Idalia/Volume 1/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
"LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI."
When he also had left her, she leaned awhile over the terrace-parapet, with her eyes musingly dropped on the shelving mass of myrtle blossom, and as she stood there in her solitude, a step hurriedly crushed the fallen leaves of pomegranate flowers; before she saw him, a man had thrown himself before her, pressing his lips on the trailing folds of her laces, kneeling there as one kneels who sues for life.
"Idalia!"
She started and looked down; and drawing herself from his clasp with the gesture of her habitual haughty grace, turned from him without a word, bending her head with a silent salutation.
"Idalia!—I have come only to look upon your face."
The vibration of intense suffering in his voice made her involuntarily pause: but when she spoke it was with a calm indifference, a pointed meaning.
"I do not receiye this evening, Monsieur; did not my people inform you so?
A quick shudder shook him; he it was who had worn the badge of the Silver Ivy, and had answered Victor Vane with three brief pregnant words—"To my cost!" To his cost, his most bitter cost, he had loved her, and he had forced his way to her here in the quiet of the night. He grasped again the hem of her dress, and held her there, looking upward to that fair and fatal face in the radiance of the full moon shining from the sea.
She had destroyed him:—but he could not look on her without growing drank with his own idolatry as men grow drunk with wine.
"Idalia! have yon no pity—no remorse? You know what you have made me, and you give me no mercy? Is your heart stone?"
No change came on her face; she smiled with a negligent disdain.
"You have studied at the Porte St. Martin! That is not the way we speak anywhere else in Paris."
There was a contemptuous languor in the words more cruel than the bitterest utterance, in earnest, would have been; with scenes and hours so vivid in his memory, in which his love had been lavished at her feet, and sunned in her smile, and welcomed by her word, they struck on him as passing all that history had ever held of women's traitorous heartlessness.
Idalia was now—what much evil done to her had made her.
His hands clenched on her dress in a convulsive wretchedness.
"Have you no heart, no soul, no conscience? I laid down all I had on earth for you; I gave you my peace, my honour, my abject slavery. And yet""
His voice died inarticulate, while the light from the sea fell on his upturned face—a face of fair and gallant cast, of ancient race, and leonine blood, in the early prime of manhood, yet now worn, haggard, drawn, and darkened with the hopeless passions that were loosening in him beyond all strength to hold them.
She looked down on him, still without change of glance or feature. It was a tale so often told to her. She drew herself from him with her coldest indolence.
"You came here to tell me this? It was scarcely worth while. Good evening."
Like a deer stung by a shot he started to his feet, standing between her and the shafts of jasper that formed the portico into the building; the endurance that had laid him at her mercy, soffering all things for her sake, living only in the light of her smile, and knowing no law but her desire, broke its bondage now and turned against her in fierce bat just rebuke, incoherent in its misery.
"It is true, then, what they say! You have a heart of bronze, a soul of marble? You have that glory of your loveliness only to draw men in your net and hurl them to perdition? It is true, then! in worshipping you we worship the fairest traitress, the most angelical lie that the world ever saw? Have you ever thought what it is you do? Have you ever asked yourself what price we pay for the power you hold? Have you ever thought that you may tempt us, and betray us, and destroy us once too often, till your very slaves may turn against you?"
He stood alone with her in the lateness of the night, his words incoherent and crushed between his teeth; and she knew that she had done him wrong which before now has turned men into fiends, and has made them stamp out into its grave the beauty that has beguiled them and betrayed them. But she gave no sign of fear; her dauntless nature knew fear no more than any Spartan knew it. Her conscience alone smote her, a pang of remorse wakened in her. She was silent, looking at him in the shadowy moonlight; she knew that she had ruined his life—a high-souled, patriotic life, full of bright promise and of fearless action—a life laid subject to her, and broken in her hands as a child breaks the painted butterfly.
"God!" he cried, and it was the involuntary cry of a great despair that broke his force down before the woman by whom he had been fooled and forsaken, yet whom he still worshipped but the more the more that he condemned her. "That such beauty should only veil a heart of steel! If you had ever loved—if ever you could love—you could not do such treachery to love as this. I know you as you are, now—now that it is too late, and yet—and yet"
A single sob choked his voice, he threw himself again at her feet in the sheer blindness of an utter misery, his hands clutching the folds of her dress, his lips pressed in kisses on the senseless laces, conscious alone of the woman who now had no more thought, or need, or tenderness for him than the cold marble that rose above him into the starry stillness of the Bosphorus night.
"And yet there is no crime I would not take on me at your word—there is no sin I would not sin for you! I know you as you are—and yet, so utterly in spite of all, I love you! I came to-night to see your face once more. I go to die for Italy. Say one last gentle word to me; we shall never meet again on earth."
She stood there, above him, in the clear radiance shining from the waters; his words had struck deep to the core of the remorse that was slowly awaking in her; a profound pity for him, as profound a loathing of herself, arose; all the gentler, purer, nobler nature in her was touched, and accused her more poignantly than the most bitter of his accusations. She stooped slightly; her proud instincts, her habit of power, and her world of levity and mockery, made her yield with difficulty, made her pity with rarity; but when she did either, she did them as no other woman could.
She stooped slightly, and her eyes were heavy as they rested on him :
"I have but one word: Forgive me!"
And in that one word Idalia spoke more than could have been uttered in the richest eloquence that could have confessed her error and his wrong. Yet while she said it, she knew that both the sin and the injury were beyond all pardon.
He looked up, hope against hope flashing in on him one moment: it was quenched as soon as born; her face had pain on it, but the light that he had once seen there was gone—there was no tenderness for him.
His head sank again:
"Forgive! I would have forgiven you death—I forgive yon more than death. But if you ever meet again one who loves you as I have loved, remember me—and spare him."
The generous answer died in his throat; never again, he knew, would he look upon the loveliness that had betrayed him; he knew that he was going to his death, as surely as though he sank into the sea-depths glistening below, and that when he should lie in the darkness and decay of a forgotten soldier's grave, there would be no pang of memory for him in her heart, no thought that gave him pity or lament in the life to which his own was sacrificed.
He looked yet once again upward to her face, as dying men may look their last on what they treasure; then slowly, very slowly, as though each moment were a separate pang, he loosened his hold upon her, and turned and went through the shadows of the cypress, downward to where the waves were drearily breaking on the strand below.
Where he had left her, she stood silent, the moonlight falling on the white marble about her, till from the sea the lustre on her looked bright as day. In one thing alone had he wronged her. She knew the weariness of remorse, she knew the tenderness of pity.
Though no sign had escaped her, each word of his accusation had quivered to her heart; he did not feel its truth more bitterly than she. That upbraiding, poured out in the solitude of the night, had stirred her heart with its condemnation; it showed her what it was that she had done, it made her shudder from the fatal gift of her own dominion; how had she used it?
Again and again, till they had passed by her, no more noted than the winds that swept the air about her, the anguish of men's lives, the fire of their passions had been spent upon her, and been wasted for her; she had won love without scruple, embittered it without self-reproach. But now, her own heart for once was stirred.
"What do I do?" she asked herself. "Ruin their lives, destroy their peace, send them out to their deaths—and for what? A phantom, a falsehood, an unreality, that betrays them as utterly as I! The life I lead is but cruelty on cruelty, sin on sin. I know its crime, and yet I love its sovereignty still. I am vile enough to feel the charm of its power, while I have conscience enough to abhor its work."
The thoughts floated through her mind where she stood, looking over to where the sea lay, the dark outline of some felucca alone gliding spirit-like across the moonlit surface.
The last words of the man who had left her seemed to echo still upon the air; the summons of conscience, the reproach of the past, the duty and the demand of the present, all were spoken in them. Even as he had uttered them, she had thought of one whose fate would be the same with this which now upbraided her, and pleaded with her. She knew that he should be spared. It might not be too late to save him—to save him from herself.
He who had left her to go out and find a soldier's death on the blood-soaked plains of Lombardy, stood between her and the other life which she had once saved from such a grave, and which now was in the first flush of faith that held her rather angel than woman, and of love that had sprung up, full grown in one short night, like a flower under tropical suns.
Better one pang for him at first than for a while the sweetness of a cheated hope, to end in lifelong desolation, like that which had to-night risen before her, and arraigned her for its ruin.
"Most men in their passion love but their own indulgence; but now and then there are those who love us for ourselves; they should be spared," she thought, still standing, her face turned once more towards the sea.
They called her unscrupulous, she had been so; they called her heartless, merciless, remorseless, in all her poetic beauty; there had been too much truth in the charge; much error lay on her life, great ruin at her door; but of what this woman really was her foes knew nothing, and her lovers knew as little. With neither was she ever what she now was, looking on the white gleam of the surf where it broke up on the sands below—now, when she was musing how to save again, from herself, him whom she had once saved from the grave.
In the break of the morning Idalia rose; and thrusting back the green lattice of her casement glanced outward at the east. The loose silken folds of a Turkish robe floated round her, her face was pale with a dark shadow beneath the eyes, and her hair lay in long loose masses on her shoulders, now and then lifted by the wind. She was thinking deeply and painfully, while her eyes followed mechanically the flight of "white-winged gulls, as they swept in a bright cloud above the water. The reproaches that had been uttered to her a few hours before still had their sting for her, the truths with which they had been barbed still pierced her.
Proud, fearless, negligent, superbly indifferent to the world's opinion, contemptuous of its censure as she was careless of its homage, she still was not steeled against the accusation of her own heart and conscience. She was no sophist, no coward; she could look at her own acts and condemn them with an unsparing truth; though haughtily disdainful of all censure, she tore down the mask from her own errors, and looked at them fully, face to face, as they were. Erred she had, gravely, passing on from the slighter to the deeper, in that course which is almost inevitable, since no single false step ever yet could be taken alone.
The brightest chivalry, the noblest impulses, the most unquestioning self-sacrifice, the most headlong devotion, these had all been wakened by her, and lavished on her;—what had she done with them? Accepted them, to turn them to her tools; excited them, to make them her slaves and her creatures; won them and wooed them with sorceress charm to weigh them with cold cruelty at their worth, and let them drift unpitied to their doom.
Those who had loved her had been no more to her than this; beguiled for the value they were betrayed to passion that by it they might grow plastic to her purpose, bent to her command. She, who had all the superb, satiric, contemptuous disbelief in suffering of a woman of the world, still knew that, over and over again, the tide of grief had broken up vainly against the disdain of her delicate, pitiless irony; knew that over and over again a life made desolate, a life driven out to recklessness and desperation, a life laid down in the early glory of ambitious manhood, had been sacrificed through her, ruined by her, as cruelly, as carelessly as a young child destroys the brightness of the butterfly, the fragrance of the cowslip, in its sport of summer-day chase or spring-day blossom-ball. And for what? For the sake of triumphs that had palled in their gaining, for the sake of gains that were valueless now, for the sake of a sovereignty that seemed to brand her forehead with its crown, for the sake of evil things that had worn a fair mask, of freedom that had grown into slavery, of daring that had said, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
She had erred deeply; all that was noblest, tenderest, most generous in her nature—and there was much still, despite the accusers that could appeal against her—knew it, and did not seek to palliate it to herself. The career that closed her in, once entered, as the net closes round the bird it ensnares, had wearied her, had revolted her, had made her pride contemn the part she played, her conscience plead against the woe she worked, her nature, grand in its mould and fearless in its courage, revolt from much that she had once voluntarily sought and confessedly loved in the earlier years when it was fresh to her. And she was not happy: the simplicity of the aged recluse at Monastica had pierced to a truth that Paris, and the world, and the men, who glittered round her and adored her, did not perceive. She was not happy. With her brilliance, her power, her enterprise, the fineness of her intricate intrigues, the daring of her constant adventures, the excitement of her incessant changes, no morbid sentiment, no passive pensiveness could have hold on her or be known to her, but something deeper than this was at her heart; it was the melancholy of a mute remorse, the unavailing and vainly-silenced lament of one who finds that he has bartered his gold for stones.
Her eyes were weary in all their splendour, as they followed the flight of the sea-gulls. She thought of what she had been, when only sixteen seasons had warmed the lustre of her hair, yet had made her Hellenic beauty in its early blush and sudden maturity almost, even then, the beauty of her present womanhood; she thought of herself as she had stood one evening at sunset leaning down over the ivy-mantled ruins of an antique bridge in Greece, looking across to the Ægean, flashing in the light, and thinking of the centuries far away in the distance of the past when those wares had broken against the prows of Miltiades' galleys, and been crowded with the fleets of Salamis; she remembered the vivid and decorated eloquence that had wooed her then to her present path, murmuring such bright words of liberty and triumph, while the waters in their melody and the sunset in its splendour seemed filled with the grand dead names of Gracehan Rome and of Socratic Athens; she remembered how the proud imagination of her dawning life had leapt to those subtle temptings as an arrow leaps from the bow into the empyrean, and had seen in its ambitious and still child-like dreams the sovereignty of Semiramis, the sway of Aspasia, the empire of Maria Theresa, waiting in the future for her.
Eight years had gone by since then, and she had known the world deeply, widely, wisely; she had been sated with homage and with victory, she had wakened love almost wherever her glance fell; her hours had been filled with vivid colour and incessant variety, with luxury and with pleasure, with the life of an adventuress in its airy nonchalance mingled with all the grace and elegance of patrician tastes, and habits, and wealth. And yet she was not happy; for the fame she had was notoriety, the power she had was used unscrupulously, in the core of the rose there was always an asp, and in the depth of her heart there were disappointment, remorse, and dishonour.
"And yet I was more sinned against than sinning," she mused. "I was so young then, and I was allured with such glorious beguilement. The regeneration of nations, the revolution of empires, the striking off of the serfs fetters, the redressing of every unjust balance, the conquest of empires and liberties, the people's homage and the monarchs' crowns,—those were what tempted me. It was the old fable of Satan and Eve: 'Eat of this fruit, and ye shall have the knowledge of heaven and earth;' 'Believe in me, follow me, and you shall have glory beside which Paradise is poor, kingdoms beside which Eden is a desert!' And I took the fruit. How could I tell then that it would be all a lie?"
The thoughts floated through her mind, leaning there wearily against the lattice, while the early wind of the warm dawn stirred the half-opened scarlet blossoms of the japonica twining round it. But she was too integrally proud to seek refuge or exculpation in self-excuses even in her solitary reverie.
"Yet that is but half the truth." she mused, while her eyes still unconsciously followed the sweep of the sea-birds out to sea. "I was sinned against then, in the first, but it has been my own wrong since. I have kept to error long since I have known it to be error. I have loved my power even while I despised its means and its ends. I have felt the intoxication of hazard till I have let it entangle me beyond recal. I have known the evil I did, yet I have not paused in it when I might. I have seen the fatal issue of so much, and I have gone on and on. I have bound them, I have blinded them, I have despoiled them, I have taken their strength and their manhood, their faith and their courage, their wealth and their genius, and ruined them all. I have spared none of them. I have betrayed so many. That has not been done in ignorance—that has not been palliated with the excuse of youth scarce conscious what it does."
Her thoughts travelled far over past years, while the sun rose higher, and while the man whose existence she had given back dreamed of her with the waking of the day, as of one so fair above his love, that
"No head save some world-genius should rest
Above the treasures of that perfect breast."
She remained still and silent at the casement till the distant call of the drums, as the Soldan went up to the mosque for the sunrise prayers, died softly away on the air.
"I will save him at least. One sharp blow—and perhaps he will forget. Pride will aid him; and if we never meet again, I shall remain only a dream to him—a dream without pain," she said, half aloud. And, for the moment, a darker shadow swept over her face; she remembered loyal eyes that had gazed their eager passion into hers; she remembered leonine strength that would have been felled into its tomb but for her; she remembered that the man who had sought her with such untiring patience on the clue of one frail memory, would not forget in a day, in a year. But her resolve was not shaken.
"I will save him if he will be saved;—he, at least, still have nothing with which to reproach me," she thought, while she watched the grey sea flash between the scarlet blossoms of the japonica tendrils. Then she tamed away from the window, and rang a hand-bell that had once belonged to Catherina Medici: like the one whose long slender palm had before touched the spiral column of its handle, she never hesitated in any course when her resolve was taken, she never swerved when once she had decided.
The Nubian slave, who attended her wherever she travelled as her maid, answered the summons from where she stood in the ante-chamber.
"Tell Paulus that I start for Naples this morning. He knows what to do. I leave by ten."
The Nubian bowed to the ground, and withdrew. Her mistress stood beside the table where the bell was placed, thoughtful still, with the shadow that had gathered on her deepening in the purple light that fell through violet curtains near. She was not a woman to whom regret was familiar;—many would have said she was too heartless: it was rather because she had seen, and known, and penetrated too much to be lightly touched;—but a great tearless pain gathered in her eyes, and her hand closed with a gesture of impatience on the sharp metal circle of the bell.
"He will be stung to the heart—and yet, better one pang at once!" she said in her solitude. "What could it avail him to know me more except to suffer longer?"
Her resolve was not changed; vacillation was impossible to her; she had none of its weakness in her nature, but a regret poignant and almost remorseful was on her. She thought of the fearless fidelity with which he had refused ever again to become as a stranger to her, she thought of the fealty that she knew so well he bore to her, that had looked out from the ardent worship of his eyes in the calm of the eastern night a few short hours before.
And she was about to kill this at a blow, because the prayer of another had pierced her heart and pleaded with her to spare him. if it were not too late.
A new life had dawned on Erceldoune.
All his old habits of soldier-like decision, of sportsmanlike activity, were broken up; he who had used to find his greatest pleasures in the saddle and the rifle, in waiting high up in a leafy nest for the lions to come down to the spring to drink, and in riding wild races with Arabs over amber stretches of torrid sand, in spending whole days alone among the sedge-pools of the Border fowl, and in biyouacking through a scorching night with Brazillian guachos, had now changed into the veriest dreamer that ever let the long hours steal away,
"— — floating up, bright forms ideal,
Half sense-supplied, and half unreal,
Like music mingling with a dream."
He lived in a land of enchantment, whose sole sunlight was a woman's glance; he gave himself up without a struggle to the only passion that had ever touched his life. Now and then forebodings swept over him; now and then his own utter ignorance of the woman to whom he was yielding up his destiny, smote him with a terrible pang, hut very rarely: in proportion to the length of his resistance to such a subjugation, was the reckless headlong force of his fall into its power. Moreover, his nature was essentially unsuspecting; and he had an old-world chivalry in him that would have made it seem to him the poorest poltroonery to cast doubt on the guardian-angel who had saved him from the very jaws of death. His mother, lost in his earliest childhood, had been of Spanish race; neglected by her lord, she had been left to break her spirit as she would against the grey walls of the King's Rest, longing for the perfume and the colour and the southern winds of her home in the Vega, while the Border moors stretched round her, and the Cheviots shut her in until she died, like a tropic bird, caged in cold and in twilight. A softness, inherited from the tenderness and the enthusiasm of her southern blood, was latent in her son, little as he knew it; an unworldliness and trustfulness were in his nature, though he did not perceive them; and though his career had done much to strengthen the lion-like daring and athlete's hardihood of his character, on the other hand the picturesque colouring and varied wandering in which his years had been spent had done much to preserve the vein of romance within him, unworn while unsuspected. Nothing had touched this side of his nature until now; and now, the stronger for its past suppression, it conquered him in its turn, and ruled alone.
When he left her that evening he could not sleep; he rode far and fast through the late night, dashing down into the interior, along sandy plains, and through cypress groves, across stretches of tangled vegetation, and over the rocky beds of dried-up brooks, or the foam of tumbling freshets. The swift rush through the cooled air soothed the fever in him; his thoughts and his passions kept throbbing time with the beat of the hoof, with the sweep of the gallop.
So long ago loved his namesake the Rhymer, when under the tree of Erceldoune—the Tree of Grammarye—the sorceress-lips touched his, and the eyes brighter than mortal brightness looked into his own; lips that wooed him across the dark Border, eyes that dared him to brave the Lake of Fire for her sake. Those old» old legends!—how they repeat themselves in every age, in every life.
With the dawn he came upon a pool, lying landlocked, far and solitary, encircled with cedars and cypress and superb drooping boughs, now heavy with the white blossoms of the sweet chesnut, and while his horse drank at the brink, he threw himself in to bathe, dipping down into the clear brown waters, and striking out into the depths of green blossoming shade, while the swell of a torrent that poured into it lashed him with its foam, cold even in the east before sunrise, and hurled the mass of water against his limbs, firm-knit, sinewy, colossal as the polished limbs of a Roman bronze of Milo. As he shook the drenching spray from his hair, and swam against the current, looking upward at the sky where the dawn was just breaking, all the beauty that life might know seemed suddenly to rise on him in revelation. There is an eastern fable that tells how, when Paradise faded from earth, a single rose was saved and treasured by an angel, who gives to every mortal, sooner or later in his life, one breath of fragrance from the immortal flower—one alone. The legend came to his memory as the sunbeams deepened slanting spear-like across the azure of the skies, and he dashed down into the shock of the waters to still in him this fierce sweetness of longing for all that would never be his own.
One woman alone could bring to him that perfume of paradise; the rose of Eden could only breathe its divine fragrance on him from her lips. And he would have given all the years of his life to have it come to him one hour!
When the day was at noun he went to her, heeding no more the downpour of the scorching vertical rays than the Rhymer had heeded the leaping tongues of flame while he rode, with the golden tresses sweeping his lips, down to the glories of Faërie. Distinct thought, distinct expectance, he had none; he had but one instinct, to see her, to be with her, to lay down at her feet, the knightliest service that ever man gave to woman. He knew nothing of her, knew not whether she were wedded or unwedded, but he knew that the world had one meaning alone for him now—he loved her. That she could ever answer it, he had barely the shadow of a hope; there was much humility in him; he held himself but at a lowly account; though a proud man with men, he would have felt, had he ever followed out his thoughts, that he had nothing with which to merit or to win the haughty and brilliant loveliness of Idalia; he would have felt that he had no title and no charm to gain her, and gather her into arms that would be strong, indeed, to defend her until the last breath of life, as they had been strong to strangle the bear in the death grasp and to tame the young wild horse on the prairies, but that had no gold to clasp and fling down at her feet, no purples of state and of wealth to fold round her, bringing their equal royalty to hers. That he himself could attract her, he would have had little belief; he did not see himself as others saw him; he did not know that his vigorous magnificence of form, his dauntless manhood, his generous unselfishness, his untrammelled freedom of thought and deed, might charm a woman who had been tired by all, won by none; he was unconscious of any of these in his own person, and he would have thought that he had nothing on earth which could give him the right ever to hope for her tenderness. But hope is always strong in tis till despair is forced on us, however little we may know that hope's existence; and thought was the last thing that was shaped in him—thought never grouped itself before him; he was still in the opium-dream: neither future nor past existed for him; he was drunk with his present; his love blinded him to any other memory than itself. It was too wholly in its early freshness for it to forecast its fate.
His eyes eagerly swept over the building as he rode up the avenue; the lattices were all closed; this was usual in the noon, yet it gave him a vague disquietude and dread. The echo of his step resounded on the marble, as it had done when he had forced his entrance into what he had believed the lair of his assassin: it was the only sound, and the stillness froze his heart like ice; the rolling bay of the hound had never before failed to challenge his arrival.
The first court was deserted; in the second he saw the Abyssinian.
"The Countess Vassalis?" he asked, rapidly.
"Is not here," answered the negress.
"Not here!"
"No, most illustrious. Her Excellency left Stamboul this morning."
He staggered like a man who has received a blow.
"Left—where?—why?—for how long?"
The Abyssinian shook her head with a profound salaam; she knew nothing, or would say nothing; her mistress had left Constantinople; where she intended to travel she could not tell; her Excellency was always travelling, she believed; but a note had been given her to deliver to the English Effendi, perhaps that might tell more.
He seized it from her as she drew it from the yellow folds of her sash, and tore it open; a mist was before his sight, and his wrist shook while he held the paper as it had never done lifting the rifle to his shoulder, when one error in the bullet's flight would have been instant death to himself. The letter brought him little solace; it was but a few words of graceful courtesy, giving him the adieu that a sudden departure rendered necessary, but adding nothing of why or whither she was gone, and seeming, in their polished ceremonial, cold as ice to the storm of shattered hope, and tempestuous pain that was life in his own heart. Instinctively as bis hand closed on it he turned away from the Abyssinian, and went out of the court into the hot blaze of day, alone; he could not bear the eyes of even that African upon him in the desolation that had swept down upon his life. He went out; where, he did not see or know, passing into the scorching air and into the cooler shade of the groves, with a blind, dumb suffering on him like the suffering of a dog. For her he had no pride, against wounds from her hand he had no shield; and nothing with which she could wring his heart, nothing with which she could try his loyalty, could avail to turn his love away. They had been no idle words with which he had said that his life was hers to do with what she would; having made the vow he would keep it, no matter what the test, or what the cost.
He crushed in his grasp that pitiless letter;—her hand had touched it, her hand had written it, bitter as it was it was sacred to him; and he stood in the vertical sun, gazing blankly down on the waves below the terraces, tossing upward in the light at his feet. The blow had fallen on him with a crushing, sickening force,—again he had lost her! Again, when to the old baffled weariness with which he had so long vainly sought her was added the certainty that he who had lavished his heart's best treasure on her was no more to her than the yellow sands that the seas kissed and left.
A few hours before and her eyes had smiled on him, her presence had been with him; she had listened to him, spoken with him, let him linger beside her in ail the familiar communion of a welcome freindship; he could not realise that he was forsaken by her without a word, without a regret, without an effort for them ever to meet again. He had no claim on her remembrance, no title to her confidence, it was true; his acquaintance with her was slight, as the world would have considered. But he could not realise that the tie between them of a life saved, so powerful on him, so deathless in its memory for him, could be as nothing to her. The wanton cruelty of her desertion seemed to him so merciless that he had no remembrance of how little hold he had, in reason and in fact, upon her tenderness. The knowledge of her loss alone was on him, leaving him no consciousness save of the burning misery that possessed him.
As he had never loved, so he had never suffered until now; his adventurous career in camps, and cities, and deserts, had never been touched by any grief; he had come there in the gladness of the morning, full of faith, of hope, of eager delight, and of unquestioning expectation, and he stood in the scorch of the noonday heat, stupified, the glare of sun and sea unfelt in the fiery agony that had seized him.
The little gilded caïque, was rocking at his feet, where it was moored to the landing-stairs; trifles link thought to thought, and with the memory of that first enchanted hour when he had floated with her down the water, he remembered the warning that she had given him—the warning "not to lie under the linden."
The warning had been—she had said—for his sake, not her own; was it for his that she had left him now? She had implied that some sort of peril, some threatening of danger, must await him with her friendship; was it to save him from these that she had left him thus? Then the humility that was as integrally a part of his nature, as his lofty pride of race was towards men, subdued the bitter sense of her cruelty: what was he more to her than any other to whom she gave her gracious courtesies, that he should look for recollection from her? He owed her his life;—but that debt lay on him, it left no claim to her. What was there in him that he could hope in their brief intercourse to have become any dearer to her than any other chance-met acquaintance of the hour? He could not upbraid her with having smiled on him one hour to forsake him as a stranger the next, for with the outset she had bade him leave her unknown.
Hot tears, the first that had ever come there since as a child he had sobbed over his young mother's grave, rushed into his eyes, shutting out the stretch of the sparkling seas and the rich colouring around him, where Cashmere roses and Turkish lilies bloomed in untrained luxuriance. The sea had no freedom, the flowers no fragrance, the green earth in its early summer no beauty for him;—he only felt that let him spend loyalty, fidelity, life and peace upon her as he would, he might never be one shadow nearer to her than he was now, he might never touch her to one breath of tenderness, never move her to one pang of pity. His strength was great, he had wrestled with the gaunt northern bear in the cold of a Scandinavian night, he had fought with ocean and storm in the madness of a tropical tempest, he had closed with the African lion in a fierce embrace, and wrenched the huge jaws apart as they closed on their prey; he had prevailed in these things by fearless force, by human might: but now, in his weakness and his misery, he could have flung himself down on the tawny sands and wept like a woman for the hopes that were scattered, for the glory that was dead.
Another moment, and he had crossed the labyrinth of the garden, thrown himself into saddle, and turned back towards the city. The Greeks idly lying under the shelter of their fishing or olive feluccas drawn up on the shore, and the Turks sitting on their cocoa-nut mats under the shadow of fig-tree or vine at the entrance of their huts, stared aghast at the breathless horse, thundering along the sea-road through the noontide heat, his flanks covered with foam, and the white burnous of his Giaour rider floating out upon the wind. Down the steep pathways, over the jagged rocks, across the flat burning levels of sand, and under the leaning grape-covered walls, Erceldoune rode, reckless of danger, unconscious of the fierce sun-fire pouring on his stead.
He had sworn to follow her, whether her route were seaward to Europe, or eastwards into the wild heart of Asia. Pride, reason, wounded feeling, wavering faith, none of them availed to turn him from his course. He was true to his oath; and the madness was upon him that in the golden verse of his namesake the Rhymer makes Syr Tristam love better to go back to the risk of death and shame, to the land of his foe, to the old piercing pain and the old delicious sorcery, than to live in peace and honour and royalty without the smile of King Marc's wife, without the light of Ysonde's eyes. Let come what would, he followed Idalia.
In the love he bore her there was a strange mingling of utter humility, of most reverential chivalry, with the wildest passion and the most reckless daring; in it the two sides of his nature were blent.
He rode to the Golden Horn, where the flags of every nation were streaming from the crowded masts in the clear hot light. He knew that her departure by any one of the vessels could easily be ascertained.
To seek the guests whom he had met at her house to inquire of her from the numerous acquaintance he had among the various chancelleries in Constantinople, and the military and naval men passing through or staying off there; to ask who she was, whence she came, how she was held in social estimation; all that might have been the natural course of most was impossible to Erceldoune. He could not have brought himself to speak of her to others; he felt that if he heard her name lightly uttered he should strike his hand on the mouth that uttered it; and intense as his longing might be to pierce the mystery that apparently shrouded her, the Quixotic code of his lore and his honour would have let him ask nothing through strangers that she withheld herself. He prosecuted his search alone, and the rapidity in such investigations gained by habit soon brought him the knowledge he pursued.
Before evening he had learned among the sailors in the port that a steam yacht belonging to her, the Io, which had returned twenty-four hours previously from Athens, had taken its departure early in the morning; for Capri, the Greek crew had said, with no one on board but herself, her suite, and the Russian dog. The yacht was probably by now through the Dardanelles. It was well known in the Golden Horn, the sailors told him, that she usually came from Europe in it; it could be recognised anywhere on the seas, for it always carried the green white and scarlet of the Italian national colours, crossed on the Greek ensign, a fancy, it was supposed, of her Excellency's.
Erceldoune's eyes strained across the glittering expanse of water with a wistful longing as he listened; every word he gathered plunged like a knife into his heart,—no steamer went from the harbour that day to Naples; with twelve or twice twelve hours between them, how could he tell but what again she might be lost to him, how or where or when he might ever recover the clue she had rent asunder?
"If that schooner were only mine!" he muttered unconsciously aloud, as his glance fell on a yacht in the harbour, with her gold figure-head and her brass swivel-guns glistening in the sun; his want of wealth he had never felt, his nature was too high toned, his habits too hardy, his temper too bold; but now for the first time the pang of his beggared fortunes struck heavily on him. Were wealth his own how soon the seas that severed them might be bridged!
A familiar hand was struck on his shoulder as he stood looking across at the grey arc of the Bosphorus, straining his eyes into the offing as though he could pierce the distance and follow her with his gaze.
"You want a yacht? Take Etoile. I am going inland on a special mission into Arabia; bring her back in a year's time, that will be soon enough for me."
Erceldoune turned and saw a man he knew well; a true and tried friend; one with whom he had gone on many a perilous expedition; a dauntless traveller, a pure Arabic scholar, and a skilled negotiator with Eastern chiefs and tribes.
The Etoile was at his service, with her captain and her crew, to take him where he would; there remained but the duties of the Messenger Service to detain him, and these, on application, let him loose. He had so habitually abstained throughout the twenty years of his service from any effort to shirk or shift the most dangerous or most irksome, missions, that as nothing specially required him then, and a courier was daily expected from Russia who could take despatches home in his place, he easily obtained his furlough, and by sunset he weighed anchor.
The yacht steered out of the varied fleet of merchantmen that crowded the Golden Horn, steered out to the open sea, while the scarlet glory of the after-glow lingered in the skies and dyed the waters blood-red in its light. To what fate did he go? he asked himself.
Safer, wiser, better far, he thought, that he should turn back with his familiar comrade and plunge down into the core of Asia, into the old athletic, bracing, vigorous, open-air life, into the pleasures that had never palled of forest and rifle, of lake and mountain, of the clear ringing shot and the wild day-dawn gallop, into the pastimes that had no taint in them, the chase that had no pang in it. That old life had been so free, so elastic, so unshadowed, with all the liberty of the desert, with all the zest of hardihood in it, with no thought for the morrow, and no regret for the past, with sleep sound as a mountaineer's, with strength exhaustless as the sea eagle's. He was leaving it. And for what? For a love that already had cost him a year of pain to a few short hours of hope; for a woman of whom he knew nothing, not even whether she were the wife or the mistress of another; for the miserable fever of restless passion, for the haunting torment of unattainable joys, for the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for the shadows of surrounding doubt and mystery. Better far let the strange charm that had enthralled him be cut away at any cost, and go back to that old life while there was yet time. The thought crossed him for the moment as he drifted from the quay of the Golden Horn. The next it passed as swiftly; let him plunge into the recesses of Asia or the green depths of Western wilds, he would carry with him his passion and her memory; and the schooner swept down beyond the Dardanelles in her pursuit, through the phosphor crests of starlit wares as the night deepened, and the distance between them grew less and less with every dip the prow made down into the deep-grey glistening water, like a petrel that stoops to bathe in his passage, and shakes the spray from his spread wings to take a freer flight.
END OF VOL. I.