A Thorny Path — Complete. Georg Ebers
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dried his tears, he said, in so melancholy and subdued a tone that the angry blusterer was scarcely recognizable: “There—leave me alone; it will soon be over. I will finish this gem to-morrow, and then I must do the Serapis I promised Theophilus, the high-priest. Nothing can come of the Atlas. Perhaps you meant it in all sincerity, Alexander; but since your mother left me, children, since then—my arms are no weaker than they were; but in here—what it was that shriveled, broke, leaked away—I can not find words for it. If you care for me—and I know you do—you must not be vexed with me if my gall rises now and then; there is too much bitterness in my soul. I can not reach the goal I strive after and was meant to win; I have lost what I loved best, and where am I to find comfort or compensation?”
His children tenderly assured him of their affection, and he allowed Melissa to kiss him, and stroked Alexander’s hair.
Then he inquired for Philip, his eldest son and his favorite; and on learning that he, the only person who, as he believed, could understand him, would not come to see him this day above all others, he again broke out in wrath, abusing the degeneracy of the age and the ingratitude of the young.
“Is it a visit which detains him again?” he inquired, and when Alexander thought not, he exclaimed contemptuously: “Then it is some war of words at the Museum. And for such poor stuff as that a son can forget his duty to his father and mother!”
“But you, too, used to enjoy these conflicts of intellect,” his daughter humbly remarked; but the old man broke in:
“Only because they help a miserable world to forget the torments of existence, and the hideous certainty of having been born only to die some horrible death. But what can you know of this?”
“By my mother’s death-bed,” replied the girl, “we, too, had a glimpse into the terrible mystery.” And Alexander gravely added, “And since we last met, father, I may certainly account myself as one of the initiated.”
“You have painted a dead body?” asked his father.
“Yes, father,” replied the lad with a deep breath. “I warned you,” said Heron, in a tone of superior experience.
And then, as Melissa rearranged the folds of his blue robe, he said he should go for a walk. He sighed as he spoke, and his children knew whither he would go. It was to the grave to which Melissa had accompanied him that morning; and he would visit it alone, to meditate undisturbed on the wife he had lost.
CHAPTER II.
The brother and sister were left together. Melissa sighed deeply; but her brother went up to her, laid his arm round her shoulder, and said: “Poor child! you have indeed a hard time of it. Eighteen years old, and as pretty as you are, to be kept locked up as if in prison! No one would envy you, even if your fellow-captive and keeper were younger and less gloomy than your father is! But we know what it all means. His grief eats into his soul, and it does him as much good to storm and scold, as it does us to laugh.”
“If only the world could know how kind his heart really is!” said the girl.
“He is not the same to his friends as to us,” said Alexander; but Melissa shook her head, and said sadly: “He broke out yesterday against Apion, the dealer, and it was dreadful. For the fiftieth time he had waited supper for you two in vain, and in the twilight, when he had done work, his grief overcame him, and to see him weep is quite heartbreaking! The Syrian dealer came in and found him all tearful, and being so bold as to jest about it in his flippant way—”
“The old man would give him his answer, I know!” cried her brother with a hearty laugh. “He will not again be in a hurry to stir up a wounded lion.”
“That is the very word,” said Melissa, and her large eyes sparkled. “At the fight in the Circus, I could not help thinking of my father, when the huge king of the desert lay with a broken spear in his loins, whining loudly, and burying his maned head between his great paws. The gods are pitiless!”
“Indeed they are,” replied the youth, with deep conviction; but his sister looked up at him in surprise.
“Do you say so, Alexander? Yes, indeed—you looked just now as I never saw you before. Has misfortune overtaken you too?”
“Misfortune?” he repeated, and he gently stroked her hair. “No, not exactly; and you know my woes sit lightly enough on me. The immortals have indeed shown me very plainly that it is their will sometimes to spoil the feast of life with a right bitter draught. But, like the moon itself, all it shines on is doomed to change—happily! Many things here below seem strangely ordered. Like ears and eyes, hands and feet, many things are by nature double, and misfortunes, as they say, commonly come in couples yoked like oxen.”
“Then you have had some twofold blow?” asked Melissa, clasping her hands over her anxiously throbbing bosom.
“I, child! No, indeed. Nothing has befallen your father’s younger son; and if I were a philosopher, like Philip, I should be moved to wonder why a man can only be wet when the rain falls on him, and yet can be so wretched when disaster falls on another. But do not look at me with such terror in your great eyes. I swear to you that, as a man and an artist, I never felt better, and so I ought properly to be in my usual frame of mind. But the skeleton at life’s festival has been shown to me. What sort of thing is that? It is an image—the image of a dead man which was carried round by the Egyptians, and is to this day by the Romans, to remind the feasters that they should fill every hour with enjoyment, since enjoyment is all too soon at an end. Such an image, child—”
“You are thinking of the dead girl—Seleukus’s daughter—whose portrait you are painting?” asked Melissa.
Alexander nodded, sat down on the bench by his sister, and, taking up her needlework, exclaimed “Give us some light, child. I want to see your pretty face. I want to be sure that Diodorus did not perjure himself when, at the ‘Crane,’ the other day, he swore that it had not its match in Alexandria. Besides, I hate the darkness.”
When Melissa returned with the lighted lamp, she found her brother, who was not wont to keep still, sitting in the place where she had left him. But he sprang up as she entered, and prevented her further greeting by exclaiming:
“Patience! patience! You shall be told all. Only I did not want to worry you on the day of the festival of the dead. And besides, to-morrow perhaps he will be in a better frame of mind, and next day—”
Melissa became urgent. “If Philip is ill—” she put in.
“Not exactly ill,” said he. “He has no fever, no ague-fit, no aches and pains. He is not in bed, and has no bitter draughts to swallow. Yet is he not well, any more than I, though but just now, in the dining-hall at the Elephant, I ate like a starving wolf, and could at this moment jump over this table. Shall I prove it?”
“No, no,” said his sister, in growing distress. “But, if you love me, tell me at once and plainly—”
“At once and plainly,” sighed the painter. “That, in any case, will not be easy. But I will do my best. You knew Korinna?”
“Seleukus’s daughter?”
“She herself—the maiden from whose corpse I am painting her portrait.”
“No. But you wanted—”
“I wanted to be brief, but I care even more to be understood; and if you have never seen with your own eyes, if you do not yourself know what a miracle of beauty the gods wrought when they molded that maiden, you are indeed justified in regarding me as a fool and Philip as a madman—which, thank the gods, he certainly is not yet.”
“Then he too has seen the dead maiden?”
“No, no. And yet—perhaps.