The Emperor — Complete. Georg Ebers
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as his neck would allow, looking, with his hooked nose, like a vulture that strives to descry his distant prey-cast his eyes down, raised them again to take in something fresh, and after a long gaze looked down again while his fingers and nails moved over the surface of the wax-figure, sinking into the plastic material, applying new pieces to apparently complete portions, removing others with a decided nip and rounding them off with bewildering rapidity to use them for a fresh purpose.
He seemed to be seized with cramp in his hands, but still under his knotted brow his eye shone earnest, resolute and calm, and yet full of profound and speechless inspiration. Selene had said not a word that permitted his using her as a model; but, as if his enthusiasm was infectious, she remained motionless, and when, as he worked, his gaze met hers she could detect the stern earnestness which at this moment possessed her eager companion.
Neither of them opened their lips for some time. At last he stood back from his work, stooping low to look first at Selene and then at his statuette with keen examination from head to foot; and then, drawing a deep breath, and rubbing the wax over with his finger, he said:
“There, that is how it must go! Now I will wet your father’s handkerchief and then we can go on again. If you are tired you can rest.”
She availed herself but little of this permission and presently he began work again. As he proceeded carefully to replace some folds of her drapery which had fallen out of place, she moved her foot as if to draw back, but he begged her earnestly to stand still and she obeyed his request.
Pollux now used his fingers and modelling tools more calmly; his gaze was less wistful and he began to talk again.
“You are very pale,” he said. “To be sure the lamp-light and a sleepless night have something to do with it.”
“I look just the same by daylight, but I am not ill.”
“I thought Arsinoe would have been like your mother, but now I see many features of her face in yours again. The oval of their form is the same and, in both, the line of the nose runs almost straight to the forehead; you have her eyes and the same bend of the brow, but your mouth is smaller and more sharply cut, and she could hardly have made such a heavy knot of her hair. I fancy, too, that yours is lighter than hers.”
“As a girl she must have had still more hair, and perhaps she may have been as fair as I was—I am brown now.”
“Another thing you inherit from her is that your hair, without being curly, lies upon your head in such soft waves.”
“It is easy to keep in order.”
“Are not you taller than she was?”
“I fancy so, but as she was stouter she looked shorter. Will you soon have done?”
“You are getting tired of standing?”
“Not very.”
“Then have a little more patience. Your face reminds me more and more of our early years; I should be glad to see Arsinoe once more. I feel at this moment as if time had moved backwards a good piece. Have you the same feeling?”
Selene shook her head.
“You are not happy?”
“No.”
“I know full well that you have very heavy duties to perform for your age.”
“Things go as they may.”
“Nay, nay. I know you do not let things go haphazard. You take care of your brothers and sisters like a mother.”
“Like a mother!” repeated Selene, and she smiled a bitter negative.
“Of course a mother’s love is a thing by itself, but your father and the little ones have every reason to be satisfied with yours.”
“The little ones are perhaps, and Helios who is blind, but Arsinoe does what she can.”
“You certainly are not content, I can hear it in your voice, and you used formerly to be as merry and happy as your sister, though perhaps not so saucy.”
“Formerly—”
“How sadly that sounds! And yet you are handsome, you are young, and life lies before you.”
“But what a life!”
“Well, what?” asked the sculptor, and taking his hands from his work he looked ardently at the fair pale girl before him and cried out fervently:
“A life which might be full of happiness and satisfied affection.”
The girl shook her head in negation and answered coldly:
“ ‘Love is joy,’ says the Christian woman who superintends us at work in the papyrus factory, and since my mother died I have had no love. I enjoyed all my share of happiness once for all in my childhood, now I am content if only we are spared the worst misfortunes. Otherwise I take what each day brings, because I can not do otherwise. My heart is empty, and if I ever feel anything keenly, it is dread. I have long since ceased to expect any thing good of the future.”
“Girl!” exclaimed Pollux. “Why, what has been happening to you? I do not understand half of what you are saying. How came you in the papyrus factory?”
“Do not betray me,” begged Selene. “If my father were to hear of it.”
“He is asleep, and what you confide to me no one will ever hear of again.”
“Why should I conceal it? I go every day with Arsinoe for two hours to the manufactory, and we work there to earn a little money.”
“Behind your father’s back?”
“Yes, he would rather that we should starve than allow it. Every day I feel the same loathing for the deceit; but we could not get on without it, for Arsinoe thinks of nothing but herself, plays draughts with my father, curls his hair, plays with the children as if they were dolls, but it is my part to take care of them.”
“And you, you say, have no share of love. Happily no one believes you, and I least of all. Only lately my mother was telling me about you, and I thought you were a girl who might turn out just such a wife as a woman ought to be.”
“And now?”
“Now, I know it for certain.”
“You may be mistaken.”
“No, no! your name is Selene, and you are as gentle as the kindly moonlight; names, even, have their significance.”
“And my blind brother who has never even seen the light is called Helios!” answered the girl.
Pollux had spoken with much warmth, but Selene’s last words startled him and checked the effervescence of his feelings. Finding he did not answer her bitter exclamation, she said, at first coolly, but with increasing warmth:
“You are beginning to believe me, and you are right, for what I do for the children is not done out of love, or out of kindness, or because I set their welfare above my own. I have inherited my father’s pride, and it would be odious to me if my brothers and sisters went about in rags, and people thought we were as poor and helpless as we really are. What is most horrible to me is sickness in the house, for that increases the anxiety I always feel and swallows up my last coin; the children must not perish for want of it. I do not want to make myself out worse than I am; it grieves me too to see them drooping. But nothing that I do brings me happiness—at most it moderates my fears. You ask what I am afraid of?—of everything, everything that can happen to me, for I have no reason to look forward to anything good. When there is a knock, it may be a creditor; when people look at Arsinoe in the street, I seem to see dishonor lurking round her; when my father acts against the advice of the physician I feel as if we were standing already roofless in the open street. What is there that I can do with a happy mind? I certainly am not idle, still I envy the woman who can sit with her hands in her lap and be waited on by slaves, and if a