth as she could know, stirred in her towards him.
His beauty, his youth, his very innocence, had a charm for her, such as sated Faustina or wearied Messalina might have found in some fair boy captive from Judea, with the simple asceticism of the Galilean fishers in his soul. And then he rebuked her, shrank from her, condemned her: it was enough.
In the day of their infancy she had done with him as she chose; should he be stronger than she was now?
He cleaved to his art and his faith; well, he should forswear both.
He was a little shell off the seashore that Hermes had taken out of millions like it that the waves washed up, and had breathed into, and had strung with fine chords, and had made into a syrinx sweet for every human ear.
Why not break the simple shell for sport? She did not care for music. Did the gods care — they could make another.
“Have I no pity?” she murmured. “Nay, you only dream — dreams are pale, cold things at best — learn with me to live!” — and she drew her hands from him and passed them round his throat and inclined his head towards her breast, and brought his lips to hers.
“Have I no pity?” she said.
His life passed into her life. His soul went from him and became her own.
CHAPTER IX.
IT was a soft, clear winter in the country round the Lastra.
On Christmas‐day the wind‐flowers were still rosy and purple and snow‐white in the grass of the fields; and, with the new year, the red roses blossomed behind the iron bars of the casements, and in the corn‐fields the crocuses were thinking that it was already time to come through the earth. Girls plaited at the doors on the mild mornings, as if it were summer; and there was seldom a curl of wood‐smoke on the air, except when the soup‐pots were simmering.
Men coming and going from the city, and post‐bags dropped as the letter‐cart ran down over the bridge from the Upper town; brought tidings, in the soft, silvery weather, of the Actea and the Lamia.
In all the cities one or the other was being given; north and south, under the Alps, and by the seashore of Vesuvius, they were playing and singing the music of the young master, who called himself by the old, historic word of “Signa.”
“What name will you take for the great world?” they had said to him, when he was still but a little scholar.
“Only Signa,” he had said; and he signed all that he wrote so.
“My mother was the flood, and my father the owls,” he said to himself; he liked best to have it so; dead Pippa was a pain to him; and her lover, whoever he had been, whether prince or peasant, had no hold on his thoughts. “I am Signa,” he said, that was all his own; owing no man anything for it, nor the Church either. Signa, just as the walls were, and the gates and the bells and the woods and the old painted frescoes.
Everywhere they were playing and singing his music, and it had even echoed over the Alps, and spread itself northward and southward, in that victory of the lyre with which his country has so often avenged herself for the invasions of the sword.
His music was in the throats of the people.
In grim Perugia Augusta, in dark Bologna, in smiling Como, in grand Ravenna, in the City of the syrens, in the busy marts of Milan, in sombre obscure Etruscan towns, in mighty opera houses, in little solitary theatres, anywhere, and everywhere, the melodies of the Actea and the Lamia were ringing; they had the pure science which allures the cultured ear, and the potent sympathies which sway the multitudes; learned doctors followed their accurate combinations with delight in the solitude of the study, and boys and girls caught their sweet simplicity with rapture, and sang them to the woods and fields, as birds their love calls.
The Actea and the Lamia were sisters and rivals both at once; the Asiatic slave, with her crucified god and her murdered master, and the Venus of the flute, with her crowned passion and her divine honours, divided between them the adulation of the people.
Some found noblest the sacrificed love, some the victorious; some the dishonoured grave that held the world for Actea, some the imperial art that rendered Lamia stronger than her tyrant; but whether one or the other, or whether both together, the two stories, old as the cities of the world are old, fresh as love is fresh, took hold upon the souls of the people, and by the interpretation of his harmonies thrilled the world anew, as Rome had trembled when Actea had wept, and Athens when Lamia had stayed the lifted sword.
