Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 8

there is but one voice audible;
all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all eternity can be but
its heritage alone.
* * *
Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of years,
and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.
This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller
of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and
lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.
* * *
"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said brutally, and
laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the
bonds of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed,
and I seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail
fade against the sky.

"And when that ship sails without you? The day 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