One afternoon, when people thronged the great cemetery of the city, a
strolling group were held fascinated by the unique loveliness of a newly
created monument.
"Never," they exclaimed, "have we seen so exquisite a masterpiece. In
whose honour is it erected?"
But when they drew nearer, they found carved on it simply a woman's
name.
"Who was she?" they asked, puzzled and disappointed. "Is there no
epitaph?"
"Ay," spoke up a young man lying on the grass and eagerly watching the
spectators. "Ay, a very fitting epitaph."
"Where is it?"
"Carved on the heart of the monument!" he cried, in a tone of triumph.
"On the heart of the monument? Then we cannot see it."
"It is not meant to be seen."
"How do _you_ know of it?"
"I made the monument."
"Then tell us what it is."
"It cannot be told. It is there only because it is unknown."
"Out on you! You play your pranks with the living and the dead."
"You will live to regret this day," said a thoughtful bystander. "You
have tampered with the memory of the dead."
"Why, look you, good people," cried Nicholas, springing up and
approaching his beautiful master-work. He rested one hand lovingly
against it and glanced around him pale with repressed excitement, as
though a long-looked-for moment had at length arrived. "I play no pranks
with the living or the dead. Young as I am, I have fashioned many
monuments, as this cemetery will testify. But I make no more. This is my
last; and as it is the last, so it is the greatest. For I have fashioned
it in such love and sorrow for her who lies beneath it as you can never
know. If it is beautiful, it is yet an unworthy emblem of that brief and
transporting beauty which was hers; and I have planted it here beside
her grave, that as a delicate white flower it may exhale the perfume of
her memory for centuries to come.
"Tell me," he went on, his lips trembling, his voice faltering with the
burden of oppressive hope--"tell me, you who behold it now, do you not
wed her memory deathlessly to it? To its fair shape, its native and
unchanging purity?"
"Ay," they interrupted impatiently. "But the epitaph?"
"Ah!" he cried, with tenderer feeling, "beautiful as the monument is to
the eye, it would be no fit emblem of her had it not something sacred
hidden within. For she was not lovely to the sense alone, but had a
perfect heart. So I have placed within the monument that which is its
heart, and typifies hers. And, mark you!" he cried, in a voice of such
awful warning that those standing nearest him instinctively shrank back,
"the one is as inviolable as the other. No more could you rend the heart
from the human bosom than this epitaph from the monument. My deep and
lasting curse on him who attempts it! For I have so fitted the parts of
the work together, that to disunite would be to break them in pieces;
and the inscription is so fragile and delicately poised within, that so
much as rudely to jar the monument would shiver it to atoms. It is put
there to be inviolable. Seek to know it, you destroy it. This I but
create after the plan of the Great Artist, who shows you only the fair
outside of His masterpieces. What human eye ever looked into the
mysterious heart of His beautiful--that heart which holds the secret of
inexhaustible freshness and eternal power? Could this epitaph have been
carved on the outside, you would have read it and forgotten it with
natural satiety. But uncomprehended, what a spell I mark it exercises!
You will--nay, you _must_--remember it for ever! You will speak of it
to others. They will come. And thus in ever-widening circle will be
borne afar the memory of her whose name is on it, the emblem of whose
heart is hidden within. And what more fitting memorial could a man rear
to a woman, the pure shell of whose beauty all can see, the secret of
whose beautiful being no one ever comprehends?"
He walked rapidly away, then, some distance off, turned and looked back.
More spectators had come up. Some were earnestly talking, pointing now
to the monument, now towards him. Others stood in rapt contemplation of
his master-work.
Tears rose to his eyes. A look of ineffable joy overspread his face.
"O my love!" he murmured, "I have triumphed. Death has claimed your
body, heaven your spirit; but the earth claims the saintly memory of
each. This day about your name begins to grow the Legend of the
Beautiful."
The sun had just set. The ethereal white shape of the monument stood
outlined against a soft background of rose-coloured sky. To his
transfiguring imagination it seemed lifted far into the cloud-based
heavens, and the evening star, resting above its apex, was a celestial
lamp lowered to guide the eye to it through the darkness of the
descending night.