She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she obeyed.
With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.
It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.
But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.
He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her the center of innumerable stories.
He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg. He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's sake spoke not.
He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell, the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.
Of all the studies he made from her—he all the while cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of sacrifice,—those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath, around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken—the one touch of pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.
In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,—ready for the mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,—ready for the feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in dust.