50
CHANDOS,
her own in barter for the rank she held, for the things
of wealth that were about her, for the possessions of a
husband she scorned and hated. And m that moment
of weakness she would have given them all back tor
one hour of the love that she had lost.
CHAPTER III.
Under the deep leaves of Fontainebleau, in the heart
of the forest, in the golden pomp of early autumn,
when only a few trees were bronzed with the redden-
ing flush of the waning summer, there stood an antique
wooden building, half lodge, half chalet, all covered
with the quaint floral and faun carvings of the Moyen
Age and buried away beneath dense oak-boughs
and the dark spreading fans of sea-pines. It was old,
dark, fantastic, lonely; yet from under its low peaked
roof music was floating out like a Mass of Palestrma s
from within a chamber dark and tranquil as an oratory.
The musicians were seated in the glow of a western
afternoon sun, that shone all amber and crimson and
mellow throrrgh the open painted panes. They were
strangely dissimilar, yet bound together by one love—
their Art. The first was a grand old Roman, like a
picture of Bassano; the second a South German, with
a fair, delicate head, spiritualized and attenuated as
Schiller's: a third was a little, nut-brown, withered,
silent creature, ugly and uncouth as CaUban; the
leader was a cripple with whose name the world had
come to associate the most poetic and ethereal har-
monies that ever rebuked the fusts and the greed of its
passions and cares. They were often together, these
four brothers in art, and no jealousies ever stirred
amidst them, though they all served the same mistress;
three of them implicitly loved and implicitly followed
the fourth, though he never asked or thought ot
mastery, but was still humble in Ms great powers as a
child still thought the best that he could reach so poor
beside his dreams of excellence. The world treasured
his works, and paid lavishly with its gold for the
smallest fragment of his creations, the slightest and
the brief est of his poems of sound; but this brought
him no vanity, no self-adoration.    He worshipped his
tart too patiently, too perfectly, ever to think him-
self more than a poor interpreter, at his uttermost, ot
all the beauty that he knew was in her. Success makes
many men drunk as with the eating of the lotus-hly;
success only made Guido Lulli scorn himself that he
could not tell men better all the sublime things his art
taught him.
Their music filled the chamber with its glory, and
that glory flushed his face and lit his eyes as it had
always power to do, as the world had now seen it in
the moments of his triumphs, until it had learned to
know that the feeble visionary whom it called a fool
was higher and holier than it in all its stirring strength
and wealth. He roused to life the beating of its purer
heart; he led it towards God better than any priest or
creed. But he held himself throughout but an un-
worthy priest of the mighty hierarchy of melody; he
held himself but a feeble exponent of all the glory, un-
seen of men, that with his dreams was opened to hrm.
They thought and called him great; he knew himself
unwise and faint of utterance as a young child.
Against the casement leaned one whom the Hebrew
lad Agostino had likened in his youth to David of Israel
In the fulness of royalty, when the smile of women and
the sun of Palestine had their fairest light for the
golden-haired, golden-crowned king; whom the young
Tuscan Castalia had likened now to David when Ms
royalty still was with him, but when the treachery of
men had eaten into his soul, and the heat and burden
of battle darkened his sight, and the shadows of night
lengthened long in his path.
Chandos came here as men in the old monastic days
came, war-worn and combat-wearied, into the hush and
the majesty and the subdued color-glow of the abbey
sanctuaries, to leave their arms and their foes without
for a while and forgotten, and to lie down to rest for a
brief hour on the peaceful altars where in the silence
they remembered God.                                                .
He was changed—utterly changed; not so much m
his face or his form; the beauty with which nature had
dowered him so lavishly could not perish, except with
death itself; and though the brilliance, the careless-
ness the gay and cloudless light which had made
painters take him as the Sun-god were gone, the grave
and serene melancholy, the deep and weary tnought,
which were upon his features now shadowed them in-
deed, but gave them a yet higher, a yet grander cast:
it had the power of Lucretius; it had the weariness of
Milton. Dead in him forever, lost never again to be
recovered, were the brightness, the splendor, the
radiant and fearless lustre, of his early years: they had
been killed—killed by a merciless hand—and could no
more revive than the slaughtered can revive in their
tombs Yet not wholly had calamity conquered him;
and from the black depths into which misery had
thrust him to die like a drowned dog, he had risen with
a force of resistance that in some sense had wrung a
victory from the fate that sought to crush him.
In the old court of the Eue du Temple he had accepted
adversity, and lived for the sake of the honor of his
fathers, of the dignity of his manhood, of the heritage
of his genius. From that hour, though he had longed
as the tortured long for death many a time, he had
never swerved from the path he had taken ; in the arid,
lifeless, burning desert-waste around him he had gone on
resolute and unbeaten, wresting from its very loneliness
and barrenness the desert-gifts of strength and silence.
His nature was one to loathe the burden of existence,
unless existence were with every breath enjoyment;
yet when every breath was pain he bore with it as men
whose tempers were far stronger and more braced by
training might never have found ability to do—bore with
it for the sake of the loftier things, the prouder powers,
that would not die in him, and that naught except dis-
honor or his own will could slay.                  .
The little gold given for the silver collar had sufficed
to keep life in him a few days : when those were ended,
he had gone to the house at which the French editions
of his works had been produced, and asked the cMef s of
it simply for work. Perhaps he was greater when he
said that word than he had been in all the magnificence
of his joyous reign. The heads of the firm, generous
and scholarly men, touched to more pity than they
dared express (for so brief awhile ago they had known
him as the darling of the court circle, the idol of Paris
fashion and Paris aristocracy), eagerly gave what he
sought—classical work, which, though but the labors ot
routine and of compilation, still brought his thoughts
back perforce to the Greek studies that had over been
his best-beloved treasuries of meditation and of knowl-
edge. He labored for his bare subsistance—for Ms
d ay's maintenance ; but the exertion brought its reward.
It gave him time to breathe, to think, to collect his
efforts and his energies; for Ms intellect seemed dead,
and his thoughts numb. He wondered if it were true
that the world had told him so brief a time ago that he
had genius. Genius!—his very brain seemed dull as
lead, hot as flame. Yet he took the sheer laborious,
mechanical work, and he bent himself to it; he bound
his mind to the hard mental labor as a galley-slave is
chained to his oar; and he who had never known an
hour's toil spent day after day, month after month, in
the thankless unremitting mental travail. It brought
its recompense : his mind through it regained its balance,
his reason its tone; the compulsory exertion did for him
what nothing else could. It took him by degrees back
into that impersonal life which is the surest consolation
the world holds; it revived the lost tastes, it reopened
the deep scholarship, that even in his gayest years had
been one of his best-loved pursuits; it led him to take
refuge in those vast questions beside which the griefs
and joys of life alike are dwarfed—those resources of
the intellect which are the best companion and the
truest friend of one who has once known them and loved
them. In his past career he had never exerted all the
powers that nature had gifted him with; the very facil-
ity of his talents had prevented it, and brilliant trifles
had rather been their fruit than anything wider or
weightier. Now in the treasuries of study and in the
solace of composition he alike found a career and a
hope, an ambition and a consolation.
The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him
to fathom the depths of his own attainments. He had
in Jm the gifts of a Goethe; but itwas only under
adversity that these reached their stature and bore
their fruit.                                                                      ,
When the world had forgotten for some years, or, if
it ever remembered Mm, thought he had killed himself,
it learned this suddenly and with amazement. His
name once more became public—never popular, but
something much higher. He was condemned, reviled,
wondered at, called many bitter names; but Ms
thoughts were heard, and had their harvest. Aristo-
cratic as his tastes were, and proud though he had
been termed, he had always had much that was demo-
cratic in his opinions; for he had ever measured men
by their minds, not their stations; such freedom was
in his works, and they had done that for which the
song of the Venetten youths had thanked him. Against
much antagonism, and slowly in the course of time, he
won fame. Riches he never made; h~ was poor still;
but he was nearer the fulfilment of the promise of his
childhood now, when the chief sum of the world was
against him, than in the days of his prosperity, when
the whole world lay at Ms feet. Happiness he had not :
it could be with no man who had such losses ever in Ms
memory as his; but some peace came to him; a great
and a pure ambition was his companion and his con-
soler, and a grander element was woven in his charac-
ter than fair fortune would have ever brought to light.
England he never saw. The intercession of his rela-
tions or his acquaintance might with ease have pro-
cured him affluent sinecures; but he would have held
it degredation deep as shame to have taken them. His
cousin of Castlemaine once wrote and offered one; he
simply declined it. By hisnown folly his ruin had been
wrought; by his own labor alone would he repel it and
endeavor to repair it. He accepted poverty, and lived
in exile, associating with many of the greatest thinkers
of Europe; but into the pale of the fashionable world
he had once led he never wandered, and in the palaces
in which he had once been the idol of all eyes he was
never seen, "he friends of that past time knew of him
indeed by the intellectual renown that he had won, but
it was very rarely that they looked upon his face.
Cynic he could not grow; he did not curse the world
because to him it had been base: he believed in noble
lives and staunch fidelities, though treachery had tre-
panned and love abandoned Mm. The bitterness of
Timon could have no lodging with him: but an un-
speakable weariness often came on Mm.
He had lost so much; and one loss—that of Claren-
cieux—gnawed ever at his heart with an unceasing
pang. There were times when he longed for his per-
ished happiness with the passion with which an exile
longs for the light of his native suns.
He listened now to the melodies that filled the
chamber. Lulli's was the sole life wliich had been
faithful to him, save that of the dog, buried now,
under Sicilian orange-boughs, in the grave to which
old age had banished it, but lamented and remem-
bered with more justice than many a human friend
is regretted and mourned. The music, a new opera-
overture of the Provencal's, closed with its .noblest
harmonies, reeling- through the air Uke a young Bacchus
ivy-crowned. Then it stayed suddenly, the hands that
drew out its charmed sounds pausing as if moved by
one impulse; three of them bowed their heads. "It will
be great," they said, reverently, adding no other word,
and went their way silently and left the chamber.
Guido Lulli was alone with Ms guest. The victorious
radiance, the sovereignty in his own realms, that had
been on him as he called out to existence the supremacy
of his own creations, faded into the hesitating, doubting
hope of a child who seeks the praise of a voice he loves.
" And you, ' monseigneur?" he said, appeaUngly.
" Can you say, too, it will be great?"
Chandos lifted his head.
" You ask me, LulU? The world has long told you,
and truly, that you can give it nothing that is not so.
You surpass yourself here; it will be noble music—
nobler even than anything of yours."
The eye of the cripple beamed. The world had long
crowned him with the Delphica laurus, yet he still
came with the humility of a child to receive the laurel
he loved best in the words of his old master.
" The world may have told me, monseigneur, but
that were nothing unless you spoke also. What would
the world have ever known or heeded of me without
your aid? Known of me, do I say? It is not that I
heed; it is my works. I shall pass away, but they will
endure; my body will go to corruption, but they will
have immortality. I thank God and you, not the
world, that what is great in me will not perish with
what is weak and vile."
"I understand you; others might not," answered
Chandos, as he looked at the delicate kindling face of
the only man who had given him back fidelity and
gratitude—a face that time had changed in so little,
save in the white threads that gleamed among the
dark masses of hair. "Men prostitute their'genius now,
as the courtesan her beauty; they think little—think
nothing—of impersonal things. Hypocrisy pays ; they
supply it. Were blasphemy the better investment, they
would trade in it. You are fortunate in one thing; you
speak in a language that cannot be cavilled at or mis-
understood,"
" But deaf ears were turned to it till, through you,
the disbelievers listened."
"Hush! Let the dead bury their dead. I do not look
back ; I wish that no one should. ' '
" But I cannot forget! Such debts as mine are not
scored out."                                                                    _
" In your nature. Yet I served many more than I
servedyou.   You are the only one who remembers it."
He spoke without bitterness; but the words were the
more profoundly sad because there was no taint of
acrid feeling in them. Lulli glanced at Mm with an
anxious reverence. Though he was famous now in his;
own art, and though wealth or what seemed so to Ms
simple tastes and needs, had come to him with the
applause of cities and the praise of princes and the
renown of nations for Ms music, he felt to Chandos the
same fond faithful loyalty and veneration as when he
had been a dying boy on the bleak hills of Spain. Im
truth the more he gained from the world's recognition,,
the more his gratitude found to owe.
"You served so many! yes," he said, with a vibra-
tion of such passion as had used to move him with a
sudden vehemence when he thought of his lost Valeria.
"And they were curs who tore down one by whom they
had been fed—one whom they had fawned on for a-
word of notice ! The vilest of them all, what is he now?
High in honor among men."
A darkness passed over his listener's face, a gloom
like night, yet a disdain as strong as it was silent—such,
a look as might come upon the face of a man who saw
one whom he knew assassin and traitor courted and
adored by the people.
"Ah! give him you scorn now. One day you shau-
give him your vengeance]" cried the musician, with
that passionate desire of revenge which he could never,
under any wrongs, have known on his own behalf, but
which he had felt for Valeria, and which he felt for
Chandos.
Chandos' head drooped slightly where he sat, and'
into his eyes came the shadows of a thousand bitter
memories.                               ,    ,
" Perhaps," he said, under his breath.
The evil tempted him ; if ever it passed into his hands,,
its widest exercise could be no more than justice. In
his dark hours there were times when no other thing
looked worth the living for, or worth the seeking,
except this—vengeance upon his traitor.
Lulli gazed at him regretfully and with self-reproach;
he had not meant to stir these deep-closed poisonous
pools of deadly recollections; he had not meant to
recall a past that was, by a command he obeyed with
the docile obedience of a dog, never named between
them. His music was, to the man he honored, as the
music of the young Israelite was to the soul of the
great stricken king whom men forsook and God aban.
doned. His conscience and his love alike smote him for
having jarred on these forbidden chords and wrought
harm instead of bringing consolation.
He leaned forward and his voice was infinitely sweet.
" Forgive me. You have loved truth and served men
through all, despite all; it is not to you that I should
talk of such a tiger's lust as vengeance, though ven-
geance there were righteous. If they had not driven
you from your paradise, would you ever have been
your greatest? If you had not been forced from your
rose-gardens out into the waste of the desert, would
you ever have known your strength? Till you ceased
to enjoy, you were ignorant how to endure."
The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the
food on which men grow to their fullest stature; the
waters of bitterness are the debatable ford through
which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes
boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the
price that must be paid for the golden fruit of knowl-
edge. The swimmer cannot tell his strength till he
has gone through the wild force of opposing waves;
the great man cannot tell the might of his hand and
the power of Ms resistance till he has wrestled with the
angel of adversity and held it cloce till it has blessed
him.
Still, the thought will arise, Is the knowledge worth
its purchase? Is it not better to lie softly in the Ught
of laughing suns than to pass through the blackness
of the salt sea-storm out of pity for men who will revile
the pursuit of a phantom goal, that may be but a
mirage when all is over?
This thought was with him now.
" God knows!" he said, " Do not speak against my
golden days ; they were very dear to me. I think I was
a better man in them than I have ever been in my exile.
A happy life—a life that knows and gives happiness as
the sunlight; it cannot last on earth, maybe, but it is
life as no other is, while it does." .
Lulli was silent. The yearning regret that uncon-
sciously escaped in the reply pierced him to tho heart,
even though he, to whom existence had been one long
spell of physical pain, and to whom all strength ana
joy were unknown, could but dimly feel all that the-
man who spoke to him looked back to with so passion-
ate a longing.
" The revellers in Florence," he murmured, softly,,
" had delight and gladness, and made of life an un-
broken festa, while Danfro was in exile. Who thinks of
them now?—even of their names? But on his door is
written, ' Qui nacqui il divino Poeta.' "
Chandos rose with a smile—a smile in which there
was a weariness beyond words.
"A tardy and an empty recompense! While they
write on his door to-day, reviling those who were blind
in his generation, they repeat in their own times the
blindness, and the persecution to free thought, by
which the poet and the thinker suffered then and suffer
still."
Throughout the years which had gone by since the
fall of his high estate, no lamentation, no recrimination,
had ever been heard to pass his lips. When the tidings
floated to him of success piled on success that his
enemy and his traitor achieved, he Ustened in silence,
too proud to condemn what was beneath envy and be-
yond vengeance. Men sought oftentimes to make him
speak of the past and speak of Trevenna; they never
succeeded. He held his peace, keeping patience with
a force of control which amazed and bewildered those
who had known him as an effeminate, serf-indulged
voluptuary, and had looked from him for a suicide's
story, or, at best, for a bitter upbraiding of the curse of
fate. They never heard a word from him either of re-
gret at his own ruin or of anger at his debtor's success.
He endured in as absolute a silence as ever an Indian-
endured when bound to the pyre. To two only, two
who alone remained to him out of the throngs who had
once thought no honor higher than to claim his friend-
ship, did he ever syeak, either of his fate or of his too»