A Thorny Path, Volume 1.

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A THORNY PATH

By Georg Ebers

Volume 1.

CHAPTER I.

The green screen slowly rose, covering the lower portion of the broad
studio window where Heron, the gem-cutter, was at work. It was Melissa,
the artist's daughter, who had pulled it up, with bended knees and
outstretched arms, panting for breath.

"That is enough!" cried her father's impatient voice. He glanced up at
the flood of light which the blinding sun of Alexandria was pouring into
the room, as it did every autumn afternoon; but as soon as the shadow
fell on his work-table the old man's busy fingers were at work again, and
he heeded his daughter no more.

An hour later Melissa again, and without any bidding, pulled up the
screen as before, but it was so much too heavy for her that the effort
brought the blood into her calm, fair face, as the deep, rough "That is
enough" was again heard from the work-table.

Then silence reigned once more. Only the artist's low whistling as he
worked, or the patter and pipe of the birds in their cages by the window,
broke the stillness of the spacious room, till the voice and step of a
man were presently heard in the anteroom.

Heron laid by his graver and Melissa her gold embroidery, and the eyes
of father and daughter met for the first time for some hours. The very
birds seemed excited, and a starling, which had sat moping since the
screen had shut the sun out, now cried out, "Olympias!" Melissa rose, and
after a swift glance round the room she went to the door, come who might.

Ay, even if the brother she was expecting should bring a companion,
or a patron of art who desired her father's work, the room need not fear
a critical eye; and she was so well assured of the faultless neatness of
her own person, that she only passed a hand over her brown hair, and with
an involuntary movement pulled her simple white robe more tightly through
her girdle.

Heron's studio was as clean and as simple as his daughter's attire,
though it seemed larger than enough for the purpose it served, for only a
very small part of it was occupied by the artist, who sat as if in exile
behind the work-table on which his belongings were laid out: a set of
small instruments in a case, a tray filled with shells and bits of onyx
and other agates, a yellow ball of Cyrenian modeling-wax, pumice-stone,
bottles, boxes, and bowls.

Melissa had no sooner crossed the threshold, than the sculptor drew up
his broad shoulders and brawny person, and raised his hand to fling away
the slender stylus he had been using; however, he thought better of it,
and laid it carefully aside with the other tools. But this act of self-
control must have cost the hot-headed, powerful man a great effort; for
he shot a fierce look at the instrument which had had so narrow an
escape, and gave it a push of vexation with the back of his hand.

Then he turned towards the door, his sunburnt face looking surly enough,
in its frame of tangled gray hair and beard; and, as he waited for the
visitor whom Melissa was greeting outside, he tossed back his big head,
and threw out his broad, deep chest, as though preparing to wrestle.

Melissa presently returned, and the youth whose hand she still held was,
as might be seen in every feature, none other than the sculptor's son.
Both were dark-eyed, with noble and splendid heads, and in stature
perfectly equal; but while the son's countenance beamed with hearty
enjoyment, and seemed by its peculiar attractiveness to be made--and to
be accustomed--to charm men and women alike, his father's face was
expressive of disgust and misanthropy. It seemed, indeed, as though the
newcomer had roused his ire, for Heron answered his son's cheerful
greeting with no word but a reproachful "At last!" and paid no heed to
the hand the youth held out to him.

Alexander was no doubt inured to such a reception; he did not disturb
himself about the old man's ill-humor, but slapped him on the shoulder
with rough geniality, went up to the work-table with easy composure, took
up the vice which held the nearly finished gem, and, after holding it to
the light and examining it carefully, exclaimed: "Well done, father!
You have done nothing better than that for a long time."

"Poor stuff!" said his father. But his son laughed.

"If you will have it so. But I will give one of my eyes to see the man
in Alexandria who can do the like!"

At this the old man broke out, and shaking his fist he cried: "Because
the man who can find anything worth doing, takes good care not to waste
his time here, making divine art a mere mockery by such trifling with
toys! By Sirius! I should like to fling all those pebbles into the
fire, the onyx and shells and jasper and what not, and smash all those
wretched tools with these fists, which were certainly made for other work
than this."

The youth laid an arm round his father's stalwart neck, and gayly
interrupted his wrath. "Oh yes, Father Heron, Philip and I have felt
often enough that they know how to hit hard."

"Not nearly often enough," growled the artist, and the young man went on:

"That I grant, though every blow from you was equal to a dozen from the
hand of any other father in Alexandria. But that those mighty fists on
human arms should have evoked the bewitching smile on the sweet lips of
this Psyche, if it is not a miracle of art, is--"

"The degradation of art," the old man put in; but Alexander hastily
added:

"The victory of the exquisite over the coarse."

"A victory!" exclaimed Heron, with a scornful flourish of his hand.
"I know, boy, why you are trying to garland the oppressive yoke with
flowers of flattery. So long as your surly old father sits over the
vice, he only whistles a song and spares you his complaints. And then,
there is the money his work brings in!"

He laughed bitterly, and as Melissa looked anxiously up at him, her
brother exclaimed:

"If I did not know you well, master, and if it would not be too great a
pity, I would throw that lovely Psyche to the ostrich in Scopas's court-
yard; for, by Herakles! he would swallow your gem more easily than we can
swallow such cruel taunts. We do indeed bless the Muses that work brings
you some surcease of gloomy thoughts. But for the rest--I hate to speak
the word gold. We want it no more than you, who, when the coffer is
full, bury it or hide it with the rest. Apollodorus forced a whole
talent of the yellow curse upon me for painting his men's room. The
sailor's cap, into which I tossed it with the rest, will burst when
Seleukus pays me for the portrait of his daughter; and if a thief robs
you, and me too, we need not fret over it. My brush and your stylus will
earn us more in no time. And what are our needs? We do not bet on
quail-fights; we do not run races; I always had a loathing for purchased
love; we do not want to wear a heap of garments bought merely because
they take our fancy--indeed, I am too hot as it is under this scorching
sun. The house is your own. The rent paid by Glaukias, for the work-
room and garden you inherited from your father, pays for half at least of
what we and the birds and the slaves eat. As for Philip, he lives on air
and philosophy; and, besides, he is fed out of the great breadbasket of
the Museum."

At this point the starling interrupted the youth's vehement speech with
the appropriate cry, "My strength! my strength!" The brother and sister
looked at each other, and Alexander went on with genuine enthusiasm:

"But it is not in you to believe us capable of such meanness. Dedicate
your next finished work to Isis or Serapis. Let your masterpiece grace
the goddess's head-gear, or the god's robe. We shall be quite content,
and perhaps the immortals may restore your joy in life as a reward."

The bird repeated its lamentable cry, "My strength!" and the youth
proceeded with increased vehemence:

"It would really be better that you should throw your vice and your
graver and your burnisher, and all that heap of dainty tools, into the
sea, and carve an Atlas such as we have heard you talk about ever since
we could first speak Greek. Come, set to work on a colossus! You have
but to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your
modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias's work-room,
which is indeed your own. I know where the best is to be found, and can
bring it to you in any quantity. Scopas will lend me his wagon. I can
see it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms
ache. You will not whistle and hum over that, but sing out with all your
might, as you used when my mother was alive, when you and your
apprentices joined Dionysus's drunken rout. Then your brow will grow
smooth again; and if the model is a success, and you want to buy marble,
or pay the founder, then out with your gold, out of the coffer and its
hiding-place! Then you can make use of all your strength, and your dream
of producing an Atlas such as the world has not seen--your beautiful
dream-will become a reality!"

Heron had listened eagerly to his son's rhapsody, but he now cast a timid
glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough hair
from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: "My dream, do you say--
my dream? As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man to
create an Atlas! As if I did not feel, without your words, that my
strength for it is a thing of the past!"

"Nay, father," exclaimed the painter. "Is it right to cast away the
sword before the battle? And even if you did not succeed--"

"You would be all the better pleased," the sculptor put in. "What surer
way could there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the
time when he could do great work is over and gone?"

"That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you," the young man
interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his
voice; "Silence, boy! One thing at any rate is left to me, as you know--
my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each other
as the starling cried, 'My strength!' Ay, the bird is in the right when
he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock. But
you--you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence and
all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over your own
father's humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly successful.
--How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been a painter!
How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of necessity, has
come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to being a mere
gem-cutter! In the depths of your soul--and I know it--you regard my
laborious art as half a handicraft. Well, perhaps it deserves no better
name; but that you--both of you--should make common cause with a bird,
and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and moves him
to serve true and noble art and to mold something great--an Atlas such as
the world has never seen on a heroic scale; that--"

He covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud. And the strong
man's passionate grief cut his children to the heart, though, since their
mother's death, their father's rage and discontent had many a time ere
now broken down into childish lamentation.

To-day no doubt the old man was in worse spirits than usual, for it was
the day of the Nekysia--the feast of the dead kept every autumn; and he
had that morning visited his wife's grave, accompanied by his daughter,
and had anointed the tombstone and decked it with flowers. The young
people tried to comfort him; and when at last he was more composed and
had 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. That at present remains a mystery. I hardly
know what happened even to myself. I succeeded in controlling myself in
my father's presence; but now, when it all rises up before me, before my
very eyes, so distinct, so real, so tangible, now--by Sirius! Melissa,
if you interrupt me again--"

"Begin again. I will be silent," she cried. "I can easily picture your
Korinna as a divinely beautiful creature."

Alexander raised his hands to heaven, exclaiming with passionate
vehemence: "Oh, how would I praise and glorify the gods, who formed that
marvel of their art, and my mouth should be full of their grace and
mercy, if they had but allowed the world to sun itself in the charm of
that glorious creature, and to worship their everlasting beauty in her
who was their image! But they have wantonly destroyed their own
masterpiece, have crushed the scarce-opened bud, have darkened the star
ere it has risen! If a man had done it, Melissa, a man what would his
doom have been! If he--"

Here the youth hid his face in his hands in passionate emotion; but,
feeling his sister's arm round his shoulder, he recovered himself, and
went on more calmly: "Well, you heard that she was dead. She was of just
your age; she is dead at eighteen, and her father commissioned me to
paint her in death.--Pour me out some water; then I will proceed as
coldly as a man crying the description of a runaway slave." He drank a
deep draught, and wandered restlessly up and down in front of his sister,
while he told her all that had happened to him during the last few days.

The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been
carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of
Seleukus. Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully
to himself. Never had he felt more fully content--the gayest of the gay.
One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him with
a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had
pleased him. His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of
the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body. As his glance fell on the
implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up with
the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt
equal. Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him,
and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent
permission to step in, he had already become more serious.

He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen
that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular
thing among the various objects worthy of admiration. For already in the
anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him. The large halls, which
were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the
grave. And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining
brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared
behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen,
surrounded him. Then he perceived that it came in through the black
velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through
which he was passing.

In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms. His duty must have been
to announce the artist's arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards him
--Korinna's mother.

Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot, she
speechlessly signed him to follow her. Till this moment not even a
whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and
mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young
painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained
to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come. But the only answer
was a dumb assenting bow of the head.

He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a
spacious room. It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds of
magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the midst
stood the couch on which lay the dead girl. In this hall, too, reigned
the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the vestibule.

The dim, shrouded form lying motionless on the couch before him, with a
heavy wreath of lotus-flowers and white roses encircling it from head to
foot, was the subject for his brush. He was to paint here, where he
could scarcely distinguish one plant from another, or make out the form
of the vases which stood round the bed of death. The white blossoms
alone gleamed like pale lights in the gloom, and with a sister radiance
something smooth and round which lay on the couch--the bare arm of the
dead maiden.

His heart began to throb; the artist's love of his art had awaked within
him; he had collected his wits, and explained to the matron that to paint
in the darkness was impossible.

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