I was bound up amongst a score of others with ropes of gardener’s bass to chain me amidst my fellow-prisoners, and handed over by my jailer with the silver ear-rings to a youth who paid for us with a piece of gold—whether of great or little value I know not now. None of my own roses were with me: all were strangers. You never think, of course, that a little rose can care for its birthplace or its kindred; but you err.
O fool! Shall we not care for one another?—we who have so divine a life in common, who together sleep beneath the stars, and together sport in the summer wind, and together listen to the daybreak singing of the birds, whilst the world is dark and deaf in slumber—we who know that we are all of heaven that God, when He called away His angels, bade them leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to now and then make man remember Him!
You err. We love one another well; and if we may not live in union, we crave at least in union to droop and die. It is seldom that we have this boon. Wild flowers can live and die together; so can the poor amongst you: but we of the cultivated garden needs must part and die alone.
All the captives with me were strangers: haughty, scentless pelargoniums; gardenias, arrogant even in their woe; a knot of little, humble forget-me-nots, ashamed in the grand company of patrician prisoners; a stephanalis, virginal and pure, whose dying breath was peace and sweetness; and many sprays of myrtle born in Rome, whose classic leaves wailed Tasso’s lamentation as they went.
I must have been more loosely fettered than the rest were, for in the rough, swift motion of the youth who bore us my bonds gave way and I fell through the silver transparency of our prison-house, and dropped stunned upon the stone pavement of a street.
There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so far as I had consciousness, that some pitying wind would rise and waft me on his wings away to some shadow, some rest, some fresh, cool place of silence.
I was tortured with thirst; I was choked with dust; I was parched with heat.
The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot metal; the sun scorched like flame on the glare of the staring walls; the heavy feet of the hurrying crowd tramped past me black and ponderous; with every step I thought my death would come under the crushing weight of those clanging heels.
It was five seconds, five hours—which I know not. The torture was too horrible to be measured by time. I must have been already dead, or at the very gasp of death, when a cool, soft touch was laid on me; I was gently lifted, raised to tender lips, and fanned with a gentle, cooling breath,—breath from the lips that had kissed me.