Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 371
She did not rebel against his sentence, but she loathed herself because she had incurred it. All the lofty, pure, and poetic passion which she had dreamed of in her ignorance over the pages of Dante and Petrarca and Sospitra she had given to him: that she had been nothing, in truth, higher or better than a toy to him was incomprehensible to this nature which had the purity and the force of Electra and Antigone. In some way she had failed: that was all she knew.
With her he had heard only the nightingales. And in some strange, horrible way, the snakes and the apes had been stronger than she, and to him had been sweeter, and so had drawn him back to them and had left her alone.
That was all she knew.
With an intense pride she had an intense humility. “He loved me once,” she said; and this seemed to her to be a wonder still so great that it excused in him all later cruelty; and, like the woman she once had pitied on the Maremma shore, she would not have wished her wounds less deep, nor their pain less, nor their hideousness less, because those wounds assured her he had loved her once.
Alas! even this poor and bitter consolation was a self-deception. Even when he had laid his roses on her knees and wooed her first, he had not loved her, not even with such love as that foul patrician jade wrung from him by treading on his worn heart, as a vine-gatherer on the bruised and pressed-out grapes crushed in the vats at autumn.
For so he soon told me, even he, himself, with that cynical frankness which at times broke up from under the soft disguises of his usual words.
He had never come to Rome, — never once since that chill and bitter Lenten night when Maryx and I had found the chamber empty, and Hermes in the moonlight alone.
I, asking always people whom I knew, learned that he had never been in Rome since then, nor ever once at Daïla. It was not fear, certainly, which kept him from the city; but probably it was that sort of restless but fruitless and vague remorse which is the repentance of such a man as he.
For the difference between good and bad in men lies less, I think, in what they do than in how they feel, and so less in act than in conscience; and many a one among us could undo the evil he has done if only he would not push away the pain it causes him, and hurry on leaving the past behind him like a dead mule on the high-road to rot forgotten.
We all sin, but some of us walk on, not looking back, and some of us do look back, and thus do go again over the ill-trodden path, and so, perchance, meet angels on the way, — to mend it.
Hilarion never looked back: not because he was altogether cruel, but because he had tenderness sufficient twined in with his cruelty to make him reluctant to see pain, although quite reckless as to causing it. The masters of the world would slay ten thousand victims here in Rome, yet weep sometimes if a beloved slave died. And why? — because they were only Humanity let loose to all its instincts.
I dreaded lest he should come to Rome, for I knew that even such comparative calm as she had attained would be destroyed again, if she could behold his face or hear his footstep on the stones. I watched for him ceaselessly and in anxiety, but he never came, and I heard that he was in Paris and in other places that he loved, and the vile Sovrana woman was also absent, and the pale sad peace that reigned with us, as it reigns over a buried village when the snow has covered it, and the fires are out, and the cries stilled, and the sleepers all sleeping forever, was untroubled by any burst of storm or break of dawn.
It was night with us always, — night always: even in the golden glory of wide Rome, with the light upon the amethystine hills, and blue aerial distances, and the sound of birds’ wings and children’s laughter, and the people’s gladness, everywhere about the bright broad waters.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
ONE night I was carrying home some work that I had done, and I went perforce past the palace of the Sovrana princes, — the palace of his black-browed wanton, who there ruled like Olympia Pamfili, and had the great world all about her; for she who makes her husband’s shame nowadays can clothe herself with it as with a garment of righteousness, be her lord only but vile also.
In the shadow of the mighty court-yard of the place there was a vast crowd of gay grand people coming and going among them I saw Hilarion: he was entering the house. My heart leaped with a wild bound, as though the blood of only twenty years pulsed in it.
But for my promise to her he would have died with the moment that the moonlight fell on his fair, serene, cold features and revealed them to me.
I left my errand undone, and waited by the palace gates. It was in the oldest part of Rome, — a mighty palace, built out of travertine, from great ruins, in the Middle Ages by some pope. Just now its courts were alight with lamps and torches, and up the vast stairs one could see the serving-men , all red and gold, like strutting paroquets, standing one above another. No doubt this kind of life must be fine to lead, and I dare say people in the midst of it very soon forget, — unless they wish very much to remember.
I stood outside the gates with sundry other folks, who had come there to stare at the foreign princes and great ladies who alighted and passed up between the men in red and gold.
No one noticed me; a good many hours went by; the people by the gates had long before grown tired of looking on and had gone away; I was left alone, but I did not stir; there were a fret and fume of the waiting horses all around, and their breath was like steam on the night. After a time the people within began to come forth again: among the earliest of them he came: in your great world lovers are careful, I believe, to preserve this sort of affectation: it saves the honor of the ladies and their lords.
I stopped him as he went out to his equipage.
“Let me have a word with you,” said I.
He turned, and I think he grew paler; but he was brave always, and for me, I must say, he had always been gentle in his conduct, and never had made me feel in any way that I was only a cobbler at a street-corner, stitching for daily bread.
“Is it you, old friend?” he said, with a kindly indifference, real or assumed. “Do you want me? It is late. Will not to-morrow do as well?”
“To-morrow will not do,” said I. “Come out with me.”
And he came, being always brave, as I say, and no doubt seeing some look on my face that told him I was longing for his life.
The palace stood, as I say, in one of the oldest parts of Rome: a turn or two of a passage-way, and one was in front of the dome of Agrippa, the gloomiest, grandest thing that the world holds, I think, above all when the moonlight is upon it, as it was on it now.
I walked thence, and he with me: his attendants remained at a sign from him before the palace.
When there was no one to hear in the deserted place, I stopped; he also.
He spoke before I could speak.
“If you were a younger man, you would kill me, would you not?”
His blue eyes were serene, and met mine, but his face was troubled.
I looked him also full in the face.
“If I had not promised never to harm you, I would find the means to kill you now, old though I may be.”
He looked at me thoughtfully.
“Whom have you promised?”
“You must know. There cannot be two who, so wronged, would yet forgive.”
He sighed a little restlessly.
Is she well?” he said, after a pause, and there was a sort of shame in his voice, and his eyelids fell.
I cursed him.
Heaven be merciful to me a sinner! I called down on his head every blight and vengeance of heaven, all ill and wretchedness and despair that life can ever heap on those whom God and man forsake. I cursed him in his lying down and his uprising, in his manhood and his age; I cursed all offspring that might be begotten by him, and all women that his love might light on; I cursed him as in the Scriptures holy men curse the children of hell.
I was wrong, and such curses should blister the lips that utter them, being all weak and at one another’s mercy, and all adrift in an inexplicable mystery of existence, as we are. But I was beside myself; I thought only of her; I saw only in him the cruel brutality of Love, which in his passion-flower hides an asp, and with his kiss upon the lips gives death.
He stood tranquil and unmoved under the fury of my words, and he showed no resentment: he shuddered a little once, that was all. He did not seek to go away. He stood quietly by the granite steps of the Pantheon, with the columns behind him that have withstood the fires and the sieges of two thousand years.
When my voice had died, choked in my throat by the force of my own misery and hate, he looked at me, with his clear cold eyes dim.
“I am sorry that you should hate me,” he said, under his breath; “but you are right, — as you see things. And why do you call on any god? Rome has outlived them all.”
The patience in him, and the serenity, quelled the tempests of my fury and my loathing, as, answering, passion would have fed them. I stood stock-still, and stared on him, in the moonlight.
“Can one never hurt you?” I muttered to him. “Are you brute, or devil, — or what, that you feel nothing, and only stand and smile like that?”
“Did I smile?” said Hilarion. “Nay, you hurt me when you hate me. It is natural that you should, and just enough; only, when you call on God —— ! Has ever He listened ?”
“No! since He never kept her from you. No!”
“Who shall keep the woman from the man?” said he, with a sort of scorn. “Nature will not; and it is Nature alone that is strong.”
I blame not your love; I am no puritan: what I curse in you is your bitter coldness of soul, your deception, your faithlessness, your cruelty, your abandonment. How could you leave her, once having loved her? — how?”
“I never loved her,” he said, wearily. “What said Anacreon in your dream? Instead of Love it is Philotes. It is a bitter truth.”
I groaned aloud.
The clay that she had spent her force on in her delirium in Paris was more real, more worthy of worship, than this phantom of passion, which had led her on to perish!
“I am ashamed; I regret,” he muttered, hurriedly, with a true contrition for the moment in his voice. “Why did you ask me to leave her alone? And then one saw that Maryx loved her: that was a temptation the more. Do I seem base to you? Men always do whenever they speak the truth. Yet it was not only baseness; no. Such purity with such passion as hers I never knew. She never understood I did her wrong: she only loved me. She was so calm, too, so like the old statues and the old fancies of the immortals, with eyes that never seemed likely to weep or smile or look anywhere except straight to their home in heaven. I never had seen a woman like that — —”
“Therefore you were not content until you had made her like to others!”
“She never became so, — never,” he said, quickly. “I may have ruined her as you and the world call ruin; but, as I live here, I swear I left her soul unsullied. Coarse words would have cancered one’s tongue spoken to her! One night I took her to the opera in Paris, — only one. It seemed like dragging Athene through a bagnio: a mere man’s look at her seemed insult.”
“You could feel that, and yet — —”
“Ay, and yet I forsook her, you would say. Because of that: can you not understand? She was a constant shame to me! If you had poured out poison to a creature trusting you, and she kissed you as she drank it, and thought each throe it caused her sweet because the hurt was from you, could you bear that? It was so with us. She stung me always, not meaning; and then I tired — —”
He had walked to the edge of the fountain. The moon shone on the water, and the water reflected the pale and troubled beauty of his face.
“We are faithful only to the faithless, you say,” he muttered, turning back from the water that mirrored him. “That is true. Who is it says that we are happiest with light and venal women because we are not ashamed to be with them the mere beasts that nature made us? Montaigne, I think. It is true. And besides that, with her, every little lie I told her — such lies as one must always tell to women — seemed to sting me as I said it. She never doubted me! If she had doubted me once, it would have been easy; but she always believed, — always. In Venice she made her marble in my likeness, but made me a god. That was her fault always. She never saw me as the thing I am.”
He had not even loved her, — he who had taught her that imperishable love which possesses the body and the soul, and fills all earth and heaven, and lets no living thing reign beside it for a moment, nor any thought obtain a place!
“You never loved her,” I muttered. “You never loved her! You who wrote your name across her very soul, so that it burns there always, and will burn on, and on, and on, so that God Himself could not quench the flame of it, even if He would! You never loved her! — you!”
It seemed to me the pitifulest thing that ever the ear of man could hear: it stunned me.
Across my brain ran a line I once had read in some coarse cruel book:
“Les femmes ne savent pas distinguer l’appétit de l’amour.”
Was great Love nowhere in the world save here and there in some woman’s breaking heart? — Was Philotes the only thing men knew?
I could speak no more to him: the unutterable desolation of it struck me dumb. I felt as in that very spot some pagan Roman might have felt, seeing his daughter passing by between the guards to perish for the love of Christ, he knowing all the while that her Christ was dead in Galilee and could not aid her, and that the angelic hosts she waited for to break the wheel and quench the fires had never had a shape or substance, save in the heated fancy of some desert saint or hunted preacher.
“You cannot think it of me that I would desert a woman brutally, and a woman so young,” he said, at length, with an impatience and apology in his tone, for it hurt him that such as I, or any one indeed, could deem him guilty of such grossness in his cruelty.
“I was faithless; I left her; yes, but I meant to return. I thought she would more easily understand that one might weary. Of course I never dreamed that she would flee away to misery like that — —”
“No, I remember,” I answered him, bitterly. “You said of old, when you buried a dead love you cast some rich gifts on its grave, as the Romans the porca præsentanea. Well, you see there are dead things you cannot bury so, and there are things that will not die at all, not even at your bidding. You are a famous poet, but it seems to me that you are but a shallow student of great natures.”
“She will love me always, you mean? Yes.”
“You dare to triumph!”
“No, I meant no triumph. There are women like that: they make one dread lest ever there should be the endless Hereafter that we wise men laugh at. How should we bear their eyes?”
A shiver shook him as he walked to and fro in the moonlight.
“Tell me more of her,” he said, pausing before me.
“I will tell you nothing.”
“You think me so unworthy?”
“I think any one of the galley-slaves that toil in the gangs, with their crimes written on their breasts, better and honester than you. Yes.”
He was silent. The moonlight poured down between us white and wide. There lay a little dead bird on the stones, I remember, — a redbreast, stiff and cold. The people traffic in such things here, in the square of Agrippa: it had fallen, doubtless, off some market stall.
Poor little bird! All the innocent sweet woodland singing-life of it was over, over in agony, and not a soul in all the wide earth was the better for its pain, not even the huckster who had missed making his copper coin by it. Woe is me! the sorrow of the world is great.
I pointed to it where it lay, a poor little soft huddled heap of bright feathers: there is no sadder sight than a dead bird, for what lovelier life can there be than a bird’s life, free in the sun and the rain, in the blossoms and foliage?
“Make the little cold throat sing at sunrise,” I said to him. “When you can do that, then think to undo what you have done.”
“She will forget,” he muttered.
“You know she never will forget. There is your crime.”
“She will have her art — —”
“Will the dead bird sing?”
He was silent.
“Tell me,” he said, abruptly, after a little while, “tell me: is she here in Rome?”
I would not answer him; I stared on him stupidly, seeing his pale fair face in all its beauty against the granite columns of Agrippa’s temple.
“Is she in Rome?” he asked.
“I will not tell you!”
“Then she is! When I learned in Paris that you had found her, I knew that she was safe. You thought I drove her away. You do me wrong. I left her, indeed; but I would have returned. I wrote to her to try and make her see that one might weary, still not be a brute: how could I tell that she would take it so? My servants should have sought her: they might have known that I had no intention to drive her from me, — not like that. When I reached Paris, then I sought for her, but then you had been there and had gone I recognized that it was you by what they said. You had found her in wretchedness?”
“She kept herself by making fishermen’s nets: yes.”
I would not tell him all the truth; I could not bear that he should know that her lovely and lofty mind had lost itself in the fell gloom of madness for his sake.
He moved impatiently with a gesture of shrinking and regret.
Hilarion could inflict all tortures of the emotions on a woman, and forsake her, and feel no pang; but physical need in any woman hurt him, and the thought that it was suffered for him, or through him, stung him sharply: in his code his honor was hurt if the creature he had caressed could want for bread. She might die of pain, or drag out a living death in solitude: but that was nothing. That did not touch his honor, in any way.
“Does she want — now?” he said, with a tinge of ashamed agitation in his cheek. “Does she want? Surely she must. And I — —”
