I went back to the finding of the Roman newspaper and my departure from home.
All, all; I told him all; how I had come into the home of the Slow Movers, how I had mistaken them for marble like the rest of the figures about the island, how I longed to have the mystery cleared up.
All that day Antonius and I sat by the sea in most delightful converse.
Only once, at high noon, did he set a brief limit to his tale while we passed into his cavern to partake of food and drink.
With a high-bounding heart, I listened to his story of the landing of the Seven Sculptors upon the isle. Their first task had been to rear the glorious temple with its long flight of marble steps leading down to the sea. Then they, and, later, their sons, and their sons’ sons, had set to work to people this beautiful island with almost countless figures of the rarest grace and finish.
In the forests, by the river’s banks, through the valley, on the hillside, adown the terraces, to the very water’s edge, rose the faultless statues in wondrous beauty and profusion.
Here, there and everywhere, forms of matchless grace gleamed, snow-white amid the leafy bowers or tangled underwood.
A mysterious ardor burned within the hearts of these exiled artists. It would seem that theirs was a wild sort of hope to rear on that far-distant isle another Rome—an infant daughter, but fairer and whiter in her marble magnificence than the glorious mother who sate upon her seven hills!
Times and times again, aye, thrice three score and ten, the wretched Paula arose out of the quarried blocks, ever fair and ever fairer, now bent in awful grief, now putting the very skies to shame with the entrancing beauty of her upturned, pleading, sweet and pitiful face.
Here and there, too, stood great Cæsar, never to be forgotten for his godlike clemency in snatching the sculptors from terrible death.