The hour had passed when any one was likely to enter his shop. A few
rays of pale sunlight, straggling in through crevices of the door,
rested like a dying halo on the heads of the monumental figures grouped
around. Shadows, creeping upward from the ground, shrouded all else in
thin, penetrable half-gloom, through which the stark gray emblems of
mortality sent forth more solemn suggestions. A sudden sense of the
earthly tragedy overwhelmed him. The chisel and the hammer dropped from
his hands and, resting his head on the block he had been carving, he
gave himself up to that mood of dim, distant reverie in which the soul
seems to soar and float far above the shock and din of the world's
disturbing nearness. On his all but oblivious ear, like the faint
washings of some remote sea, beat the waves of the city's tide-driven
life in the streets outside. The room itself seemed hushed to the awful
stillness of the high aerial spaces. Then all at once this stillness
was broken by a voice, low, clear, and tremuluous, saying close to his
ear:
"Are you the maker of gravestones?"
"That is my sad calling," he cried, bitterly, starting up with
instinctive forebodings.
He saw before him a veiled figure. To support herself, she rested one
hand on the block he had been carving, while she pressed the other
against her heart, as though to stifle pain.
"Whose monument is this?"
"A neglected poet's who died not long ago. Soon, perhaps, I shall be
making one for an old soldier, and one for a holy man, whose soul, I
hear, is about to be dismissed."
"Are not some monuments sadder to make than others?"
"Aye, truly."
"What is the saddest you ever made?"
"The saddest monument I ever made was one for a poor mother who had
lost her only son. One day a woman came in who had no sooner entered
than she sat down and gave way to a passionate outburst of grief."
"'My good woman,' I said, 'why do you weep so bitterly?'
"'Do not call me good,' she moaned, and hid her face.
"I then perceived her fallen character. When she recovered self-control
she drew from her sinful bosom an old purse filled with coins of
different values.
"'Why do you give me this?' I asked.
"'It is to pay for a monument for my son,' she said, and the storm of
her grief swept over her again.
"I learned that for years she had toiled and starved to hoard up a sum
with which to build a monument to his memory, for he had never failed
of his duty to her after all others had cast her out. Certainly he
had his reward, not in the monument, but in the repentance which came
to her after his death. I have never seen such sorrow for evil as the
memory of his love wrought in her. For herself she desired only that
the spot where she should be buried might be unknown. This longing to
be forgotten has led me to believe that none desire to be remembered
for the evil that is in them, but only for some truth, or beauty,
or goodness by which they have linked their individual lives to the
general life of the race. Even the lying epitaphs in cemeteries prove
how we would fain have the dead arrayed on the side of right in the
thoughts of their survivors. This wretched mother and human outcast,
believing herself to have lost everything that makes it well to be
remembered, craved only the mercy of forgetfulness."
"And yet I think she died a Christian soul."
"You knew her, then?"
"I was with her in her last hours. She told me her story. She told me
also of you, and that you would accept nothing for the monument you
were at such care to make. It is perhaps for this reason that I have
felt some desire to see you, and that I am here now to speak with you
of--"
A shudder passed over her.
"After all, that was not a sad, but a joyous monument to fashion," she
added, abruptly.
"Aye, it was joyous. But to me the joyous and the sad are much allied
in the things of this life."
"And yet there might be one monument wholly sad, might there not?"
"There might be, but I know not whose it would be."
"If she you love should die, would not hers be so?"
"Until I love, and she I love is dead, I cannot know," said Nicholas,
smiling.
"What builds the most monuments?" she asked, quickly, as though to
retreat from her levity.
"Pride builds many--splendid ones. Gratitude builds some, forgiveness
some, and pity some. But faith builds more than these, though often
poor, humble ones; and love!--love builds more than all things else
together."
"And what, of all things that monuments are built in memory of, is most
loved and soonest forgotten?" she asked, with intensity.
"Nay, I cannot tell that."
"Is it not a beautiful woman? This, you say, is the monument of a poet.
After the poet grows old, men love him for the songs he sang; they love
the old soldier for the battles he fought, and the preacher for his
remembered prayers. But a woman! Who loves her for the beauty she once
possessed, or rather regards her not with the more distaste? Is there
in history a figure so lonely and despised as that of the woman who,
once the most beautiful in the world, crept back into her native land a
withered hag? Or, if a woman die while she is yet beautiful, how long
is she remembered? Her beauty is like heat and light--powerful only for
those who feel and see it."
But Nicholas had scarcely heard her. His eyes had become riveted upon
her hand, which rested on the marble, as white as though grown out of
it under the labors of his chisel.
"My lady," he said, with the deepest respect, "will you permit me to
look at your hand? I have carved many a one in marble, and studied many
a one in life; but never have I seen anything so beautiful as yours."
He took it with an artist's impetuosity and bent over it, laying its
palm against one of his own and stroking it softly with the other. The
blood leaped through his heart, and he suddenly lifted it to his lips.
"God only can make the hand beautiful," he said.
Displaced by her arm which he had upraised, the light fabric that had
concealed her figure parted on her bosom and slipped to the ground.
His eyes swept over the perfect shape that stood revealed. The veil
still concealed her face. The strangely mingled emotions that had
been deepening within him all this time now blended themselves in one
irrepressible wish.
"Will you permit me to see your face?"
She drew quickly back. A subtle pain was in his voice as he cried:
"Oh, my lady? I ask it as one who has pure eyes for the beautiful."
"My face belongs to my past. It has been my sorrow; it is nothing now."
"Only permit me to see it!"
"Is there no other face you would rather see?"
Who can fathom the motive of a woman's questions?
"None, none!"
She drew aside her veil, and her eyes rested quietly on his like a
revelation. So young she was as hardly yet to be a woman, and her
beauty had in it that seraphic purity and mysterious pathos which
is never seen in a woman's face until the touch of another world
has chastened her spirit into the resignation of a saint. The heart
of Nicholas was wrung by the sight of it with a sudden sense of
inconsolable loss and longing.
"Oh, my lady!" he cried, sinking on one knee and touching his lips to
her hand with greater gentleness. "Do you indeed think the beauty of a
woman so soon forgotten? As long as I live, yours will be as fresh in
my memory as it was the moment after I first saw it in its perfection
and felt its power."
"Do not recall to me the sorrow of such thoughts." She touched her
heart. "My heart is a tired hour-glass. Already the sands are well-nigh
run through. Any hour it may stop, and then--out like a light!
Shapeless ashes! I have loved life well, but not so well that I have
not been able to prepare to leave it."
She spoke with the utmost simplicity and calmness, yet her eyes were
turned with unspeakable sadness towards the shadowy recesses of the
room, where from their pedestals the monumental figures looked down
upon her as though they would have opened their marble lips and said,
"Poor child! Poor child!"
"I have had my wish to see you and to see this place. Before long some
one will come here to have you carve a monument to the most perishable
of all things. Like the poor mother who had no wish to be remembered--"
Nicholas was moved to the deepest.
"I have but little skill," he said. "The great God did not bestow on
me the genius of his favorite children of sculpture. But if so sad and
sacred a charge should ever become mine, with his help I will rear such
a monument to your memory that as long as it stands none who see it
will ever be able to forget you. Year after year your memory shall grow
as a legend of the beautiful."
When she was gone he sat self-forgetful until the darkness grew
impenetrable. As he groped his way out at last along the thick
guide-posts of death, her voice seemed to float towards him from every
head-stone, her name to be written in every epitaph.
The next day a shadow brooded over the place. Day by day it deepened.
He went out to seek intelligence of her. In the quarter of the city
where she lived he discovered that her name had already become a
nucleus around which were beginning to cluster many little legends of
the beautiful. He had but to hear recitals of her deeds of kindness
and mercy. For the chance of seeing her again he began to haunt the
neighborhood; then, having seen her, he would return to his shop the
victim of more unavailing desire. All things combined to awake in him
that passion of love whose roots are nourished in the soul's finest
soil of pity and hopelessness. Once or twice, under some pretext, he
made bold to accost her; and once, under the stress of his passion,
he mutely lifted his eyes, confessing his love; but hers were turned
aside.
Meantime he began to dream of the monument he chose to consider she had
committed to his making. It should be the triumph of his art; but more,
it would represent in stone the indissoluble union of his love with her
memory. Through him alone would she enter upon her long after-life of
saint-like reminiscence.
When the tidings of her death came, he soon sprang up from the
prostration of his grief with a burning desire to consummate his
beloved work.
"Year after year your memory shall grow as a legend of the beautiful."
These words now became the inspiration of his masterpiece. Day and
night it took shape in the rolling chaos of his sorrow. What sculptor
in the world ever espoused the execution of a work that lured more
irresistibly from their hiding-places the shy and tender ministers of
his genius? What one ever explored with greater boldness the utmost
limits of artistic expression, or wrought in sterner defiance of the
laws of our common forgetfulness?