The man who is miserable is also the man who is happy. He is, in fact, the only man who is really happy. A man may not reap till he has first ploughed. No one can undertand joy till he has first felt misery. Nature seems to be a vulgar commercial shopkeeper. All things seem to have a price. There are a few men, however, who are so formed that they are sometimes able to get a little happiness, or at least pleasure, in advance of payment; on credit, as it were. But then, when these men come to pay for it, they have to pay such enormous interest that they are ruined.
Then there are other men who come to their full estate and fortune with the ruddy hue of youth on their faces and full of sunhine in their hearts. No, no! these men have not suffered, neither have they enjoyed. They are children still. You may follow this idea down till you come to a stone standing placid and stlll, and always serene and peaceful, but in the form and expression of a man; and this form of a man, this stone, has not suffered at all.
Fire in the eye and furrows on the face. Let these things come when they may, they have their meaning. A man may crowd forty years into forty days and nights of his impetuous life, if he be large enough of soul to hold them, and may die an old man at thirty.
Nature keeps her own books and bapismal records, and all that, herself. It would be interesting if we could sometimes manage to have her books and man's compared. We should be startled at the discrepancies.
Well, let no man murmur, or woman weep, in vain. The storm is only the prophet and forerunner of fair weather. The peaants know perfectly well that they are going to have a warm and an early spring when they have had a hard and unhappy winter. If a pendulum swings far to the left, it must swing just exactly as far to the right when it returns. All things are pretty evenly balanced. The law of compensation is exact and unalterable. The great store of Nature is indeed a big, vulgar shop. You must pay for everything you get. And what is very interesting to know is the fact that the peasant has just as much of Nature's currency in his pocket as the prince.
Murietta had been doing a large business in this line from the first. From the very first he had felt and suffered much. Standing on a peak of the Cordilleras when still a boy, with the sun and wind of the Pacific in his yellow hair, he had dared to question why he had been born. Said somone, revelations never go backward. Ask this question, and sometimes the answer may come to you when you are tired and want to rest. Then you cannot rest.
When you are suffering intensely you can safely say to yourself, "I am heaping up money, I am putting it in the bank of Nature, and some day it will all be paid back with interest."
But now it seemed to Murietta as he sat there so perfectly full of calm delight, that there never any more could be even the breath of a storm.
His roses in the road, in the path of the strangers who followed had been bread upon the waters.
He did not say one word when she told this. He did not even look at her, for fear of he knew not what. He did not speak or answer her, or even lift his eyes to look at her. He was satisfied. It was enough.
Now, for the first time, he liked Naples. He even was certain that he loved Naples and all her motley wretched people. He liked all Italy and all the people of Italy; the beggarly princes of the old Jew quarter of Rome, and the princely beggars on the Spanish steps. He loved them all. For had not she said she liked Italy, and was not that enough? He was willing — he wished to be blind. He wanted henceorth to see only through her eyes.
Murietta did. not dare remain long in her presence. In fact, for all that he had thought and said and felt, he had been before her but a very few minutes. But, such minutes! They were bricks of gold. They were great big bank notes that Nature had handed him, and bade him go and take a glorious holiday.
The good old commander came down from out his cloud of battle smoke as the artist rose to say good day, and in a dreamy and indistinct way said something of wishing to see this young man at his own house; and then, to the unutterable delight of Murietta, Annette took up the tangled thread and laid it straight and made its meaning intelligible by means of dates and numbers and names on a card which she now got from the dreamy old commander, who had gone back to ride on his battle cloud; and then, by means of a pencil and a few bold clear words in a hand as clear and strong as if it might hold and control a world of its own, she blazed out the future path of the artist's mind for many and many a day.
She had simply written the day, or evenng, in which her house was open and they were all at home. But this to him was more than all the wealth of banks, than all the world beside.
Poor deluded boy, self-deluded! He did not know, he did not think, could not think, that she had said nothing, done nohing whatever that she might not have said and done to any one, even the most humble and least favoured in all that house.
Then he retreated from her presence, and found the good secretary hidden away in a comer where the light would not fall too heavily on his clothes, and then, turning to the good Mother Bunch, they bowed themelves away, and were gone.
Down the corkscrew steps, and down and down, and around and around and around. Murietta laughed as he descended, and he knew not why he laughed. His heart was so full of happiness that it jostled and spilled over and on to the steps as they made their unsteady descent.
"We have been up in heaven," he said to the good secretary, as they shook hands at the great portal, and then turned and gave to the beggars who crowded around, all the money he could find in his pockets.
"Ha! ha! A pretty figure that," laughed the secretary, as he said good-bye "a figure that might be used by a novelist. It was indeed heaven, and like heaven it was very hard to attain. Let us hope that we have not descended into hell." And so saying the novelist and secretary bowed very low, and then waving his hand went on his way.
The artist again stood alone in the street, but he did not feel alone. If all the hundreds of millions who have laid down and died in Rome, who have made the very roads and streets, even the soil of Rome for many feet deep out of their dust, had risen up, he could not have felt more in the preence of, and in sympathy with, his kind.
It is a bad sign if you feel lonesome in a city. And yet it is no uncommon feeling. And, too, if a man does feel lonesome in a city he feels it terribly. There is no man so lonesome as a man who is lonesome in a crowd.
This man was not a bit exalted. He gave away all his money to beggars. He could have taken the little urchin, clad in sheepskin even in summer, who ran by his side and asked for a sou, into his arms and kissed him, yet when he saw Carlton coming down the street on his way to the popular and populous Greco, he turned up a court and escaped him.
Why had he done this? He did not know. Perhaps he did not wish to speak to him? Possibly he was offended with him? Not so. He could not have shaped the reason into expression, or have given it uterance. But the truth is, he felt that this day was sacred. It was to him a holy day. He felt that it would be profanity to speak. He wanted to think, to dream, to drift. He did not want to speak to Carlton, because he wanted to think of Annette.
And now that he was happy, he did not stop to think that this would end some day. He felt that henceforward he should for ever walk on in the sun. It seemed to him just as if it would never be night any more in figure or in fact. His soul was didfting away into and over a great sea of light that knew not any shore. How could he then think of shore, or shipwreck, or anything that had a dark side or any disaster in it?
There are three things, at least, in art worth seeing in Rome, outside the Vatican. One of these, possibly the first, is the Dying Gladiator. Then there is the Moses of Michael Angelo, out in the rich old church near the Coliseum.
It is an ugly figure, with horns on its head. It sits there right before you as if it had come down from some high place to get close to you, and appeal to you, and absorb you into its awful self. It sits there lifting its wrinkled brows all day to God.
That figure seems as full of life, of husanded strength, of suppressed power, as the Nile when flowing dark and full of flood, and lapping the topmost limit of its stony embankment.
Whatever you may be, standing before this awful form of deified man, be you Papist, Protestant, or Jew or Pagan, you feel somehow that from out of a man like that, and only that, there could have flowed a stream and tide of people with all their laws and ceremonies intact — even from this fountain head before you, sitting there with all the sad majesty and desolation of Sinai in the desert, that should flow on for ever to the eternal sea.
The third and last, if it is not the first, is a little face thrown back over the shoulder, looking at you from under the careless brown hair, with the lips half parted as if she had a story to tell and you were bound to stand there and look and listen and listen and look till you made out all the story yourself.
Murietta went and stood before this picture, and alone. Whenever any one with a red book, who had the good taste to find the little treasure on the walls of the Barbarini Palace, would stop before the sad face of the Cenci, he would pass on a moment, and only a moment, until the disppointed visitor shrugged his shoulders, shut up his book as if disgusted with the laudations heaped upon this little picture, and then he would return.
There he stood and listened and listened and stood and watched the light come and go from the great sad eyes; watched the blood flow and fall and pulsate! through the neck; watched the parted lips till the soul seemed passing through them, and then the sun was down, and the story was finished. He knew her now, and all her awful sorrows. Their souls stood close together. Lawless and terrible both of these, and mighty for good or ill.
How singular it is that all beautiful things are sad! Every great face seems to be a flood gate of tears that is about to burst. This face of the Cenci is so, the Moses of Angelo is so; the face of the Gladiator would be so only that he is a soldier, and is weeping blood.