Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 8

will come. It always comes. You are my Ariadnê; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come! you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."
And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half mad.
No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her breast with her words unspoken.
All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden shiver from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadnê, fell upon her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly stricken creature.
"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed? That is all his love will leave you by-and-by."
"Ah, never!"
She spoke rather to herself than me. The terror was fading out of her eyes, the blood returning to her face; she was in the sweet bewildered trance of that blind faith which goes wherever it is led, and never asks the end nor dreads the fate. Her love was deathless: how could she know that his was mortal?
"You are cruel," she said, with her mouth quivering, but the old, soft, grand courage in her eyes. "We are together for ever; he has said so. But even if--if--I only remembered him by wounds, what would that change in me? He would have loved me. If he would wish to wound me, so he should. I am his own as the dogs are. Think!--he looked at me, and all the world grew beautiful; he touched me, and I was happy--I, who never had been happy in my life. You look at me strangely; you speak harshly. Why? I used to think, surely you would be glad----"
I gripped my knife and cursed him in my soul.
How could one say to her the thing that he had made her in man's and woman's sight?
"I thought you would be glad," she said, wistfully, "and I would have told you long ago--myself. I do not know why you should look so. Perhaps you are angered because I seemed ungrateful to you and Maryx. Perhaps I was so. I have no thought--only of him. What he wished, that I did. Even Rome itself was for me nothing, and the gods--there is only one for me; and he is with me always. And I think the serpents and the apes are gone for ever from the tree, and he only hears the nightingales--now. He tells me so often. Very often. Do you remember I used to dream of greatness for myself--ah, what does it matter! I want nothing now. When he looks at me--the gods themselves could give me nothing more."
And the sweet tranquil radiance came back into her eyes, and her thoughts wandered into the memories of this perfect passion which possessed her, and she forgot that I was there.
My throat was choking; my eyes felt blind; my tongue clove to my mouth. I, who knew what that end would be as surely as I knew the day then shining would sink into the earth, I was dumb, like a brute beast--I, who had gone to take his life.
Before this love which knew nothing of the laws of mankind, how poor and trite and trivial looked those laws! What could I dare to say to her of shame? Ah! if it had only been for any other's sake! But he,--perhaps he did not lie to her; perhaps he did only hear the nightingales with her beside him; but how soon their song would pall upon his ear, how soon would he sigh for the poisonous kiss of the serpents! I knew! I knew!
I stood heart-broken in the warm light that was falling through the casement and streaming towards her face. What could I say to her? Men harder and sterner and surer in every way of their own judgment than I was of mine no doubt would have shaken her with harsh hands from that dream in which she had wandered to her own destruction.
No doubt a sterner moralist than I would have had no pity, and would have hurled on her all the weight of those bitter truths of which she was so