Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 344
So she settled down in my chamber, nothing doubting, with a weary sort of peacefulness such as a wounded bird might feel sinking under fresh leaves after a heavy storm. She was not happy, — how should she have been? — but she was at rest. It was the best thing for her.
She was tired and confused and feverish still, and the great close heats of Rome, the heat that has no wind to stir, no rain to freshen it, tried her, reared as she had been all her short life on the high cliffs among the breeze-swept rosemary and arbutus above the blue Ligurean sea. But this she never would allow, because she would let no complaint of anything of Rome escape her.
And there was Hilarion’s beautiful cool marble-paved villa among the flowers and the fountains, in the shadow of the hills, standing empty for all but a few idle servants, and its master meanwhile away heaven knew where, — in deep Danubian woods, or beside blue Northern lakes, or on wind-freshened Western seas, in coolness and in calm, going wherever the current of his fancy drifted him.
The contrast made me irritable, as I never had been at such contrasts for my own sake; for it is contrast that gives the color to life, and communism is but a poor short-sighted creed, and would make the world a blank were it reducible to practice.
For me, I have no prejudices of that kind, or of any other: when one comes of the gens Quintilii, and is a cobbler by trade, one may be said to be bound to the two uttermost extremes of the social scale, and so may sit in judgment in the middle fairly, and survey both with equal impartiality. Where there is hatred of one or of the other, true judgment is possible of neither: that is quite certain.
One could not do better for her; and at least she was safe, body and soul. That is much for a girl, friendless and homeless and beautiful to look upon as any jewel-like flower of the sea.
So she became settled in our midst, and all the people of the Rione got to say she was my daughter whom I did not like fairly to own. It was absurd; but they might have said worse things, and it did no harm. Indeed, in a measure, it seemed to protect her. I was thought to be very close and unpleasant because I never would talk of her; but when you know nothing it is always best to say nothing, — everybody thinks you know so much. And, indeed, there was always something in her that escaped me. Her mind seemed to be always far away.
I got her some clay, and she worked upon it; it passed the time for her, and she really had lovely fancies, and greater skill in giving them shape than could have been looked for in one so young.
Of course they were only small things; but as she made them I set them up upon my stall, and sometimes people bought them, and that pleased her. It served to beguile her out of that intense, unspoken, heavy sadness which had fallen on her with her pain at the ruin of Rome.
To see her work upon the clay was like seeing young Callisto herself; her close, white linen dress hung almost like the tunic of Virgil’s Lycoris; her arms were bare to the shoulder because of the great heat; her hair of that rich dusky golden bronze was like a sun-bathed cloud over her forehead; her lustrous, intense eyes were grave and brilliant with meditation and with teeming fancy. If Hilarion could see her, I used to think, and was thankful he was far away.
With all artists that are artists indeed and not artisans, the conception is always immeasurably superior to the power of execution; the visible form which they can give their ideas always is to them utterly inferior to the wonders and the beauties that they dream of: with her, of course, it was necessarily so in the very largest measure, she herself being so young and her art the most difficult of any. She saw things beautiful and perfect as all the buried treasures of Phidias, but Phidias himself could hardly have given them an embodiment that would have contented her.
Meanwhile, her brain dreamed conjured visions; and her hands modeled in the gray clay and the red earth little heads of children and shapes of animals and of birds and of leaves that were pretty to see and drew many an idler to them. They sold for only a few copper pieces, indeed, because the people were all poor that came near, and for the matter of that the works cost as much as the little things brought; but it kept her quiet and contented to believe that she earned her own bread and bed, and it made it easy for me to cheat her into that belief. Indeed, a baby could have cheated her: those large brilliant eyes of hers, that saw so far into the past ages and were always looking for things not to be found upon earth, saw but a very little way into the disguises of men and women and the cobwebs their words weave. It is always so the far sight that can discern the eagle flying in the rarefied air above the distant mountain-snows will not see the mosquitoes that are hissing within the distance of an inch, or the dust, that lies close at hand up the corner.
The only thing I ever said to them was, —
“I am the cobbler of the Forum, you know this; but this girl was the daughter of Virginius, and before that she was Ariadne.”
And that, of course, they knew was nonsense; but they laughed, and they left her alone, and the crew on my estate used to learn to call out Ariadne.
“I do not like Ariadne,” she said, herself. “I am sorry I am like that bronze of hers. She was so faithless — —”
“Faithless! She was deserted herself. Have you forgotten Naxos?”
“Oh, no. It is Naxos I mean. Why did she let Bacchus come near her?”
“But she was cruelly abandoned.”
“She should have been faithful herself.”
“That is saying very much.”
She looked at me with a little contempt.
“She could not have helped being faithful had she been worth anything.”
“That is your idea of love, then?”
“Yes.”
“How should you know of it, child? What should you know of love?” I said to her.
“I have thought about it,” she answered, gravely, then added, after a pause, “It must be very terrible to have no life any longer of your own; only to live through the eyes and the breath and the heart of another.”
“Who told you it was all that?”
“Oh, the poets; and something in one’s self. It must be terrible.”
“My dear, there are not many who feel love at all in that sort of way.”
“There can be no other way,” she said, with that soft, calm resoluteness which was so inflexible in her. There were things, one felt, in which one never could change her.
And she was right. Truly, there is no other way: the plaything which the chief number of men and women call love is no more that sacred thing, that imperishable and unutterable passion, than fireflies upon the summer night are Aldebaran and Orion.
The girl sat thoughtful, with her level brows a little drawn together, and her eyes looking at the Tiber swirling round the piles of the Quattro Cassi and lapping the marshy ground of the Velalerum, — great Tiber, that far away yonder in the dusky oak woods of Umbria — of that Umbria which is older than Etruria — runs a little rill among the mountain-mosses; Tiber, a brook that a baby can wade and a rabbit skip across; Tiber, a mere thread of water, where lovers mirror their smiling eyes, and charcoal-burners dip their birch-bark cups; Tiber, that comes down from the oak woods to roll like molten bronze towards the setting sun, big with the mightiest memories of the world; Tiber, that has engulfed the statues of Etruria, and the osier figures of the Vestals, and the treasures of Hadrian, and the golden toys of the Agrippines, and the spoils of Jerusalem, and the corpses of the Spolarium, and holds them all fast and only yields them to the sea.
I did not like to see her so thoughtful.
“Let us go for a walk,” I said to her: “the evening is beautiful. Let us go on the same pilgrimage that Ovid sent his manuscript, — from the laurels that grew before the door of his tyrant, past the Danaïds, whose labors were not more fruitless than his prayers, on to the library of Pollion in the Atrium of Liberty, — you remember? Oh, yes, I can show you every step of the way. Poor little book! Knocking at all the library doors and everywhere refused !
“‘Why do I send you my songs only that I may be in some manner with you,’ he wrote: how the whole nature of him is painted in those words! Ovid adored Rome. But he would have been happier in the Athens of Pericles or the Paris of our day. The smell of blood must have spoiled the moonlit nights for him when he sat by his open window looking out on the Capitol: it was all ablaze with gold then, but Freedom cannot dwell with too much gold; it chokes her as rich food does the dog. Will you not come, my dear?”
She came, and willingly. We had many such walks together when the sun had set and my work was done and the Fauns were all piping in the fountains.
She was not easily tired: the fleet young feet that had waded all their few years in the clear blue shallows of the Maremma shores were as enduring as Atalanta’s. Nor was she tired of my rambling talk, because all the memories and legends of the city were vivid in her own mind, and for me, I have all the crooks and turns of the streets at my toes’ ends, and had puzzled out all the old Rome that lay beneath them, — Cæsarean, Latin, Etrurian, Sabine, and Pelasgic.
For myself, I confess, I cared most for the Cæsarean. Not for the Cæsars themselves; who can care? but for the men who lived in all those terrible days, so terrible even at their best, the men whose books are household words to-day.
The Satires and the Eclogues, the Odes and the Georgics, have proved more lasting powers than the Conscriptions and the Conquests.
I had always loved to wander about and think of them, and I was glad that she would go so often with me in that black muffling which Ersilia made her wear to escape notice, and only showing out of it her delicate head, with the lustrous hair bound close above it, but always tumbling over her eyes because of its abundance. Ersilia wished her to be veiled also; but that she would not have: she wanted all the air here, where the scented winds that come through orange-blooms and cedars still seem to bring some scent of murdered millions.
We would go together to the old book-stalls and hunt for quaint black-letter folios and little old out-of-the-way volumes of classics; we would try and find out the very spot where Martial’s garret was in the Quarter of the Pear-tree by the temple of Quirinius, so high up that he could look right downwards and see the laurels by the house of Agrippa near the Flaminian way: we would sit on the steps of the Pincian hill, under the palm, by what was once the palace of Belisarius, and talk of the conquests, and of the cherry-trees of Lucullus, and think of that awful night in these, of old, his gardens where Messalina lay on the turf among her bacchantes and Vettius climbing the trees and looking seaward said, “I see a great storm that comes from Ostia,” — the storm whose wind was death: we would go up the Sacred Way and picture the great Roman dames getting their strenæ for the January visits as they get them in Paris now, and buying their false golden tresses “at the Portico of Philip in front of the temple of Hercules:” we would go out at the gates and talk of the Palilia, and the Vinalia, and of Tibullus, and of the spring-time when he used to leap over the fires and sprinkle the flocks from a bough of laurel with his shepherds at Pedum.
We would wander up among the vines and cabbage-gardens of the Esquiline, and fancy that we found the spot where Virgil lived (though no one ever well knew it), and where Propertius sighed to that red and white Cynthia whose mules seemed to trot still with their tied-up tails along the Appian Way.
Do you remember the day Propertius lost his tablets and bewailed them, — the tablets that he wrote his prayers on to her, and on which she in return would write back, “Come”? was there ever another lost trifle whose advertisement has been read two thousand years by all the world? Cynthia was a good-for-naught — and what a temper! — she boxed his ears, and flew on Phyllis and Teia like a fury, though the ground was strewn deep with white roses, and there was sweet flute-playing; she did not even affect to be so much as faithful; she found the rich money-lender from Illyria more solid prey than her poet, who perhaps may have been a little too scholarly for her; she painted her face, she had false hair, she drank, she gambled, she did everything she ought not to have done, that beautiful Cynthia, all lilies and roses; indeed, she was just like your women of the present day in everything; and yet she has been sung of by her lover in such a fashion that the world will never forget her, — no more than it will forget its Cæsars. Such is justice; and so kind is Venus Volgivaga.
One wonders if they gave Propertius the tomb he asked her for, underneath the shelter of the leaves, unseen and unknown by all, “for crowds insult the grave of love.” Perhaps they did; at least, no one can ever find it now.
These were the things I thought of most; it may be contemptible, it no doubt is, but when I go about the Forum it is not half so much of Cicero or of Virginius that I think as it is of Horace going into that one of his bookseller’s shops that was hard by the statue of the Etruscan Vertumnus; or of the copyists writing in the offices of Atrectus, with the titles of the new books pasted at the doors for the lazy people of pleasure to see as they passed on their evening drive; or of Ovid — dear, hapless Ovid — applauding above all others the statue of Aphrodite as the procession of the gods passed by, brushing the dust from the white roses of his fair friend, fanning her with the flabellum, or telling her who would win in the circus, who were the captive kings in the triumph, and what the conquered countries,—” yonder Euphrates with his crown of reeds, and here with azure hair great Tigris.”
Ah, dear me! Ovid died in exile, and yet you call Augustus great! But Ovid has his desire in death.
“So long as Rome shall look down from her mountains on the universe, I shall be there;” and he is here. He was weak in his life; but no hero ever spoke greater words than those last words of his.
All the might of Cæsar cannot outlaw or dethrone him now. He has conquered Augustus.
So she and I went about the old ways together, companioned with the shades. Only she would think more of Scipio and his one word Zara, of the Horatii, of the Antonines; more of the old Etrurian and Sabine Rome; more of Virgil and of his Æneas lying down at night upon the bearskins in the tent, of the old shepherd king in the shadow of the Sacred Woods upon the Palatine. It was all true and real to her. So best. Scholars, and sciolists, maybe, even more than scholars, strip the past too bare.
There never was Æneas; there never was a Numa: well, what the better are we? We only lose the Trojan ship gliding into Tiber’s mouth when the rose-thickets that bloomed by Ostia were reddening with the first warmth of the day’s sun; we only lose the Sabine lover going by the Sacred Way at night, and sweet Egeria weeping in the woods of Nemi; and are — by their loss — how much the poorer!
Perhaps all these things never were.
The little stone of truth rolling through the many ages of the world has gathered and grown gray with the thick mosses of romance and superstition. But tradition must always have that little stone of truth as its kernel; and perhaps he who rejects all is likelier to be wrong than even foolish folk like myself who love to believe all and tread the new paths, thinking ever of the ancient stories. Will painting ever have a lovelier origin than that fair daughter of Demaratus tracing the beloved shadow on the wall? And whilst one mother’s heart still beats among women, who shall coldly dissect and deny the sorrows of great Demeter?
It is all fable. It is all metaphor. It never was. You are a fool.
Well, say so if you choose, you wise generations. who have made your god of a yelling steam-engine and dwell in herds under a pall of soot.
CHAPTER VII.
THE summer passed away.
Giojà was not unhappy, rambling through the storied streets with me, reading my old books and all others I could borrow for her, and following out all her own fancies with the wax and the clays that bent so forcibly under her fingers. She was an artist at soul, and she was in Rome; she was a child in years, and the people that were about her supplied her few simple wants. She needed nothing more.
“If only my father were with me!” she would say; and it was the only thing. lacking to her. She did not look forward in any way; she was always looking backward, as students do.
If she could only go and spend the long hot hours in the cool chambers of the Capitol or the halls of the Pio-Clementine, she asked nothing else of fate.
I could not take her future so lightly.
It was not the cost of her that troubled me, that was but slight; she scarcely ate more bread than Palès; it was the character of the girl herself, and her uncommon beauty.
She seemed to me no more fit for the harsh realities of the world than the marble child that doubts between the dove and serpent in the Capitol were fit to stop a breach in a fortress against cannon-balls. What would become of her, seen only by the eyes of Ezio the water-carrier, and Rufo the melon-seller, and Tancredo the fisherman, and the youths of the tanners’ quarter, and the young men from the fruit-gardens pushing their loaded beasts across her path? And her one talent, what could it avail her? It was not like the talent of the singing sorceresses who carry a life’s fortune in their throats.
Marble costs gold, and sculpture is not for women. Sculpture is always an epic; and what woman ever has written one?
I wished that Maryx were in Rome.
But that very day that I had dreamed my dream before the Ariadne, he had gone to his own country, and all the hot months went by and the city saw nothing of him who was more Roman than the Romans, the great French sculptor who had come there a boy of eighteen to the gardens that once were Sallust’s, and therein had learned to love Rome as dearly as any one of her own sons could do, and wrested from its marbles and its ruins all the lost secrets of Etruria and Greece.
“If Maryx were here!” I sighed to myself, stitching under the Apollo Sandaliarius that he had modeled for me when he had been a lad in the Villa Medici.
And one day in autumn he passed by, and paused before me with his frank smile.
“Dear Crispin, how are you all this while? Why, how you look! Are you still moon-struck or sun-struck by your Borghese bronze? I returned last night, and go again tomorrow.”
