I sprang upon that whirling form, with a sort of mad desperation, to seize and hold its outstretched hand.
At length I held it.
But no!
His body had come to a rest, but now high over my head, now at my feet, now flashing up one side, now down the other, now whizzing in front of my eyes, now encircling my head like a bird in swift flight that hand went on, ever on, in its wild and mysterious course!
My strength was failing me!
Shall I ever be able to grasp it!
Antonius, too, showed signs of yielding to the awful power of the dread disease which tormented him!
His face took on a strange pallor! His breast heaved convulsively. With one last despairing effort I succeeded in catching his hand in its flight around my head!
I clung to it with desperate vigor!
My touch dispelled the venom from his veins.
He seemed to awake as from some awful dream. He passed his hand across his eyes.
He smiled.
Still clinging to his hand, I gently forced him to be seated upon a rocky bench, over which the ocean had woven a velvety covering of sea-grass and weeds.
“Antonius!” I cried, “peace come upon thee! Forget thy suffering. Be as thou once wert! My touch can give thee rest at least for a brief respite!”
He pressed my hand. A deep sigh lifted his breast. It was the last gasp of the demon which oppressed him.
He was now at rest.
To me his utterance was rapid but not more so than that of many quick thinkers with whom I had conversed.
“What wouldst thou?” said he, in a low but strangely sweet, mild voice.
I unfolded to him the object of my coming.
I went back to the finding of the Roman newspaper and my departure from home.
All, all; I told him all; how I had come into the home of the Slow Movers, how I had mistaken them for marble like the rest of the figures about the island, how I longed to have the mystery cleared up.
All that day Antonius and I sat by the sea in most delightful converse.
Only once, at high noon, did he set a brief limit to his tale while we passed into his cavern to partake of food and drink.
With a high-bounding heart, I listened to his story of the landing of the Seven Sculptors upon the isle. Their first task had been to rear the glorious temple with its long flight of marble steps leading down to the sea. Then they, and, later, their sons, and their sons’ sons, had set to work to people this beautiful island with almost countless figures of the rarest grace and finish.
In the forests, by the river’s banks, through the valley, on the hillside, adown the terraces, to the very water’s edge, rose the faultless statues in wondrous beauty and profusion.
Here, there and everywhere, forms of matchless grace gleamed, snow-white amid the leafy bowers or tangled underwood.
A mysterious ardor burned within the hearts of these exiled artists. It would seem that theirs was a wild sort of hope to rear on that far-distant isle another Rome—an infant daughter, but fairer and whiter in her marble magnificence than the glorious mother who sate upon her seven hills!
Times and times again, aye, thrice three score and ten, the wretched Paula arose out of the quarried blocks, ever fair and ever fairer, now bent in awful grief, now putting the very skies to shame with the entrancing beauty of her upturned, pleading, sweet and pitiful face.
Here and there, too, stood great Cæsar, never to be forgotten for his godlike clemency in snatching the sculptors from terrible death.
As the second century of the exile dawned upon the little Roman Kingdom, far away beneath the Southern skies, at the very moment when the colony was waxing strong and vigorous a strange and mysterious thing happened to the dwellers in this island home of sweet content.
No more male children were born!
The seven sculptors, now bent with age, and their faces hollowed by the sharp chisels of remorse, went, one after the other to the dark realm of Death.
Their sons, too, came into ripe manhood. And their sons grew up, happy in the possession of that glorious talent which had peopled the isle with such matchless forms of beauty.
But now the race had reached the end of its long reign in the world of art.
Decade after decade slipped away, and still there came not one male child to gladden a sculptor’s home.
A sort of blank despair sank upon the colony.
The elder sculptors laid their chisels down in utter hopelessness.
Even the younger wrought less and less.
Still there came no boy to wake the old-time song and laughter of that once joyous island home.
Fingers cunning in art grew stiff with age.
Hearts full of glorious inspiration waxed dull and spiritless! One by one they all went the way which mortal feet must tread.
A terrible, a wonderful change came over the people.
Weighed down by this leaden grief, surrounded day and night by these speechless, motionless marble forms, which, although silent as the very clod itself, yet cried out unceasingly: “Give us more companions in these solitudes!” these unfortunate people almost turned to marble itself.
They became, in good sooth, brothers and sisters to the marble dwellers on this island.
At length the end came!
The last sculptor was laid upon the carved bier of the great white temple by the sea!
A silence so long, so deep, so dreadful, fell upon the people that it almost seemed their speech was lost forever.
Within the dark grottoes and bosky underwood, they crawled to hide away from the very light of day.
Their limbs, once so supple and elastic, ever ready to bear their owners over hill and across plain, delighting in the dance, inured to the race, now became heavy and slow.
They seemed almost about to turn to stone, and join the silent company around them.
In good sooth, such a fate was imminent, when the happening of a joyful event averted it.
A year had passed since the last sculptor had gone to join the shadowy caravan which moves forever across the desert of Eternal Silence, when his seven sad-faced daughters were fairly startled by an infant’s cry.
But look!
Their widowed mother stands before them with a babe nestled in her arms.
It is a son!
The joyful tidings can only creep from family to family.
Alas! it was too late to call them back to old-time customs and habits, too late to start their blood again in old-time bounding, leaping course through their veins.
They were a changed people!
True, their happiness came again, but it was not the same. They could smile and laugh, but it was scarcely more than faces of marble moved by some mysterious power. They could talk, but so slowly fell the words that it almost seemed some statue spoke amid the leafy coverts of the island. They could move, but snail or tortoise outstripped them with ease.
REMARKABLE BEHAVIOR OF A BUST OF CÆSAR IN THE LAND OF THE SLOW MOVERS.
Ay, they were changed indeed; fated henceforth to people their beautiful island home with living statues.
For