She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there—alone.
The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute and content;—and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread winged King,—the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden apples in their hands,—the women dancing upon Cithæron in the moonlight,—the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,—all the familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old sweet life of the heroic times, were there—left to the rat and the spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.
The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the skies, and they would be there—alone.
To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.
She held them in a passionate tenderness—these, the first creatures who had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness of her life.
She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them in an agony of prayer—prayed for them that the hour might come, and come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart, towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and consolation.
Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To have them live, she would have given her own life.
Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.
When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and Thanatos—the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.
They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet their look struck coldly to her heart.