A SAXON GOD.
In the year of grace 1854, Ernest Philip King, a young attaché of the English embassy at Athens, married Haidée Amic, the most beautiful woman in that city. Neither of the pair possessed a fortune, and their united means afforded a not abundantly luxurious style of living; but they loved each other, and the fact that he was the portionless son of a Church of England divine, and she the daughter of an impecunious Greek of noble family and royal lineage, was no drawback to the early happiness of their wooing and wedding. They had two children, a boy and a girl, born within two years of each other in Athens: the girl, the elder of the two, they named Hyacinthe; the boy was called Tancredi.
Five years after this marriage had taken place King lost his position at the embassy, and only received in exchange for it a mean government clerkship in Rome at a meagre salary. Thither he removed, and after dragging out a miserable and disappointed existence five years longer, he died in the arms of his beautiful and still young wife. Thereafter the youthful widow managed to keep life in herself and her two little ones by dint of pinching, management and contrivance on the pittance that had come to her from the estate of her impecunious father. They lived in a palace, it is true—but who does not live in a palace in Rome?—high up, where the cooing doves built their nests under the leaden eaves, and where the cold winds whistled shrilly in their season.
Such accomplishments as the mother was mistress of she imparted to her children. What other education they received was derived from intercourse with many foreigners, English, French, Russians, and from familiarity with the sights and wonders of Rome, its galleries, ruins, palaces, studios.
At eighteen Tancredi had obtained a situation as amanuensis to an English historian resident in Italy; and Hyacinthe already brooded over some active and unusual future that spread itself as yet but dimly before her. She inherited from her mother her unparalleled beauty—the clear, colorless, flawless skin, the straight features, the lustrous eyes with their luxuriant lashes and long level brows, her lithe and gracious figure and slender feet and hands: of the English father her only physical trace was the large, full, mobile mouth with its firm white teeth. She had from him the modern spirit of unrest and the modern impetus and energy: from the Greek mother, a counteracting languor of temperament and an antique cast of mind.
Such, in a measure, was Hyacinthe King at twenty—a curious compound of beauty, unspent verve, irritated longings, half-superstitious imaginings, and half-developed impulses, ideas and mental powers; practically, an assistant to the worn mother in her household duties, a haunter of the beautiful places in the city of her adoption, an occasional mingler in the scant festivities of artists, a good linguist, knowing English thoroughly and speaking French and German with fluent accuracy. Watch her, with me, as she walks one spring day along the narrow Via Robbia, down which a slip of sunlight glints scantily on her young head, and, emerging into a wider thoroughfare, ascends at last the Scala Regia of the Vatican. The girl is known there, and the usually not over-courteous officials allow her to pass on at her will through hall after hall of splendor and priceless treasure. She is neither an English tourist with Baedeker, Murray and a note-book, nor an American traveller with pencil, loose leaves and a possible photographic apparatus in her pocket: therefore to the vigilant eye of the guardian of the pope's palace she is an innocuous being. Hyacinthe glides quietly through the Clementino Museum, with never a glance for the lovely, blooming Mercury of the Belvedere, or even one peep in at[page 223] the cabinet where the sad Laocoön for ever writhes in impotent struggles, or a look of love for rare and radiant Apollo, or one of surprise for Hercules with the Nemean lion. She has reached the Hall of Statues—that superb gallery with its subtly-tesselated pavement, its grand marble columns with their Ionic capitals, its arches and walls of wondrous marbles—and here she stops with a little sigh before the Cupid of Praxiteles, shorn of his wings by ruthless Time or some still more ruthless human destroyer. But oh the lovesomeness of that wingless Love, the sensuous psalmody that seems about to part the young lips, and the glad eyes one may fancy glancing under that careless infant brow! Hyacinthe stands before it a long, long time while many parties come in and go out, and only moves on a little when an insolent young Frenchman offers a surmise as to her being a statue herself. She moves only as far as Ariadne: the jeune Français has made a progressive movement also, and notes behind his Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks something like the marble. She does. Though the grief of the face of the daughter of Minos as she lies deserted by her lover on the rocky shore of Naxos be a poignant and a present woe, there is the shadow of its mate on the brow and lips of the girl who gazes at its pure and pallid and all-unavailing loveliness.
The Frenchmen have gone with their guide, and there is a great stillness falling on the place, and no more tourists come that way. The light is fading, but Hyacinthe turns back to the mutilated Cupid, and ere long sits down at the base of the statue, and her head rests well on the cold marble while the darkness grows, and the guardians of the Vatican either forget or do not distinguish the white of her gown from the blurred blanchedness of the Greek Love.
So, while the mother waits at home, and wails and prays and wonders and seeks comfort among her neighbors, the daughter sleeps and dreams; and her dream is this: The wingless Love looks up and laughs as in welcome, and Hyacinthe looks up too, and they both see a new marble standing there in front of them: nay, not a marble, though white as Parian, for the eyes that laugh back at Love's and hers are blue as the blue Italian summer skies, and the curling locks of hair on the brow are of shining gold, and the palms of the beautiful hands are rosy with the bright blood of life.
And Love asks, "What would you?"
And the strange comer answers, "They say I need nothing."