The brother and sister were left together. Melissa sighed deeply; but
her brother went up to her, laid his arm round her shoulder, and said:
“Poor child! you have indeed a hard time of it. Eighteen years old, and
as pretty as you are, to be kept locked up as if in prison! No one would
envy you, even if your fellow-captive and keeper were younger and less
gloomy than your father is! But we know what it all means. His grief
eats into his soul, and it does him as much good to storm and scold, as
it does us to laugh.”
“If only the world could know how kind his heart really is!” said the
girl.
“He is not the same to his friends as to us,” said Alexander; but
Melissa shook her head, and said sadly: “He broke out yesterday against
Apion, the dealer, and it was dreadful. For the fiftieth time he had
waited supper for you two in vain, and in the twilight, when he had
done work, his grief overcame him, and to see him weep is quite
heartbreaking! The Syrian dealer came in and found him all tearful, and
being so bold as to jest about it in his flippant way--”
“The old man would give him his answer, I know!” cried her brother with
a hearty laugh. “He will not again be in a hurry to stir up a wounded
lion.”
“That is the very word,” said Melissa, and her large eyes sparkled. “At
the fight in the Circus, I could not help thinking of my father, when
the huge king of the desert lay with a broken spear in his loins,
whining loudly, and burying his maned head between his great paws. The
gods are pitiless!”
“Indeed they are,” replied the youth, with deep conviction; but his
sister looked up at him in surprise.
“Do you say so, Alexander? Yes, indeed--you looked just now as I never
saw you before. Has misfortune overtaken you too?”
“Misfortune?” he repeated, and he gently stroked her hair. “No, not
exactly; and you know my woes sit lightly enough on me. The immortals
have indeed shown me very plainly that it is their will sometimes to
spoil the feast of life with a right bitter draught. But, like the moon
itself, all it shines on is doomed to change--happily! Many things here
below seem strangely ordered. Like ears and eyes, hands and feet, many
things are by nature double, and misfortunes, as they say, commonly come
in couples yoked like oxen.”
“Then you have had some twofold blow?” asked Melissa, clasping her hands
over her anxiously throbbing bosom.
“I, child! No, indeed. Nothing has befallen your father’s younger son;
and if I were a philosopher, like Philip, I should be moved to wonder
why a man can only be wet when the rain falls on him, and yet can be so
wretched when disaster falls on another. But do not look at me with such
terror in your great eyes. I swear to you that, as a man and an artist,
I never felt better, and so I ought properly to be in my usual frame
of mind. But the skeleton at life’s festival has been shown to me. What
sort of thing is that? It is an image--the image of a dead man which
was carried round by the Egyptians, and is to this day by the Romans,
to remind the feasters that they should fill every hour with enjoyment,
since enjoyment is all too soon at an end. Such an image, child--”
“You are thinking of the dead girl--Seleukus’s daughter--whose portrait
you are painting?” asked Melissa.
Alexander nodded, sat down on the bench by his sister, and, taking up
her needlework, exclaimed “Give us some light, child. I want to see your
pretty face. I want to be sure that Diodorus did not perjure himself
when, at the ‘Crane,’ the other day, he swore that it had not its match
in Alexandria. Besides, I hate the darkness.”
When Melissa returned with the lighted lamp, she found her brother, who
was not wont to keep still, sitting in the place where she had left him.
But he sprang up as she entered, and prevented her further greeting by
exclaiming:
“Patience! patience! You shall be told all. Only I did not want to
worry you on the day of the festival of the dead. And besides, to-morrow
perhaps he will be in a better frame of mind, and next day--”
Melissa became urgent. “If Philip is ill--” she put in.
“Not exactly ill,” said he. “He has no fever, no ague-fit, no aches and
pains. He is not in bed, and has no bitter draughts to swallow. Yet is
he not well, any more than I, though but just now, in the dining-hall at
the Elephant, I ate like a starving wolf, and could at this moment jump
over this table. Shall I prove it?”
“No, no,” said his sister, in growing distress. “But, if you love me,
tell me at once and plainly--”
“At once and plainly,” sighed the painter. “That, in any case, will not
be easy. But I will do my best. You knew Korinna?”
“Seleukus’s daughter?”
“She herself--the maiden from whose corpse I am painting her portrait.”
“No. But you wanted--”
“I wanted to be brief, but I care even more to be understood; and if you
have never seen with your own eyes, if you do not yourself know what a
miracle of beauty the gods wrought when they molded that maiden, you
are indeed justified in regarding me as a fool and Philip as a
madman--which, thank the gods, he certainly is not yet.”
“Then he too has seen the dead maiden?”
“No, no. And yet--perhaps. That at present remains a mystery. I hardly
know what happened even to myself. I succeeded in controlling myself in
my father’s presence; but now, when it all rises up before me, before my
very eyes, so distinct, so real, so tangible, now--by Sirius! Melissa,
if you interrupt me again--”
“Begin again. I will be silent,” she cried. “I can easily picture your
Korinna as a divinely beautiful creature.”
Alexander raised his hands to heaven, exclaiming with passionate
vehemence: “Oh, how would I praise and glorify the gods, who formed
that marvel of their art, and my mouth should be full of their grace and
mercy, if they had but allowed the world to sun itself in the charm of
that glorious creature, and to worship their everlasting beauty in
her who was their image! But they have wantonly destroyed their own
masterpiece, have crushed the scarce-opened bud, have darkened the star
ere it has risen! If a man had done it, Melissa, a man what would his
doom have been! If he--”
Here the youth hid his face in his hands in passionate emotion; but,
feeling his sister’s arm round his shoulder, he recovered himself, and
went on more calmly: “Well, you heard that she was dead. She was of just
your age; she is dead at eighteen, and her father commissioned me to
paint her in death.--Pour me out some water; then I will proceed as
coldly as a man crying the description of a runaway slave.” He drank
a deep draught, and wandered restlessly up and down in front of his
sister, while he told her all that had happened to him during the last
few days.
The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been
carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of
Seleukus. Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully
to himself. Never had he felt more fully content--the gayest of the gay.
One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him
with a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had
pleased him. His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of
the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body. As his glance fell on the
implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up
with the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he
felt equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door
to him, and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a
silent permission to step in, he had already become more serious.
He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once
seen that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any
particular thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For
already in the anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The
large halls, which were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were
as still as the grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had
been shining brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had
disappeared behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he
had ever seen, surrounded him. Then he perceived that it came in through
the black velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room
through which he was passing.
In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms. His duty must have been
to announce the artist’s arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards
him--Korinna’s mother.
Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot,
she speechlessly signed him to follow her. Till this moment not even a
whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and
mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young
painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained
to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come. But the only answer
was a dumb assenting bow of the head.
He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a
spacious room. It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds
of magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the
midst stood the couch on which lay the dead girl. In this hall,
too, reigned the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the
vestibule.
The dim, shrouded form lying motionless on the couch before him, with a
heavy wreath of lotus-flowers and white roses encircling it from head
to foot, was the subject for his brush. He was to paint here, where he
could scarcely distinguish one plant from another, or make out the form
of the vases which stood round the bed of death. The white blossoms
alone gleamed like pale lights in the gloom, and with a sister radiance
something smooth and round which lay on the couch--the bare arm of the
dead maiden.
His heart began to throb; the artist’s love of his art had awaked within
him; he had collected his wits, and explained to the matron that to
paint in the darkness was impossible.
Again she bowed in reply, but at a signal two waiting women, who were
squatting on the floor behind the couch, started up in the twilight, as
if they had sprung from the earth, and approached their mistress.
A fresh shock chilled the painter’s blood, for at the same moment the
lady’s voice was suddenly audible close to his ear, almost as deep as a
man’s but not unmelodious, ordering the girls to draw back the curtain
as far as the painter should desire.
Now, he felt, the spell was broken; curiosity and eagerness took
the place of reverence for death. He quietly gave his orders for the
necessary arrangements, lent the women the help of his stronger arm,
took out his painting implements, and then requested the matron to
unveil the dead girl, that he might see from which side it would be best
to take the portrait. But then again he was near losing his composure,
for the lady raised her veil, and measured him with a glance as though
he had asked something strange and audacious indeed.
Never had he met so piercing a glance from any woman’s eyes; and yet
they were red with weeping and full of tears. Bitter grief spoke in
every line of her still youthful features, and their stern, majestic
beauty was in keeping with the deep tones of her speech. Oh that he had
been so happy as to see this woman in the bloom of youthful loveliness!
She did not heed his admiring surprise; before acceding to his demand,
her regal form trembled from head to foot, and she sighed as she lifted
the shroud from her daughter’s face. Then, with a groan, she dropped
on her knees by the couch and laid her cheek against that of the dead
maiden. At last she rose, and murmured to the painter that if he were
successful in his task her gratitude would be beyond expression.
“What more she said,” Alexander went on, “I could but half understand,
for she wept all the time, and I could not collect my thoughts. It
was not till afterward that I learned from her waiting-woman--a
Christian--that she meant to tell me that the relations and wailing
women were to come to-morrow morning. I could paint on till nightfall,
but no longer. I had been chosen for the task because Seleukus had heard
from my old teacher, Bion, that I should get a faithful likeness of the
original more quickly than any one else. She may have said more, but
I heard nothing; I only saw. For when the veil no longer hid that face
from my gaze, I felt as though the gods had revealed a mystery to me
which till now only the immortals had been permitted to know. Never was
my soul so steeped in devotion, never had my heart beat in such solemn
uplifting as at that moment. What I was gazing at and had to represent
was a thing neither human nor divine; it was beauty itself--that beauty
of which I have often dreamed in blissful rapture.
“And yet--do not misapprehend me--I never thought of bewailing the
maiden, or grieving over her early death. She was but sleeping--I could
fancy: I watched one I loved in her slumbers. My heart beat high! Ay,
child, and the work I did was pure joy, such joy as only the gods on
Olympus know at their golden board. Every feature, every line was of
such perfection as only the artist’s soul can conceive of, nay,
even dream of. The ecstasy remained, but my unrest gave way to an
indescribable and wordless bliss. I drew with the red chalk, and mixed
the colors with the grinder, and all the while I could not feel the
painful sense of painting a corpse. If she were slumbering, she had
fallen asleep with bright images in her memory. I even fancied again
and again that her lips moved her exquisitely chiseled mouth, and that a
faint breath played with her abundant, waving, shining brown hair, as it
does with yours.
“The Muse sped my hand and the portrait--Bion and the rest will praise
it, I think, though it is no more like the unapproachable original than
that lamp is like the evening star yonder.”
“And shall we be allowed to see it?” asked Melissa, who had been
listening breathlessly to her brother’s narrative.
The words seemed to have snatched the artist from a dream. He had to
pause and consider where he was and to whom he was speaking. He hastily
pushed the curling hair off his damp brow, and said:
“I do not understand. What is it you ask?”
“I only asked whether we should be allowed to see the portrait,” she
answered timidly. “I was wrong to interrupt you. But how hot your head
is! Drink again before you go on. Had you really finished by sundown?”
Alexander shook his head, drank, and then went on more calmly: “No, no!
It is a pity you spoke. In fancy I was painting her still. There is the
moon rising already. I must make haste. I have told you all this for
Philip’s sake, not for my own.”
“I will not interrupt you again, I assure you,” said Melissa. “Well,
well,” said her brother. “There is not much that is pleasant left to
tell. Where was I?”
“Painting, so long as it was light--”
“To be sure--I remember. It began to grow dark. Then lamps were
brought in, large ones, and as many as I wished for. Just before sunset
Seleukus, Korinna’s father, came in to look upon his daughter once more.
He bore his grief with dignified composure; yet by his child’s bier he
found it hard to be calm. But you can imagine all that. He invited me to
eat, and the food they brought might have tempted a full man to excess,
but I could only swallow a few mouthfuls. Berenike--the mother--did not
even moisten her lips, but Seleukus did duty for us both, and this I
could see displeased his wife. During supper the merchant made many
inquiries about me and my father; for he had heard Philip’s praises from
his brother Theophilus, the high-priest. I learned from him that Korinna
had caught her sickness from a slave girl she had nursed, and had died
of the fever in three days. But while I sat listening to him, as he
talked and ate, I could not keep my eyes off his wife who reclined
opposite to me silent and motionless, for the gods had created Korinna
in her very image. The lady Berenike’s eyes indeed sparkle with a
lurid, I might almost say an alarming, fire, but they are shaped like
Korinna’s. I said so, and asked whether they were of the same color;
I wanted to know for my portrait. On this Seleukus referred me to a
picture painted by old Sosibius, who has lately gone to Rome to work in
Caesar’s new baths. He last year painted the wall of a room in the mer
chant’s country house at Kanopus. In the center of the picture stands
Galatea, and I know it now to be a good and true likeness.
“The picture I finished that evening is to be placed at the head of
the young girl’s sarcophagus; but I am to keep it two days longer, to
reproduce a second likeness more at my leisure, with the help of the
Galatea, which is to remain in Seleukus’s town house.
“Then he left me alone with his wife.
“What a delightful commission! I set to work with renewed pleasure,
and more composure than at first. I had no need to hurry, for the first
picture is to be hidden in the tomb, and I could give all my care to the
second. Besides, Korinna’s features were indelibly impressed on my eye.
“I generally can not paint at all by lamp-light; but this time I found
no difficulty, and I soon recovered that blissful, solemn mood which I
had felt in the presence of the dead. Only now and then it was clouded
by a sigh, or a faint moan from Berenike: ‘Gone, gone! There is no
comfort--none, none!’
“And what could I answer? When did Death ever give back what he has
snatched away?
“’ I can not even picture her as she was,’ she murmured sadly to
herself--but this I might remedy by the help of my art, so I painted on
with increasing zeal; and at last her lamentations ceased to trouble
me, for she fell asleep, and her handsome head sank on her breast. The
watchers, too, had dropped asleep, and only their deep breathing broke
the stillness.
“Suddenly it flashed upon me that I was alone with Korinna, and the
feeling grew stronger and stronger; I fancied her lovely lips had moved,
that a smile gently parted them, inviting me to kiss them. As often as
I looked at them--and they bewitched me--I saw and felt the same, and at
last every impulse within me drove me toward her, and I could no longer
resist: my lips pressed hers in a kiss!”
Melissa softly sighed, but the artist did not hear; he went on: “And
in that kiss I became hers; she took the heart and soul of me. I can no
longer escape from her; awake or asleep, her image is before my eyes,
and my spirit is in her power.”
Again he drank, emptying the cup at one deep gulp. Then he went on: “So
be it! Who sees a god, they say, must die. And it is well, for he has
known something more glorious than other men. Our brother Philip, too,
lives with his heart in bonds to that one alone, unless a demon has
cheated his senses. I am troubled about him, and you must help me.”
He sprang up, pacing the room again with long strides, but his sister
clung to his arm and besought him to shake off the bewitching vision.
How earnest was her prayer, what eager tenderness rang in her every
word, as she entreated him to tell her when and where her elder brother,
too, had met the daughter of Seleukus!
The artist’s soft heart was easily moved. Stroking the hair of
the loving creature at his side--so helpful as a rule, but now
bewildered--he tried to calm her by affecting a lighter mood than he
really felt, assuring her that he should soon recover his usual good
spirits. She knew full well, he said, that his living loves changed in
frequent succession, and it would be strange indeed if a dead one could
bind him any longer. And his adventure, so far as it concerned the house
of Seleukus, ended with that kiss; for the lady Berenike had presently
waked, and urged him to finish the portrait at his own house.
Next morning he had completed it with the help of the Galatea in the
villa at Kanopus, and he had heard a great deal about the dead maiden.
A young woman who was left in charge of the villa had supplied him with
whatever he needed. Her pretty face was swollen with weeping, and it was
in a voice choked with tears that she had told him that her husband, who
was a centurion in Caesar’s pretorian guard, would arrive to-morrow or
next day at Alexandria, with his imperial master. She had not seen him
for a long time, and had an infant to show him which he had not yet
seen; and yet she could not be glad, for her young mistress’s death had
extinguished all her joy.
“The affection which breathed in every word of the centurion’s wife,”
Alexander said, “helped me in my work. I could be satisfied with the
result.
“The picture is so successful that I finished that for Seleukus in all
confidence, and for the sarcophagus I will copy it as well or as ill as
time will allow. It will hardly be seen in the half-dark tomb, and how
few will ever go to see it! None but a Seleukus can afford to employ
so costly a brush as your brother’s is--thank the Muses! But the second
portrait is quite another thing, for that may chance to be hung next a
picture by Apelles; and it must restore to the parents so much of their
lost child as it lies in my power to give them. So, on my way, I made up
my mind to begin the copy at once by lamp-light, for it must be ready by
to-morrow night at latest.
“I hurried to my work-room, and my slave placed the picture on an easel,
while I welcomed my brother Philip who had come to see me, and who had
lighted a lamp, and of course had brought a book. He was so absorbed in
it that he did not observe that I had come in till I addressed him. Then
I told him whence I came and what had happened, and he thought it all
very strange and interesting.
“He was as usual rather hurried and hesitating, not quite clear,
but understanding it all. Then he began telling me something about a
philosopher who has just come to the front, a porter by trade, from whom
he had heard sundry wonders, and it was not till Syrus brought me in
a supper of oysters--for I could still eat nothing more solid--that he
asked to see the portrait.
“I pointed to the easel, and watched him; for the harder he is to
please, the more I value his opinion. This time I felt confident of
praise, or even of some admiration, if only for the beauty of the model.
“He threw off the veil from the picture with a hasty movement, but,
instead of gazing at it calmly, as he is wont, and snapping out his
sharp criticisms, he staggered backward, as though the noonday sun had
dazzled his sight. Then, bending forward, he stared at the painting,
panting as he might after racing for a wager. He stood in perfect
silence, for I know not how long, as though it were Medusa he was gazing
on, and when at last he clasped his hand to his brow, I called him by
name. He made no reply, but an impatient ‘Leave me alone!’ and then
he still gazed at the face as though to devour it with his eyes, and
without a sound.
“I did not disturb him; for, thought I, he too is bewitched by the
exquisite beauty of those virgin features. So we were both silent, till
he asked, in a choked voice: ‘And did you paint that? Is that, do you
say, the daughter that Seleukus has just lost?’
“Of course I said ‘Yes’; but then he turned on me in a rage, and
reproached me bitterly for deceiving and cheating him, and jesting with
things that to him were sacred, though I might think them a subject for
sport.
“I assured him that my answer was as earnest as it was accurate, and
that every word of my story was true.
“This only made him more furious. I, too, began to get angry, and as
he, evidently deeply agitated, still persisted in saying that my picture
could not have been painted from the dead Korinna, I swore to him
solemnly, with the most sacred oath I could think of, that it was really
so.
“On this he declared to me in words so tender and touching as I never
before heard from his lips, that if I were deceiving him his peace of
mind would be forever destroyed-nay, that he feared for his reason; and
when I had repeatedly assured him, by the memory of our departed mother,
that I had never dreamed of playing a trick upon him, he shook his head,
grasped his brow, and turned to leave the room without another word.”
“And you let him go?” cried Melissa, in anxious alarm.
“Certainly not,” replied the painter. “On the contrary, I stood in his
way, and asked him whether he had known Korinna, and what all this might
mean. But he would make no reply, and tried to pass me and get away. It
must have been a strange scene, for we two big men struggled as if
we were at a wrestling-match. I got him down with one hand behind his
knees, and so he had to remain; and when I had promised to let him go,
he confessed that he had seen Korinna at the house of her uncle, the
high-priest, without knowing who she was or even speaking a word to her.
And he, who usually flees from every creature wearing a woman’s robe,
had never forgotten that maiden and her noble beauty; and, though he did
not say so, it was obvious, from every word, that he was madly in love.
Her eyes had followed him wherever he went, and this he deemed a great
misfortune, for it had disturbed his power of thought. A month since he
went across Lake Mareotis to Polybius to visit Andreas, and while, on
his return, he was standing on the shore, he saw her again, with an old
man in white robes. But the last time he saw her was on the morning of
the very day when all this happened; and if he is to be believed, he not
only saw her but touched her hand. That, again, was by the lake; she was
just stepping out of the ferry-boat. The obolus she had ready to pay the
oarsman dropped on the ground, and Philip picked it up and returned
it to her. Then his fingers touched hers. He could feel it still, he
declared, and yet she had then ceased to walk among the living.
“Then it was my turn to doubt his word; but he maintained that his story
was true in every detail; he would hear nothing said about some one
resembling her, or anything of the kind, and spoke of daimons showing
him false visions, to cheat him and hinder him from working out his
investigations of the real nature of things to a successful issue. But
this is in direct antagonism to his views of daimons; and when at
last he rushed out of the house, he looked like one possessed of evil
spirits.
“I hurried after him, but he disappeared down a dark alley. Then I
had enough to do to finish my copy, and yesterday I carried it home to
Seleukus.
“Then I had time to look for Philip, but I could hear nothing of him,
either in his own lodgings or at the Museum. To-day I have been hunting
for him since early in the morning. I even forgot to lay any flowers
on my mother’s grave, as usual on the day of the Nekysia, because I was
thinking only of him. But he no doubt is gone to the city of the dead;
for, on my way hither, as I was ordering a garland in the flower-market,
pretty little Doxion showed me two beauties which she had woven for him,
and which he is presently to fetch. So he must now be in the Nekropolis;
and I know for whom he intends the second; for the door-keeper at
Seleukus’s house told me that a man, who said he was my brother, had
twice called, and had eagerly inquired whether my picture had yet been
attached to Korinna’s sarcophagus. The old man told him it had not,
because, of course, the embalming could not be complete as yet. But the
picture was to be displayed to-day, as being the feast of the dead, in
the hall of the embalmers. That was the plan, I know. So, now, child,
set your wise little woman’s head to work, and devise something by
which he may be brought to his senses, and released from these crazy
imaginings.”
“The first thing to be done,” Melissa exclaimed, “is to follow him
and talk to him.-Wait a moment; I must speak a word to the slaves. My
father’s night-draught can be mixed in a minute. He might perhaps return
home before us, and I must leave his couch--I will be with you in a
minute.”