In real truth, I did nothing now in my manhood so really perilous as I had done in my childhood, when I had climbed to the top of the cross on the church and sat astride of it. But they had called that mischief and blasphemy: they called the things I did now gymnastics, and applauded them till the noise might have wakened the Etrurian dead under the soil.
At last I came to the feat which, though far from the hardest to me, always looked to the crowd the most wonderful: it was my old master's trick of holding his five sons on his shoulder. Only I outshone him, and sustained on mine seven men in four tiers, and the topmost had on his head little Febo.
The mite whom we called Phœbus, because we had found him at sunrise and he had such yellow locks—yellow as the dandelion or the buttercup—was a stray thing picked up on the seashore in Apulia—a soft, merry, chirping little fellow, of whom we were all fond, and to whom we had easily taught that absence of fear which enabled us to play ball with him in our spectacles. He always delighted the people, he was such a pretty little lad, and not, perhaps, more than four years old then, and always laughing, always ready. To him it was only fun, as it had been to me at his years. I never thought it was cruel to use him so, I had been so happy in it myself. All at once, as I stood erect sustaining the men on my shoulders, the topmost one holding on his head our tiny Phœbus—all at once as I did this, which I had done a hundred times, and had always done in safety—all at once, amongst the sea of upturned faces in the glowing evening light, I saw one woman's eyes. She was leaning a little forward, resting her cheek on her hand. She had black lace about her head and yellow japonica-flowers above her left ear. She was looking at me and smiling a little.
I met her eyes, full, across the dust reddened by the sunset glow as the dust of a battlefield is reddened with blood. I felt as if I were stabbed; the red dust seemed to swim round me; I staggered slightly: in another instant I had recovered myself, but the momentary oscillation had terrified my comrades. The seventh and highest, feeling the human pyramid tremble beneath him, involuntarily, unconsciously, opened his arms to save himself. He did not lose his balance, but he let the child fall. It dropped as an apple broken off the bough falls to the earth.
There was a moment of horrible silence. Then the men leaped down, tumbling and huddling one over another, not knowing what they did. The audience rose screaming; and broke the rope and swarmed into the arena. I stooped and took up the child. He was dead. His neck had been broken in the fall. He had struck the earth with the back of his head; he was rolled up on the sand like a little dead kid; his tiny tinsel crown had fallen off his curls, his tiny tinselled limbs were crushed under him, his blossom-like mouth was half open. It was horrible.
People spoke to me: I did not see or hear them. The crowd parted and scattered, some voluble, some dumb, with the shock of what they had seen. I lifted up what a moment before had been little Phœbus, and bore him in my arms to my mother's house.
She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said, and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their sport. It was cruel."
I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him—the little fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like a king. Poor little dead Phœbus! It was true what my mother had said: the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so this night.
"Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me."
Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long I saw her face—a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair, like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome.