CHAPTER II.
When he awoke, the bright morning light was forcing its way through the crevices in the shutters, and making a sunny twilight around him. He saw the boy by his bedside, and the doctor, and heard that Theodore had gone into the town early in the morning, as soon as the boy came in, without saying anything about his return.
Thus he passed half the day, restless, dreaming, listening towards the door. Two mice, which he had tamed, and for whom he had hitherto ever had a caress, even in his moments of deepest gloom and misery, now came into the middle of the room, blinked their bright little eyes at him, squeaked, and flourished about, without his casting a glance towards them. The boy, not knowing that they were permitted guests, frightened them away. Some one knocked. It was somebody who brought the artist an order for a pair of ear-rings, in red shell. Bianchi let him depart without speaking to him; nor did he say a word to a sculptor of his acquaintance, who had heard of the terrible adventure of the previous night, and was good-hearted enough to visit the solitary being.
Meanwhile, Theodore, already early in the day, had mounted the stone steps of the large house in which Mary's parents resided. The old servant opened the door. "They waited long for you last night," he said. "I was sent to your lodgings, but you had not returned. Miss Mary thought that you must have met with some accident, as you were on horseback. But, God be praised! you are safe."
Theodore did not answer; he heard music within--a sonata of Beethoven--suddenly it ceased; a stool was pushed back, a gown rustled. As he entered, Mary stood before him; she seemed to have paused suddenly in the middle of the room on her way to the door; she tried to speak; her cheeks flushed. He seized her hand eagerly with both of his, and now saw that she had been weeping. "Mary!" he said, "I find that I have more to crave pardon for than I expected--you have been uneasy about me!"
She tried to smile. "I am delighted to find that there was no reason for it," she said. "Something prevented you; it was very foolish to think the worst at once. I will go and call my parents."
He held her back entreatingly. "You have been weeping, Mary!"
"It is nothing; I had a bad night, and the music just now agitated me."
He let her hand fall. She remained standing on the same spot, supporting herself against a chair. He took one turn up and down the room, and stood before her; he grasped her hand again, stammered out a word, and then pressed her passionately to his breast. She rested weeping blissfully and silently in his arms.
"We will go to my parents," said Mary, when she had had a little recovered the emotion of that first embrace. "Come!"
She took him gently by the hand. He longed to remain alone with her; it seemed to him as though she would be separated from him again when they came into the presence of others; yet he permitted her to lead him. They found her parents together in her mother's boudoir. As he entered he felt a longing to entreat his loved one to be silent on what had just passed between them, he felt incapable of talking calmly over it, or of meeting any one but herself in his blissful intoxication. It had already passed her lips. The mother, a stately, ceremonious woman, clasped him heartily in her arms; formal as she usually was, she could not hear the pleasant news without saying some heartfelt words of blessing, which, kindly as they were meant, still sounded foreign and strange to Theodore's state of feeling. Her father said nothing. He pressed his future son-in-law warmly by the hand, and kissed his daughter's forehead.
Theodore described the adventures of the previous evening. Mary leant her head on his breast, and when he told of the combat, threw her arm timidly around her lover, as if to assure herself that all was past, and that she really possessed him again in safety. Her mother made a sign to her, which, slight as it was, did not escape Theodore. She removed her arm, and sat near him without touching him. He felt pained; he felt, too, when after some hours he was obliged to leave, and kissed her again with his whole heart on the threshold, that she avoided him shily, and at first turned away her lips from his. He departed with a strange confusion of feeling--a weight upon his heart--and an obstinate deadened glow in every vein. He stood still for a moment before the door; the street was deserted, he pressed his feverish forehead against the cool stone pillars, and stretched forth his arms as if he would draw down a part of the heavens and press it to his breast, and then went somewhat more calmly on his way to the Tritone.
A passionate flush passed over Bianchi's haggard features, as he recognized Theodore's footsteps without. He raised himself and gazed eagerly and fully at him as he entered--taller and more manly than he had appeared to him the evening before. Theodore went to him and said, "You have rallied, Bianchi, and the doctor is satisfied. Keep quiet, I entreat you; you must let me walk up and down a little, my ideas are in a whirl, and my thoughts will not allow me to rest."
He told him not from whence he came, nor that within the last few hours he had bound his fate to a woman; but there lay a glory on him, from which Bianchi could not turn away his eyes. He had laid aside his hat, and thrown his cloak over one shoulder, his head sprang freely from the broad chest--the short curled hair was a little disordered--his forehead massive and noble; and thus, with an absent look, and his arms folded across his cloak, he seemed almost to have forgotten the purpose of his visit As he paced up and down, he struck his foot against the burning logs, and gazed at the fire. At last he turned, and said--
"Tell me about yourself, Bianchi!"
"What would you know?"
The tone of this question, doubtful, almost distrustful, and yet submissive and compliant, struck Theodore's delicate ear. He drew a stool near the couch, seized Bianchi's hand and said--
"I wish to know nothing, except how you feel now; and if you are in no humour to talk, make a sign with your hand, which now betrays but slight remains of your fever."
He felt the pressure of the hand, which then withdrew itself hesitatingly from his.
"You will soon be so well that we shall be able to part without the necessity of meeting again. For the present you must resign yourself to my intrusiveness; for you must know that I have made up my mind not to let the carelessness of a stupid boy be the destruction of such an artist as you are."
"As I am!" and he laughed sadly. "Do you know what I am? Who knows it not? A day labourer am I, cutting shells for women, with a woman's patience, whose stout arms are ashamed of him when they encounter a piece of marble. Well, perhaps, yesterday the matter was arranged so that the poor cripples will have nothing to reproach themselves for in future!"
"You talk strangely--as if there were not room enough within a circle of two inches for a soul that can at times express itself in two words."
"For the idea, possibly, but hardly for the execution."
"You must have experienced that," said Theodore. "But are you obliged to do what is so disagreeable to you?"
The sick man cast a quiet look around the four bare walls, and said--
"I have got so used to the amount of luxury you see about you; I did, indeed, once think of beginning a large work without there in the square, eating my artichoke by the fountain at noon, and sleeping at night at the foot of my work. But one is effeminate and fears the weather, and cowardly, and afraid of the gossipping. Besides, I cannot do without the wine or--"
"But if you had an opportunity of working in marble without any discomfort to yourself," interrupted Theodore.
The sick man started up excitedly.
"Do you know what you are doing with your thoughtless questions?" he cried, and his eyes sparkled. "Look in that corner; there have I cast one on the top of the other, all that used to come to me with such questions. The dust is burying these impertinent babblers day by day, and my eyes know already that it is an unpardonable sin for them to wander towards them. And yet I was fool enough to allow myself to hope again when they said that models were to be sent in for the monument to the last Pope. For a couple of weeks I thought and dreamt of nothing else, and worked it out with energy, and was myself satisfied with my work. Fool that I was, to be deluded by such fancies. That was yesterday. I wrapped the model in a cloth, and bore it myself all the way to the Cardinal Secretary of State,--for my soul hung upon it, and I thought another might let it fall. And then I was obliged to give the rascally servants civil words and my last scudo before they would even permit me to enter. Inside it was all black and red and violet, with their reverences' stockings, and they stared at me from head to foot, because I had run out of my studio without thinking of taking off my old working-jacket. I thought, 'Let them stare;' took courage, and stepped with a bow and my work before his eminence. I saw at once that he was in a bad temper, and that his neighbour had already tasted some of its effects. I told him shortly why I was there, and begged to be permitted to show my sketch. The old fellow nodded, after his custom, cast a glance over the figures, which looked doubly noble amongst all those rogues, and said, 'Not bad. But 'twont do, 'twont do; wants noblesse, my son, and more direct reference to the holy church. Take it home and beat it up. The clay is wet still.' I stood like a man in a madhouse. Beat it up! as if my loftiest ideas were broth. Whilst I stood there, unable to utter a word, up stepped the monsignori, stuck their learned spectacles on their noses, and abused it before and behind till they did not leave a nail's breadth without a spot of blame, just as when the old wolf half kills a sheep, and then hands it over to her whelps to worry and whet their milk-teeth upon. If I could only have spoken and described all that had passed through my brain whilst I was at work on the model, perhaps the old man might have looked at it differently, for they say that he has a good-enough head. But just at this unlucky moment he was full of ill temper, and poured it all out over me. So at last I got tired of this chattering, this whizzing of children's painted bird-bolts, not one of which hit the matter, and every one the man, for they pricked me like needles. Another would have shaken himself laughingly, and perhaps have won the day. But I--how was I to do it? My father did not make much talk over his cameos, and when he died, Rome was neither more agitated nor stiller, and I have ever kept out of the way of your learned men; so I stole away from them this time too, and swore never to have aught to do with them again. As I passed along the Repelta I got into a rage, and threw my model into the Tiber. 'Let it melt there,' said I to myself; and I felt relieved, and took a fancy to go and walk about the campagna. There you found me."
"You must not abuse the savant," said Theodore, laughingly, after a pause, in order to bring the other, who had sunk into a reverie, back to the subject. "Your instinct did not deceive you when you felt an antipathy to my being near you. For I am here in Rome for the purpose of poking about old parchments, and digging out long-buried matters, about which but few are interested. Histories of the old Italian towers, state papers, and judicial reports. And so we are doubly-separated individuals."
"You may be, and do what you like," said Bianchi, quickly, and half aside. "You are good and handsome, and a German."
"You little know German learning. It is even more horrible than the Roman. I myself have a secret terror of it. It has a power of glaring at feeble souls, that turns them into stone, like those poor rogues who gazed on the face of the Medusa."
"The Medusa?"
"You must know her better than I do. Have you not thrown her away there in the corner and left her, half begun and half ended, cut upon the shells on your work-table?"
"I do not know much about it. When I was quite a boy, my father gave me a part of it to work at. I loved the head, for I had but little pleasure, and the dark death in the beautiful woman's face fascinated me. Afterwards I saw the circular one in the villa Ludovisi, and never rested until I had made a copy of it as well as I could at home. It is more human and passionate there, than in the Grecian one, where it is reduced to a mere mask. I have never asked what they meant by it, and reading annoys me."
"If you like, I will read the story to you, as told by one of the old poets?"
"Do--and soon and--when do you return?" he asked, as Theodore arose.
"To-night," said the young man; "but not to read to you, for you are not well enough yet. I will not listen. I know what you are going say. But a sick man must not have a will of his own."
When he returned in the evening, he found wine upon the table, and a comfortable cushioned chair placed by the hearth. Bianchi slept, and the boy whispered that he had made him buy the wine and borrow the chair from a neighbour, and that he had not been quiet or slept until he had seen all done as he wished.