Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 1
I D A L I A.
CHAPTER I.
"SHE SMILES THEM DOWN IMPERIALLY AS VENUS DID THE WAVES."
It was evening when the schooner ran into Capri, that Eden hung beneath the sea and sky. All its marvellous maze of colour was in its richest glow; the sun was sinking behind Solaro; the towering rocks of the Salto and the Faraglioni burned through their sublimity of gloom; a lustre of gold and purple streamed over mountainous Ischia down on the brow of Epomeneo, and over the low hills of Procida; and the blue water lay dazzling in the light, with the white sails of Sorrento skiffs scarce larger on its waves than the white wings of fluttering monachi, while over the sea came the odours of budding orange and citron gardens and a world of violets that filled the woods, sloping upward and upward into the clouds where Anacapri lay.
Erceldoune saw none of it, yet he felt it vaguely—felt, as his vessel steered through that flood of sunlight, coming from the rich mezzo giorno of the Amalfi coast into the golden riot of this lavish loveliness, as though he floated to a paradise. So had they thought before him, who, sailing through those caressing seas towards the same isles where the Syrens sang, had listened to the enchanted song to find their grave, in tumult and in storm.
The sun sank behind Ischia as he went ashore, and the sudden twilight fell, quenching all the blaze of fire, and bringing in its stead the tender night, with the chime of the Ave María ringing out from church bells over the sea.
He was known in Capri, and the men showed their white teeth with a bright smile, and the girls laughed all over their handsome brown faces, as they welcomed him.
He had little doubt of soon learning what he sought: a few brief questions brought him loquacious answers.
"’Niursi, signore!" cried a marinaro, in the barbarous Capriote patois. "L'illustrissima Contessa! she knows me well. Chiara, my wife, helped the African carry the luggage up to her villa the day before yesterday"
"She is here still?"
The quick Capriote caught the tremulous excitement that ran through the question, and his heart warmed to the stranger, by whom his brother had once been brought up from the black churning waves under Tiberio in the dead of a tempestuoas night.
"She is here, signor mio; she has been often here. She is at the Villa Santilla, in the Piccola Marina. I will show you the way willingly."
"No, I can find it; I know every foot of your ísland. But if yon can get me a horse, do."
The marinaro put back the gold held out to him with a loving gesture, and a smile that glistened through his brown beard:
"Not from you, signor. We have not forgotten, in Capri here, the night after San Costanza's Day."
Awhile later, and Erceldoune passed up the terraced heights, through the woods, where he crushed starry cyclomen and late violets at every step, along hedges of prickly pear enclosing vineyards and fields of flax, and down rocky winding stairs shut in by walls, over which hung the white blossoms of orange-boughs.
Now and then he passed a village priest, or a contadina that was like a study for Giorgone, or a tourist party whose mules were stumbling down some narrow gorge or dense arbutus thicket these were all the solitude was well-nigh unbroken. He knew Capri as well as he knew the oíl Scottish border at home; many a time, waiting week after week at Naples for despatches, he had explored every creek, rock, and islet in that marvellous bay, from sunlit Amalfi to nestling Procida, and he made his way straight onward to the Piccola Marina, though slowly, from the steepness and vagaries of the broken Roman roads, overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, that his horse, a sturdy mountain-trained chestnut from Ischia, climbed cautiously.
A late hour was sounding from some campanile as he rode into that beautiful nook that lies turned towards Sicily, with its line of fisher-boats and white-walled cottages fringing the coast, and hidden among olives, cistus groves, and orangeries. Here and there—where strangers had made their dwelling—lights were gleaming, but the Capriotes all lay sleeping under their low-rounded roofs; he almost despaired of finding any guide to tell him which Villa was hers in that leafy nest among the sea-girt rocks.
At last he overtook a contadina heavily laden with wood, doing the work of pack-horses, as is the common custom for women in the isles of the Syrens; she knew the name; the Contessa had bought some coral of her, for pity's sake, yesterday; the villa was down there in that little gorge just hanging over the sea, where the grey plumes of olive were thickest. If any had asked it, he could not have answered with what definite purpose he went, whether to see her, whether to break on her privacy at such an hour, whether only to look on the place where she dwelt, and watch till the day should dawn: fixed aim he had none; he was urged by an impulse as vague as it was unconquerable, unregulated either by reason or by motive. He was in that mood in which chance does its best, or its worst, for a man; when he offers no resistance to it, and may even be hurried into guilt ere he knows what he does.
The lights were shining amongst the shades of olive and arbutus woods as his horse stumbled down the narrow defile, catching in the trailing vine tendrils at every step.
The dwelling literally overhung the sea, nestled on a low ridge of rock, curved round so that the whole arc of the bay, sweeping from east to west, was commanded by its windows, that saw the sun rise over the height of St. Angelo, fall in its noon-day glory full on Naples, and Vesuvius, and Baiæ, where they lie in the depth of that wondrous bow, and pass on to die in purple pomp behind wild Ischia. It was surrounded with all the profuse growth of the island; thickets of cistus, wilderness of myrtle, budding fíg-trees, orangeries with their crowns of bridal blossom and their balls of amber fruit, while vast rocks rose above and shelved beneath it, with columns that towered to the clouds, and terraced ledges and broken gorges filled up with foliage. Through the leaves he saw the gleam of open windows, and the indistinct outline of the roof in the deep shade cast from the rocks above; the road he had followed ended abruptly on a narrow table of stone jutting out over a precipice whose depth he could not guess; and immediately fronting the casements from which the light streamed, divided from the terrace and strip of garden running beneath them, by a chasm perhaps some six feet wide. Thus from the rock he saw straight into the lighted chamber within, as he threw himself from his horse, and with his arm round a plane-tree to hold his footing, leaned over the edge and strained his eyes through the gloom to gaze into the interior that was before him like a picture painted on the shadow of the night. His heart stood still with a sickening pang, a deadly burning jealousy that had never touched bis life before. Through the draperies of the curtains he saw her, and saw ber—not alone. She sat at the head of her table, that glittered with wax-lights and fruits and wines, and with her were some six or seven men, whose voices only reached him in a low inarticulate murmur, but whose laughter now and then echoed on his ear in the silence. At the foot of the table sat one whom be recognised at once; his back was to the windows, but the slight grace of his figure, and the elegance of bis throat and head, with its closely-cut blond hair, sufficed to identify him to Erceldoune. What tie could be have to her, this cold, smiling, silken politician, who seemed perpetually by her side? In the warm night be shook as with icy chillness through all his veins; a brute longing seized him to spring like a lion into that dainty group, and fell them down as men of his blood in Bothwell's days bad felled their foes in Border feuds,
"when the loud corynoch rang for war
Through Lome, Argyle, Monteith, and Braidalbane."
Her other guests were all unknown to him, and looked like gentlemen-condottieri; moreover, all he saw was Idalia: she was leaning slightly forward, her face was lighted with impassioned warmth, while her eyes, fixed upon the man nearest her, an Italian by the contour of his features, and of a careless princely bearing, that gave him greater distinction than the rest displayed, adjured him more eloquently still, than by the words with which her lips were moving.
The echo of her voice, though not the meaning of her speech, came to Erceldoune where he swung forward over the chasm in the hushed night, sweet and fatal as the Syren voices that had used to echo over those eternal seas that lapped the beach below. And as he heard it, a heart-sick misery seemed to make his life desolate; he had shaped no definite hope, his thoughts had known no actual form, but his love unconsciously had coloured both hope and thought: she so utterly filled his own life, he could not at once realise that he was nothing, not even a remembrance in hers.
He leaned nearer and nearer, regardless of the unfathomed precipice that yawned beneath him. At that instant Victor Vane rose, pushed back his chair, and approached the open glass doors; looking out from the brightly-lighted room, he could see the shadow of the man and horse upon the opposite ledge.
"The Romans hung their wreaths of roses over the doors, we in a more prosaic age must shut our window,"' he said, with a light laugh, as he closed the venetian blinds, leaving only their thread-like chinks open for the passage of light outward, and the passage of air within.
A great darkness fronted Erceldoune; the moon was shining on all the silvered seas, and innumerable stars were oat, but for him the blackness and blindness of night had never so utterly fallen.
Hours passed by uncounted, unheeded by him; the chimes of the campanile had chimed twelve, and one, and two, unheard by him; he was still there before the darkened windows. The Ischian horse grazed quietly off the grasses and young shoots among the rocks; Erceldoune watched the villa which sheltered her, as a lion watches the lair of his foe.
The night was absolute torture to him; intolerable suspense possessed him, and a reckless hatred of all those who were now within the chamber on which he was forbidden even to look. So near to her, and yet as far sundered as though seas divided them! His rivals with her whilst he stood without!—his imagination was filled with their looks, their words, the bold passion in their eyes, the lovely smile upon her lips. What were they, what title could they claim to her, these men, who seemed so welcome to her? Something in the familiaríty, the authority, of the Englishman's action, slight though it was, bore to him a terrible significance; were her revelríes such as those for which the rose was hung above the doors of Rome?—were they the reveries of a Faustina? The thought passed over him, cold, gliding, poisonous as the coil of a snake; he flung it from him with fierce loathing, true to the motto of his old race: "One loyalty, one faith"—he had given both to her. He heeded neither time nor place; purpose he had none in staying there; to watch her life with suspicion or espionage was the last thought in him, the last baseness possible to him; but he could not tear himself from the place, he was fascinated to it, even by the very torment of his pain. How utterly she must have forgotten him!—how utterly careless must she be of what suffering she had dealt him! As he thought of the look that he had seen on her face, as he thought of those men gathered about her whilst he was absent, he paced the narrow rocky rídge like a man chained to his cell, while his foes ríot in all that he has loved and treasured. And the closed casements faced him like an inexorable doom, while a faint glimmer of light that here and there streamed through them seemed to mock him with fugitive tormenting glimpse, only serving to make the darkness darker still.
At last, when the greyness of dawn was breaking, there was a slight noise that stirred the stillness: the shutter unclosed, the glass door opened, he saw her—alone. There was no one now in the apartment, and she stood in the open window looking out on the sea that stretched far below, round the broken and jutting cliffs.
He leaned down scarcely breathing, till he hung half way over the chasm; was it possible that in this solitude she thought of him? Were those men anything to her, or was he more than they, or nothing?—not even a regret?
The moon at that moment strayed through on to the ledge, and she saw his shadow hanging midway down over the precipice» whose fatal depth slanted straight into the sea which had worn a narrow way through the fissure five hundred feet below. A cry of horror broke from her that had a greater tenderness in it than lies only in a mere fear for life imperilled; for all answer he swung himself one moment on the ledge, balanced the distance with an unerring eye, and with a mountaineer's leap that the glens and hills of the Border had taught him long before, cleared the space and alighted at her feet.
"Does it matter to you whether I live or die?"
The brief prayer bore eloquence deeper than lies in ornate words; all the man's heart was spent in it; Idalia stood motionless and silent, her eyes fixed on him where he stood beside her, dropped as from the air upon the wild cliffs in the dead of night, when she believed him far distant on those eastern shores to which the sea beneath them ebbed away through league on league of starlight.
"Does it matter to you whether I live or die?" he said afresh, while his voice quivered with a fiery piteous entreaty.
"Surely! It mattered to me when you were but a stranger."
A vivid joy thrilled through him, his eyes in the shadow burned down into hers with passionate appeal, with passionate reproach.
"Ay, but it was only a divine pity then, is it that only now? And with but pity in you for me, how could you deal me this last misery?"
What stirred her heart he could not tell.
"I bade you know no more of me," she said at last, while her eyes looked away from him down into the still and silvered seas. "I told you nothing but bitterness could come to you from my friendship; nothing else can. Why would you not believe me while it was time?"
There was an intense and weary mournfulness in the words; they carried a deadly meaning to him, he gave them but one significance.
"You mean that even your memory is forbidden me?—that even my worship of you dishonours you?"
"Your words are as strange as your presence here. This is the time and place for neither."
"My words are strange! God help me! I hardly know what I say. Answer me, in pity's sake, what are they to you?"
"Who?"
And as she spoke, beneath the unbent hauteur of her voice and of her glance there was something as nearly kindred to anxiety and alarm as could approach Idalia's nature.
"Those men who were with you."
"Let me pass, sir. These are not questions for which you have right, or to which I give submission."
"I swear they shall be answered! What are they to you?"
She glanced at him in haughty amaze, tinged with some other feeling that he could not translate.
"You dare address me thus! Are you mad?"
"I think so!"
"I think so also," she said, coldly. "And now, sir, there is an end of these unwarranted questions, which you have as little title to ask as I have inclination to answer. Leave me or let me pass."
He stood in her path, half mad as he said:
"I will know one thing—are you any man's wife?"
Utter surprise passed over her face, and something of contemptuous annoyance.
"I reply to nothing asked in such a manner," she said briefly. "Let me pass, sir."
"No! Tell me this one thing for the love of pity!"
The anguish in his voice touched her; she paused a moment.
It can concern you in no way," she answered him distantly. "But since you ask it—know that I cherish freedom too well to be wedded."
"I thank God,—I may love you without sin."
His voice was very low, and his words had a greater intensity because their passion was restrained in obedience to her: there was grandeur in their very simplicity. She raised her bead with her old stag-like gesture—looking to the sea, and not to him.
"Sir, you have no title to speak such words. You cannot say that I have ever given you the faintest."
"Have I ever said it? No! you have given me no title, but I claim one."
"Claim!"
"I claim one. The title that every man has to love, though be go unloved—to love better than life, and only less than honour."
He spoke steadily, undauntedly, as became bis own self-respect and dignity, but his voice had an accent which told her that world-wide as the love bad been that she had roused, none ever bad loved her as this man did. For a moment she turned and looked at him, a look fleeting, and veiled from him by the flickering shadows. The look was soon banished, and her eyes strayed backward to the sea; her face was very palé, but she moved away with her proud and languid grace:
"These words are painful to us both;—no more of them, sir. Farewell."
The word struck him as a shot strikes one of his Border deer; in the impulse of his agony he caught her trailing dress, and held it as a sentenced captive might hold the purple hem of his sovereign's robes.
"Stay! A moment ago you said you cared whether I lived or died;—as I live now I will die to-night—in that sea at your feet—if you tell me to leave you for ever."
A shudder ran through her; looking down on him she saw that fatigue, long fasting, the misery of the past hours, and the force of the feeling he bore her, had unloosed his passions and unstrung his nerves till his brain was giddy; and—his calm failing him—she saw that in every likelihood, as surely as the stars shone above them, he would keep his word and fling away his whole existence for her.
Commonly she was too careless of men's lives, as of their peace; but here she could not be so. She had saved him, she could not so soon again destroy him.
"Hush!" she said more softly. "The noblest woman would never be worth that! It would be better that we should part. When I tell you that it can bring you no happiness"
"Whatever it bring, I said before, I accept it! My life is yours to save or throw away, as you will; answer me, which shall it be?"
There was a suppressed violence, a terrible suffering, in his voice, that moved her almost with such shuddering pain as though she witnessed his death before her sight; in the light falling from the opened windows she could see the burning gleam in his eyes and the red flush that darkened the bronze of his face.
"Live!" she answered him, while her own voice lost its chillness. "You do not know now what you say; with calmer hours you will see how little worth it I or any woman could be. You may meet me again,—but you must speak no more of such words as you have spoken to-night. I have your promise?"
"Till my strength shall fail me to keep it."
"When it does, we shall meet no more."
Then she left him, and passed through the chamber that was opened to the night, till, in the distance, the clustered flowers and statues veiled her among them, and the closing of a door echoed with a dull sound through the stillness.
He stood alone on the terrace, the noise of the sea surging in his ear, his pulse beating, his brain reeling: he could not tell what to believe, what to trust, what to think.
The single-hearted nature of the man had too honest a mould, too masculine a cast, to follow or to divine the complex intricacies of a woman's life, of a woman's impulses and motives. He felt blinded, powerless, heart-sick, dizzy, now crushed with reckless despair at the chill memory of her words, now touched with sweet wild hope, because he thought her free to be won if daring, fidelity, and devotion could avail to win her.
To doubt her, never—even now, even with all that he had seen and heard—occurred to him. He believed that she might only pity him with proud cold pity; he believed that it was faintly, remotely possible that by force of his own mighty love some tenderness might be at last wakened for him in her heart. But between these he saw no path, He never thought that she might be—but fooling, and destroying him.
He had comparatively seen little of women; nothing of such a woman as Idalia. His bold and sanguine nature quickly grasped at hope; even in all the humility of his love it was not in him to surrender.
Till morning broke beyond the giant mass of St. Angelo, he paced up and down the cliffs, with the waves beating music at his feet. Then he flung himself down on the moss that covered a ledge of the rock, with his saddle beneath his head, as he had lain many a night under Asiatic stars and on Andes slopes, and on yellow Libyan sand; physical fatigue brought sleep, and sleep was gentler to him than his waking life, it gave him dreams, and with his dreams Idalia.
As she passed from him through the embrasure of the myrtle-shrouded window, and crossing her reception-room, entered an inner chamber, at the farther end stood Victor Vane—too far to have heard what had been spoken, yet near enough through the suite of apartments to have seen out on the terrace above the sea. A few minutes before he had left the villa with her other guests, whose boats were taking them across to Naples; now he had returned and awaited her, half with the familiarity of a man who shared her confidence, half with the hesitation of one who fears he may give offence.
"You are here still; and so late! I suppose you bring news of importance you could not give before them?" she said, with a shade of annoyance in the languor of her voice. He had approached with a quick step, an eager warmth upon his face; he was checked and chilled, vaguely yet irresistibly, as he met her glance. He was rarely to be daunted, still less rarely to be shamed; yet he was both now. He paused involuntarily, his eyes fell, and words died on his lips, as he bowed before her.
"And your intelligence?" she asked.
"Intelligence? Caffradali has deserted us."
Idalia lifted her eyebrows.
"He is as well lost as retained. What else?"
"You know that the Ducroscs will send twenty thousand rifles into Poland, and that Falkenstein goes to take the command of the Towaricz?"
She gave a gesture of impatience.
"He will 'command' them when they are organized—when! It was I who sent him. This can scarcely be your intelligence—your intelligence that will not wait till to-morrow?"
He hesitated, with a strangely novel embarrassment upon him.
"I waited—to congratulate you on your conquest of the Prince to the cause."
A light of triumph gave its pride to her eyes, and its warmth to her brow; she smiled, as with the memory of victory.
"Viana! Yes—it is something to have secured him, semi-Bourbon that he is! But I still remain at a loss to imagine why you re-appear at this time of the night."
A flash of anger heated the delicate coldness of her listener's face, his silken and gentle courtesies were forgotten for the moment.
"Such an hour, madame! It is not too late for that wild wanderer yonder to be favoured with an interview!"
The moment the words escaped him he repented them; he knew how rash they were with the nature and disdainful dignity of the woman to whom he spoke. Idalia cast one glance on him of superb indifference; but she gave no betrayal of surprise, not even of disquiet, far less of embarrassment.
"If you only came to arraign my actions. I will be obliged to you to retire."
"Wait. Hear me first. I can act indifference no longer. I came back to-night for one thing only—to tell you what you know, as well as you know that the stars shine yonder—that I love you!"
She heard him with that same indifference, and ironic amusement.
"I think we are too well acquainted with each other for this. I gave you more credit than to suppose you would talk in this fashion."
He looked up at her with a passionate pain; he had been heartless, and been proud of his heartlessness; he had mocked all his life through at what other men felt and suffered, and passion or tenderness had been alike the subject of his most cutting sneer; but—for the moment, at least—his creed had deserted him, his wisdom and his sarcasm had failed him; for the moment he loved, as utterly as ever a lover did, and he felt powerless to make her credit it. But eloquence was always at his bidding, and eloquence came now; every honeyed flattery, every imploríng eagerness, every impassioned pleading, that could warm or shake the heart of the woman who heard him, poured from his lips. Persuasive always, he was a thousand-fold more so now that for the first time in his existence genuine passion had broken up his callousness, and a sense of hopelessness shivered his self-reliance. He loved her, if it were but a mingling of desire, of ambition, of senses intoxicated by her beauty, of pride piqued by her disdain; and he felt impotent to make her even believe this—far more impotent to make her accept it.
She heard him without interruption, smiling a little as she heard; she was half wearied, half amused, as at a comedy known and stale from custom, yet amusing because well acted.
"Monsieur, I gave you credit for better taste," she said, quietly, as he paused. "I have had so much of this so often; granted you are unusually eloquent, unusually graceful, but even with those accessories the tale is very tiresome; and it has one great drawback, you see—we neither of us believe it!"
"Believe! how can I make you believe? I tell you that ever since I saw you first I have been so changed that I have wondered if I lived or dreamed; I have felt all that once I disdained as only fit for boys and fools! What more can I tell you?—you must know that I speak truth."
"What a recantation! I am not a fitting hearer for it at all, nor likely to appreciate it. I will thank you far more to amuse me with your bonmots, which are really good, than to entertain me with your efforts in Romeo's strain, which, though very pretty, are very stale!"
"Wait!—for pity's sake. Doubt what you will, mock at what you will, but believe at least that I love you!"
She laughed softly.
"We do not believe in love—nous autres!"
"And yet men have gone to their death only for love of you!"
"No proof of wisdom if they did."
A little while before he had thought as she thought; a few months earlier and his incredulity of every such madness and emotion was not more scornful than her own; now, intoxicated with the disdainful beauty of the only woman who had ever cost him a moment's pang, he believed in all the wildest follies of romance, and would have staked everything he owned on earth, or wagered on the future, to move her and to win her. For the only time in his life he was baffled, for the only time powerless. His hands clenched where he stood before her.
"Hear me at the least before you banish me. Listen! what is there we might not compass together? You adore sovereignty, it should go hard if I did not give it you. You are ambitious, your ambition cannot overleap mine. We are both against the world; together we would subdue it. Empty thrones have fallen to hands bold enough to grasp them as they reel through revolutions; you and I might wear a crown if our aims and power were one. Love me, and there is no height I will not raise you to, no ordeal I will not pass through for you, no living man who shall baffle or outrun me. I have the genius that rules worlds—I would lay one at your feet."
Every word that he uttered he meant; in the excitement of the instant, sweeping down all the suave and hardened coldness of his temperament, he felt the power in him to do and to dare greatly; he felt that for her, through her, with her, there should be no limit to the ambition and the triumph of his life; he spoke wildly, blindly, exaggeratedly, but he spoke with an exaltation that for the second made him a nobler and a truer man than he had been in all the cool scorn of his wisdom and his mockery. Yet he did not move her, much less did he win her.
She looked at him with a smile in her eyes, and a haughty languor in her attitude. She—merciless from knowing the world too well, and gifted with a penetration far beyond the common range of women—saw that the gold offered her was adulterated; that the springs of his speech were as much self-love as love.
"I understand you," she said, as he paused. "I could advance your ambitions well, and you would be glad that I should do so; your vanity, your policy, your schemes, and—perhaps a little, too—your admiration, are all excited and chime in with another one; and that compound you call love. Well, it is as good a name for it as anything else. But as for thrones! I thought we called ourselves Liberalists and Redressers? Crowns scarcely hang in the air like roses, as you seem to think, for any passer-by to gather them; but if they do, how do you reconcile the desire for one with all your professions of political faith? I suppose, then, like most democrats, you only struggle against tyranny that you may have the right in tum to create yourself Tyrannis?"
His hands closed on a cluster of rhododendrons in the window, and tore them down with an unconscious gesture. In a measure he was wronged; he loved her enough in that moment to have renounced every ambition and every social success for her, and he could not make her even believe that any feeling was in him. In a measure, too, her satire was right, and pierced him the more bitterly because it laid bare so mercilessly all that was confused and unacknowledged to himself. In his pain in her contempt, he hated her almost as much as he loved her, and the old barbaric leaven of jealousy, that he had used to ridicule as the last insanity of fools, broke out despite all self-respect that would have crushed it into silence.
"You are very pitiless, madame!" he said in his teeth. "Do you deal as mockingly with that beggared courier whom you favour with interviews at an hour yon think untimely for lovers less distinguished?"
Her glance swept over him with the grand amazement of one whom no living man ever arraigned. He could not tell whether his insult moved her one whit for sake of the man whom his jealousy seized as his rival; but he saw that it had for ever mined all hope for himself. She looked at him calmly, with a contempt that cut him like a knife.
"I did not know that my wines were so strong or your head so weak. If you transgress the limits of courtesy, I must transgress those of hospitality, and—dismiss you."
He knew that it was as vain to seek to move or sway her from that serene indifference, as to dash himself against the Capri rocks in striving to uproot them; yet in his desperation he lost all the keen and subtle tact, the fine inscrutable ability, that had never failed him save with her. He laid his hands on the sweeping folds of her dress, with the same gesture of entreaty that Erceldoune had used in the unconscious vehemence of his prayer.
"Idalia—stay! Take heed before you refuse my love, for love it is, God help me."
She drew the laces from him, and moved away.
"You have as much belief in the name you invoke, monsieur, as I have in the love for which you invoke it! Come! we alike know the world too well for this comedietta not to weary both. You must end it, or I."
"No!—hear me out," he said, fiercely, almost savagely, for one whose impassive gentleness had commonly been his choicest mask and weapon. "Think twice before you refuse any toleration to my love. Take that, and you shall make me your slave; refuse it, and you will never have had a foe such as you shall find in me. Remember—you cannot brave me lightly, you cannot undo the links that connect us, you cannot wash out my knowledge of all that you have held most secret. Remember whose thoughts and acts and intrigues I have in my keeping. I know that you would give all your loveliness in tribute to me to bribe me from uttering to the world"
"You try intimidation? I accredited you with better breeding and less melodrama," said Idalia, her careless negligence unruffled, as with a bow like that with which queens dismiss their courts, she passed from the chamber ere he could follow or arrest her;—it would have been a man bolder and more blinded still than he was, who should have dared to do either.
He was left there alone, in the midst of the white warm light and of the burnished leaves swaying against the marble columns; to his lips oaths never came, he was too finely polished, but an imprecation was hurled back upon his heart that cursed her with a terrible bitterness, and a hatred great as was his baffled passion. He hated her for his own folly in bending to the common weakness of men; he hated her for the disdainful truth with which he had penetrated the mixed motives in his heart; he hated her for the shame she had put upon him of offering her a rejected and despised passion; he hated her for all the numberless sorceries of her fascination, of her brilliance, of her pride, which had made him weak as water before their spell. To win her there was nothing he would have checked at; she had become the incarnation of his ambitions, as she might have been the means of their fruition; all that gave her danger to other men but gave her added intoxication for him; she would have been to him, had she but loved him, what the genius and the beauty of her whom they called Hellas Rediviva were to Tallien. And more bitter than pride stung, or vanity pierced, or ambition shattered, was the sense that love her as he had, love her as he would, consume his very heart for her sake as he might, he would never—plead, beseech, swear, or prove it as he should—make her believe that one pulse of love beat in him.
And all the bygone ironies and contemptuous scoffs which he had used to cast on those who suffered for the lost smile of a woman's eyes came back upon him now, laughing in his ear and jibing at his weakness like fantastic devils mocking at his fall. A woman had enthralled him; and his philosophics were dead—corpses that lay cold and powerless before him, incapable of rallying to his rescue, things of clay without a shadow's value.