Part 72 (1/2)

She did not reason--all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring instinct of pa.s.sion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as eternally as though his grave had closed on him.

She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.

She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.

Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard at her feet.

Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was resolute to follow him,--to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.

To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.

She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a thing that was vile.

But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands, but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.

She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.

He had said that he would leave at dawn.

In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the river where he dwelt.

She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too, she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his eyes would kill her.

It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and feeble limbs through the long gra.s.ses of the sh.o.r.e and reached the ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the s.p.a.ces in the stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that the place was desolate.

The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the stone.

She entered and looked at them.

She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there--alone.

The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute and content;--and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread winged King,--the Greek youths, with doves in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and golden apples in their hands,--the women dancing upon Cithaeron in the moonlight,--the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,--all the familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old sweet life of the heroic times, were there--left to the rat and the spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.

The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the skies, and they would be there--alone.

To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.

She held them in a pa.s.sionate tenderness--these, the first creatures who had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness of her life.

She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them in an agony of prayer--prayed for them that the hour might come, and come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in wors.h.i.+p to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart, towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and consolation.

Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving them she had reached the pure and impersonal pa.s.sion of the artist. To have them live, she would have given her own life.

Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first time, she fell into a pa.s.sion of tears, and, stretched there on the floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.

When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and Thanatos--the gentle G.o.ds who give forgetfulness to men.

They were her dear G.o.ds, her best beloved and most compa.s.sionate; yet their look struck coldly to her heart.