"O 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.
"O 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 wellnigh
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 favourite 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
neighbourhood; 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?