Ramie

“ All through the long day he worked unweariedly among the reedy waters, under the frowning shadow of the monastery-crowned rocks. And from her cell she gazed on him—on the bold heroic cast of the head, and the sun-warmed brow from which the waves of hair were dashed; gazed on him where, under the cypress shadows, through the sere rushes, through the sullen waters, he toiled as peasants toil, for her—for her, though she had bidden him forsake even her memory for ever, though she had told him that suffering alone could be his portion through her. ”

“ My love, my life, my sweet Rima, I know that you will understand me now as you did not before, on that dark night—do you remember it, Rima?—when I held you clasped to my breast in the wood. How it pierced my heart with pain to speak plainly to you as I did on the mountain to-night—to kill the hope that had sustained and brought you so far from home! But now that anguish is over; the shadow has gone out of those beautiful eyes that are looking at me. ”

“ I thought I should have fainted!—in the shadow of another aisle, living before me, the glorious beauty that you painted in our altar-piece! I never sinned so deeply in my life before, but, though I never raised my eyes again, I thought of nothing but her all through the mass. If she tempted me so, how must she have tempted the souls of men! She is more lovely even than your portrait——"
"But her name—her country?" broke in Erceldoune, impatiently. "Why have withheld from me that she——"
"My son, I will tell all I know if you do not hasten me," pleaded Mother Veronica. ”

“ Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone terrace.
She was all alone.
The flower-like radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet with the setting of the sun, his life might go out in darkness.
In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit and vain passions. "Oh, God! give me his life, and I will give him mine!" ”

“ I can hear the slow, indolent murmur of the unseen river far below. I can smell the sickly heavy odour of the parched lilies in the heat. All the blinds and shutters were closed. No one was astir. The whole place seemed to sleep.
I only was awake and out—I only, who felt neither heat nor cold, knew neither day nor night, but only looked up at that one little casement in the roof to see the sunbeams illumine a girl's hand passing amidst the threads, or to watch the moonbeams slanting in their purity upon the dark closed lattice where she slept. ”

“ It is good to go and see those poor muffled wretches who scarce ever feel the sun and move like ghosts about beneath their fogs; and then to come back to see our own shores, where all the sunshine is, and where the very moon makes us a second day, and where the lutes sound half the night, and the olive grows down to the sea, and in winter all the air is full of the smell of the orange-flower and of the coltsfoot in the grass.'
She gave an impatient movement as he paused, but he pursued the thread of his own thoughts aloud. ”

“ To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite spaces of the sea and sky—this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.
Never again to hide with the snake and the fox; never again to tremble as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit hours hidden in the bowels of the earth: never to be afraid of every leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moonbeam that fell across his path!—he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release. ”

“ I saw no other living thing. I forgot that I was a hunted felon; I only remembered you. I felt the wind was from the south-west, and so walking against it I hoped to come to the beach at last. If I had known the country as well as you, I should have had no fear. As it was, I knew I might walk the whole night yet never find the sea. But all at once I felt my feet wet. I stooped and tasted the water; it was salt. The roar of the wind was so loud that I had missed the sound of the sea, but the sea it was. By the lantern light I could see the foam on a breaking wave. ”

“ The hot light whirled round her in giddy circles, her limbs were weakened by long and harsh captivity, she was feeble and faint, but she was almost once more happy. 'The earth was her own once more, and somewhere on the earth was her lover. ”

“ Even thus had Rima fallen—fallen from the great height—into the flames that instantly consumed her beautiful flesh and bright spirit! O cruel Nature!
A moth that perished in the flame; an indistinct faint sound; a dream in the night; the semblance of a shadowy form moving mist-like in the twilight gloom of the forest, would suddenly bring back a vivid memory, the old anguish, to break for a while the calm of that period. ”

“ Like a deer stung by a shot he started to his feet, standing between her and the shafts of jasper that formed the portico into the building; the endurance that had laid him at her mercy, soffering all things for her sake, living only in the light of her smile, and knowing no law but her desire, broke its bondage now and turned against her in fierce bat just rebuke, incoherent in its misery.
"It is true, then, what they say! You have a heart of bronze, a soul of marble? You have that glory of your loveliness only to draw men in your net and hurl them to perdition? ”

“ The nights began to grow melodious, the first nightingales arriving with their love chaunts; and all the daylight seemed full of Hitting wings and amorous trills till even the sombre rosemary trembled with their mirth and their pleasure; the lowly tussocks of dog-grass and the lofty ilex and robur-oaks were alike the home of their innocent passions, and down the shadowy waters, between the solitary brakes and thickets, the water birds sailed before each other's eyes in their pomp of courtship and coquetry of wooing.
All living things loved one another ”

“ When I looked down on the dark, glassy forest pool, where Rima would look no more to see herself so much better than in the small mirror of her lover's pupil, it showed me a gaunt, ragged man with a tangled mass of black hair falling over his shoulders, the bones of his face showing through the dead-looking, sun-parched skin, the sunken eyes with a gleam in them that was like insanity. ”

“ It was aimost the only instinct left in him, and the few weeks that he had been free on his own hills in the summer before—all wretched, hungry, filled with fear, and compelled to concealment, though they were—had been so sweet to him, that night and day since he had been captured afresh he had meditated escape; schemed for it, lived for it, scarcely felt the heat of the sun or the cold of the wind, the aching of his old wounds or the lash of the overseer's whip, for thinking every moment—could he get away? ”

“ It was with her as when the moor-hen was shot on the waters, as when the woodlark was trapped in the net. No one cared. There was no 'angiolin' beside the stars!
She was now almost numb with cold. The water drenched her, rain and salt water both poured over her, and the night had grown bitterly cold. She supposed it was night, she could not tell. ”

“ She had only put on her mask for entry, and had now laid it beside her; she threw aside her domino, for the heat of the box was stifling, and the whiteness of her dress shone as lilies do at moonlight. She leaned her cheek on her hand, and looked down on to the romping, screaming, many-coloured throngs.
"You are not well to-night, Madame?" said the Duc, with the affectionate solicitude that he felt for all pretty women. ”

“ She mounted the stairs and looked upward, and guessed the hour by the place of the evening star, and the look of the heavens. She went down again and ate a little and drank some water, fed the dog and the mule, shut them both in the chamber, and went out into the open air.
She had an errand to do, with which, undone, it seemed to her she could not sleep. A strange fancy had come to her, and the fancy assumed the shape of duty to her; of a duty of gratitude so imperative that it would have been a guilt in her sight to evade its execution.
The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. ”

“ She longed to penetrate the secret of these strange dwellings. She said to herself, 'Joconda found me in the hills; may be these people that dwell in stone lower than the surface of the earth are my own people.'
It was an odd fancy that had come into her head, but she thought it so likely that she had been born in some such place as this, hidden away under the leaves and the furze, where men could not reach, nor the scream of their voices intrude.
She had torn and hacked the shrubs away from about the entrance, and the light from the cloudless skies above shone down steadily. ”

“ She unloosed herself from his arms, and knelt once more beside him, so that, in the dim shadowy rays of the lamp he could only see the paleness of her upturned brow. She longed to be sheltered even from his sight, in that hour. She had no fear but that the greatness of his nature would reach to mercy and to pardon. She knew that justice to the uttermost, and an infinite tenderness, would ever be hers at his hands. ”

“ Never. When he sees a house-wall he gets up upon his wings and goes away upon the air.'
He saw that he had no effect upon her, took no more hold on her than the water takes upon the glossy laurel leaf, or the plumes of the coot.
'Let her stay!' he thought, angrily; 'she will go away with the Sicilian sailor, no doubt, sooner or later; she will be happier so than amidst culture and repose.'
His heart revolted from leaving her here all alone in the twilight of the sepulchres, and upon the wildness and vastness of the moors. ”

“ Once more, as on that day in the forest when she prevented me from killing the serpent, and as on the occasion of her meeting with Nuflo after we had been together on Ytaioa, she appeared transformed and instinct with intense resentment—a beautiful human wasp, and every word a sting.
“Rima,” I cried, “you are cruelly unjust to say such words to me. If you know that I have never deceived you before, give me a little credit now. You are no delusion—no mirage, but Rima, like no other being on earth. ”

“ Now and then her eyes turned on him in the darkness of cypress shadows, or where some yawning river-bed, yellow and reed-choked, and unfathomed in the gloom, was crossed with a measureless leap, their horses close abreast. For all except the echo of the ringing hoofs trampling through ripening corn, or sounding loud on rocky pathways, there was utter silence between them.
The night was fast waning, the stars growing larger, till the whole skies seemed on fire with their brilliance; the hours were passing swiftly—the hours which alone were safety. ”

“ And she would not, but slept here under the eaves, as the swallows did.
"We have not sun enough, little rose, you and I," she would say to me with a smile and a sigh. "But it is better to be a little pale, and live a little in the dark, and be a little cramped in a garret window, than to live grand in the sun for a moment, and the next to be tossed away in a gutter. And one can be so happy anyhow—almost anyhow!—when one is young. ”

“ If truth abode not with her, and the fealty of honour, she was dead to him.
"If her eyes shrink from mine, let the seas cover me!" he prayed in his soul; and the length of the shore seemed endless to him, and the tawny stretch of the beach to be the waste of a desert, and the surf, as it flowed up and broke at his feet, to force his steps backward and backward, and to bind his limbs as with lead. ”

“ What wrong hast thou come by either through me, or Rāma ever engaged in thy welfare? On beholding Rāma plunged in sorrow, fathers will forsake sons, and wives attached unto their husbands will forsake them, and the entire earth will be affected with ill-humour. When I hear him coming, adorned like unto a son of the celestials, I rejoice on casting my eyes on him, and I feel as if I had regained my youth. Men may do without the Sun, and the wielder of the thunder-bolt not raining, but none, I apprehend, can live, on witnessing Rāma repairing hence. ”

“ She had had the same simple bead-roll of innocent wishes ever since the first hour that she had raised me from the dust of the street; and it would, I doubt not, have remained her only one all the years of her life, till she should have glided down into a serene and cheerful old age of poverty and labour under that very same roof, without the blessed Mary ever deigning to hearken or answer. Would have done so if the painter René could have seen the stars, and so had not been driven to look instead at the glow-worm of her lamp as it was shining through my leaves. ”

“ Said Lamia, "here, upon this floor of clay,
And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough,
What canst thou say or do of charm enough
To dull the nice remembrance of my home?
Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam
Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,—
Empty of immortality and bliss!
Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
That finer spirits cannot breathe below
In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth,
What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe
My essence? ”

“ If he wake, we are lost!"
"I will wake him in such fashion that he never wakes again! An assassin your care? Let me go—let me go, I tell you!"
He strove to put her arms from him, to fling off him the coil of her hair, to break from the paralysing spell of her beauty; but she would not loosen him, she would not be shaken off—she drew him farther and farther from the Greek, let him seek as he would to escape from her. ”