A Thorny Path — Complete, Georg Ebers [i am reading a book txt] 📗

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.