Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE.
The early morning broke on Capri; with the rising of the sun the little fleet of boats all down the shore began to flutter into motion as the birds fluttered into song, the Angelus rang, the full daylight glittered over the white line of towns and villages that nestled far and wide in the bow of the bay; in the transparent air a delicate feathery column of grey smoke curled up from the cone of Vesuvius; the cliffs rose up in the sunlight, vine-covered, and standing like pillars out in the midst of the sea; while the mists were still hanging over that deep blue western depth, stretching out and on to the Mediterranean, farther and farther towards the columns of Hercules and the gates of the African and Asian worlds.
In her own chamber, a morning-room whose Windows, clustered round with trained myrtle and clematis, looked out down the shelving cliff on to the sea, Idalia stood; her head was bent, her eyes were grave and filled with thought, and her lips had as much of disdain as of melancholy; she looked a woman to dare much, to reign widely, to submit rarely, to fear never. Yet she was in bondage now.
At a breakfast table, a little distance from her sat Conrad, Count Phaulcon. He was smoking, having finished with the coffee and claret, fruit and fish beside him, and was looking at her under his lashes, a look half wary, half admiring, half angered, half exultant, the look of a man foiled in holding her by intimidation, but successful in holding her by power; yet not wholly at his ease with her, nor wholly so with himself.
"If you would only hear reason," he said, impatiently; he had vanquished her in one sense, but in another she was still his victor, and he was restless under it.
"I am happy to hear reason," she answered coldly, "but of dishonour I am—a little tired!"
There was a certain listless satiric bitterness in the last words.
"Dishonour!" echoed Phaulcon, while the blood flushed over his forehead, and he moved irritably. "How strangely you phrase things! What has changed you so? For a woman of the world, a woman of your acumen, of your experience, of your brilliancy!—to pause and draw back for such puerile after-thoughts—I cannot in the least comprehend it. What a sceptre you hold! Bah! stronger than any queen's. Queens are mere fantoccini—marionnettes crowned for a puppet-show, and hung on wires that each minister pulls after his own fancy; but you have a kingdom that is never limited, except at your own choice; an empire that is exhaustless, for when you shall have lost your beauty, you will still keep your power. You smile, and the politician tells you his secret; you woo him, and the velvet churchman unlocks his intrigues; you use your silver eloquence, and you save a cause or free a country. It is supreme power, the power of a woman's loveliness, used as you use it, with a statesman's skill."
She smiled slightly; but the tranquil carelessness and resistance of her attitude did not change. Those persuasive, vivacious, hyperbolic words—she remembered how fatal a magic, how alluring a glamour such as they had once had for her; they had no charm now, they had long ceased to have any.
"A supreme power!" pursued Phaulcon. "In the rose-water of your hookahs you steep their minds in what colour you will. With the glance of your eyes, you unnerve their wills, and turn them which way yon choose. In an opera supper you enchant their allegiance to what roads you like; in the twilight of a boudoir you wind the delicate threads that agitate nations. You are in the heart of conspiracies, in the secrets of cabinets, in the destinies of coalitions, and with Fascination conquer, where Reason would fail. It is the widest power in the world; it is that of Antonina, of Marcia, of Olympia, of Pompadour! What can be lacking in such a life?"
"Only what was wanting in theirs—honour!"
The words were spoken very calmly, but there was not the less meaning in them.
"Honour! What makes you all in a moment so in love with that word? There was a time when you saw nothing but what was triumph in your career."
"It is not for you to reproach me with that."
Over his changing, handsome, eloquent features a certain flush and shadow came.
"Reproach! I would rather reproach you with the change. And why should there be this continued estrangement between us, Idalia? You loved me once."
Her eyes dwelt on his musingly, very mournfully, with that lustre of disdtain that was in them, mingled with a momentary wistfulness of recollection.
"Yes, I loved you once," she answered, and her voice had an excessive gentleness in it; but he knew her meaning too well to ask why it was that this was now solely and irrevocably of the past.
He was silent some moments; the dashing and reckless Free Lance felt an embarrassment and a sense of mortification in her presence. He could hold this haughty and exquisite woman in a grip of steel, and feel a savage victory in forcing the proud neck that would not bend, to lie beneath his heel; he could take a refined exultation of cruelty in seeing her pride rebel, her instincts recoil, her dignity suffer mutely; he could amuse himself with all this with a rich pleasure in it. Nevertheless, he owed her many and heavy debts; he gave her an admiration that was tinged still with a strange tyrannous wayward sort of love; he held her in an unwilling homage that made him half afraid of her, and he shrank under the sense of her censure and of her rebuke.
In one sense he was her master, but in another she was far above him, in another she was his ruler, and escaped his power.
He rose restlessly; the glance he gave her was doubtful and embarrassed, and his tone was half appealing, half imperious.
"Well, there is one thing, I want more money."
"You always want money!"
There was a weary scorn in her words, the scorn of a proud woman forced into companionship with what has sunk too utterly in her eyes for any other feeling save that only of an almost compassionate contempt.
Phaulcon laughed; not because he was impervious to the contempt, but because the temper of the man was really lightly and idly insouciant, careless as any butterfly, except in hate.
"Of course! who doesn't? Is there anything money won't buy, from a woman's love to a priest's absolution? Tell me that! A man without money is like a man born into the world without his eyes or his legs; he exists, he doesn't live: he hibernates miserably, he never knows what it is to enjoy! Who are the kings of the earth? The Hopes, the Pereires, the Rothschilds, the Barings. War could not be begun, imperial crowns would never come out of pawn, nations would collapse in bankruptcies, thrones would crash down to the dust, and nobles turn crossing-sweepers, without them. Who rule Europe, kings, ministers, cabinets, troops? Faugh! not one whit of it—the Capitalists! Which was the potentate, the great Emperor who owed the bond, or the great Fugger who could afford to put it in the fire? Yes, I do want money. Can you let me have any?"
Her lips moved slightly, she restrained whatever words might rise to them, but she did not repress the disgust that was spoken silently on them.
"You wish to ruin my fortune now?"
"Far from it," laughed Phaulcon. "I am not like the boy who killed his goose of the golden eggs. I would not ruin you on any account; but even if I did, you know very well that any one of your friends would willingly make up any breaches I caused in your wealth."
Where she stood, with one hand leaning idly on the carved ivory of a chess king, she turned with a sudden gesture. He had broken down her haughty silence, her studied contemptuous tranquillity at last. A flush rose over her brow, her lips quivered, not with fear, but with loathing; her eyes flashed fire. All the gentleness that in her moments of abandonment characterised her, and all the languor that at other hours made her so indolently and ironically indifferent, changed into a fearless defiance, the more intense from its force of contrast with the restrained serenity of her past self-control.
"One other word like that and you never enter my presence again, if to be free from you I close the gates of a convent on my own life. What! are yon so vile as that? Is all shame lost in you?"
If it were not, there were moments when he was as bad a man as the world held, when the devil in him was alone victorious, and all conscience that had ever lingered was crushed out and forgotten. Her words, and yet far more, her look, lashed all that was evil in his nature to its height.
He laughed aloud.
"'A world of scorn looks beautiful' in you, that I grant, Eccellenza! At the same time your title to it is not quite clear. It is for the women who go to Courts to smile with that superb disdain, to answer with that proud defiance—not for the Countess Vassalis!"
There was not much in the words themselves, but in their tones there was an intolerable insolence, an intolerable insult. The fire in her eyes burned deeper still, her breath came rapidly, her whole form was instinct with a passion held in rein, rather for sake of her own dignity than for any more timorous thing. Standing in that haughty wrath, that self-enforced restraint, she looked like some superb stag, some delicate antelope, at bay, and panting to spring on its foes.
"Do yon think such taunts as that—your taunts! have power to wound me for one instant? Where is your boasted wisdom? It has forsaken you strangely, as strangely as your memory! Whatever I have lost, the loss is due to you; whatever I have erred in, the error lies with you; whatever wreck my life has made, is wrecked through you; whatever taint is on my name, was brought there first by you. You have tried my patience long and often; you have tried it once too much. You have trusted to the tie that is between us; it is broken for ever as if it had not been. Insult through you I have continually borne. What the world has said has been as nothing to me, my life is not ruled by it, my honour is not touched by it. But insult from you I will never bear. Be my destroyer as you choose; but your accomplice again you shall never make me—nor your dupe. Stand aside, sir, I will hear no more words."
He had laid his hand upon her arm, she shook him off with an action as intense in its gesture of contempt as her words had been intense in their concentrated passion, and swept beyond him towards the doorway of her chamber.
Phaulcon sprang before her, and stood between her and the closed doors; there was a taint of cowardice in his nature, and he had forgotten all policy when he had let malice and vengeance hurry him into an open rupture with one who was beyond all others needful to him, and who, whatever her foes, whatever her faults, still never feared.
"Idalia!—wait."
" Let me pass, sir."
"No, by Heaven! not in such a mood."
"You wish to compel me to summon my household?"
"I wish to induce you to hear reason."
"Your euphuistic synonym for some new villany? I have answered you already."
"Softly, softly! It will not do for us to quarrel. You know the terms on which alone you can make such an answer final." "Your persecution? I am indifferent to it. Allow me to pass."
"Pardon me, no. The terms I meant were—the breaking of your oath."
He spoke very gently, yet at the words she turned pale for the first time in their interview, as though he had pierced her where she was without shield; she did not reply, and he pursued his advantage.
"Tell me,—will your new and eccentric fancy for 'honour' be greatly gratified by the deliberate rupture of your sworn word? When men and women talk much of their honour, to be sure they are always conscious of having lost it, or being just about to lose it with a more flagrant bankruptcy than common; but still, your newly-adopted principle will be ill-commenced by the repudiation of your pledged oath, of your bound engagement."
Still she said nothing, only in her eyes suppressed passion gleamed, and her hand clenched as though, but for her dignity's sake, it would have found force to strike him where he stood.
Conrad Phaulcon smiled.
"I am no tyrant, no harsh task-master, my most beautiful Countess, and I frankly admit that I admire you more in your haughty rebellion than I do in the softest smile with which you enchant all our good friends. I exact nothing. I command nothing. I merely remind you—you cannot break from me without also breaking your promise, and more than your promise—your oath. However, a woman's word, I suppose—even when it is sworn, even when it is the word of such a woman as yourself, who have none of your sex's weaknesses—is only given to be broken. Is it so?"
She answered nothing still; a slight quick shudder of hatred or of contempt passed over her one moment; she was torn inwardly with such a conflict as the prisoner on parole feels when he might break his fetters away, and strive, at least, for the sweet chance of liberty, were he not held back by one torturing memory—his word.
Suddenly she turned and bent rapidly towards him, her eyes looking into his with so full and brilliant a lustre of unuttered scorn, that he started and drew back.
"You sell everything—your body and your soul! What bribe would you take to give me my release?"
"What bribe? None! You are much more to me, my exquisite Idalia, than any gold, well as I love the little god. 'Bribe!' What an ugly word! Bribes are like medicines; every one takes them, but no one talks about them. Your 'release' too I when you live as free as air!"
She said no more, but stood aloof from him again in haughty and enforced composure.
"Leave my presence, or let me pass out," she said, briefly. "One or the other."
"Either, wiih pleasure, if you will giye me two answers. First, will you break your oath?"
The look that gave so much of heroism and of grandeur to her beauty passed across it; to stoop to supplication to him would have been as utterly impossible to her as to have put down her neck beneath his heel, and though she could not break his bonds, she was not vanquished by him. She answered with a calm endurance that obeyed, not him, but the law of her own nature:
"No."
"Ah, that is well and wise, ma belle. Now for the other question. Yon will give me the money?"
"No."
The reply was precisely the same as it had been before: the triumph in his eyes fell.
"And why not?"
"Because every sum I gave you now would seem given because I feared you. Fall as low as that, yon know well enough that I shall never do. As far as you hold me by my oath, so far I will hold myself bouid, no farther; for the rest I have said—all is cancelled henceforward between us.
"What? Do yon mean that you deny my title to my power on you? Do you mean that it can ever be possible for your mere will to cancel such a tie as there is between us? Do you mean that, if you pretend to forget the past and all my claims on you, I shall ever allow them to be forgotten?"
"'Forgotten?' No. It is not so easy to forget. But trade on them longer, I have said, you shall never do. I have endured your exactions too many years already."
"But, by Heaven! then I insist"
"You cannot insist. If you need money, you know the price of it: my release from you, as far as you have the power to bestow it. On other terms, you will never again live on my gold. The choice will be for you."
"But I demand"
"You can demand nothing, sir."
And with a movement that even now did not stoop to be hurried, or lose in any sort its dignity, she swept by him before he could arrest her, passed through the door, and closed it.
He knew Idalia well enough to know that to forcée himself on her, or seek to intimidate her into compliance with his will, would be as utterly vain as to seek to quarry with a razor the great black heights of Tiberio towering yonder in the light. Half the victory was in his hands, half in hers. To gain the rest, he knew that he must wait.
He left her, and went out across the gardens and down the winding way that led along the rocks to the shore. He was not wholly satisfied with his morning's work; he felt the mute resistance of a proud nature against a power of which he was tyrannously and inexorably jealous, and he knew that this power did not extend over her money, of which he had often received much, of which he was always wanting to receive more. Besides, with all his evil triumph in galling and goading her to his uttermost ingenuity, a certain shame was always on him before Idalia, and a certain love for her always survived in his heart; love that was always strangely blent with something of unwilling homage, of reluctant awe, and, now and then, of absolute repentance.
He would not have undone one of the links of the fetters he had made her wear under the purple-hemmed and gold-broidered robes of her beauty, freedom, and supremacy; but at the same time, in her presence or freshly from it, he felt ashamed of having forged them. Long habit had killed almost everything in him that had once been a little better; but Conrad Phaulcon had still here and there certain flashes of conscience left.
As he went towards the beach, round a sharp point of rock abruptly jutting out with its hanging screen of ivy and myrtle, ere he looked where he went, his foot was almost against the arm of a man lying there, in the shadow, asleep.
Erceldoune lay on the grass, the horse standing motionless beside him; his limbs were stretched out in all their careless magnificence of strength, his head had fallen slightly back, his chest rose and fell with the calm breathings of a deep repose, and as the morning light slanted through a fissure of the cliffs it was full upon his face, from which in repose the dauntless light, the eagle fire, had gone, and only had left now a profound and serene melancholy.
It was yet early; sleep had only come to him as the sun had risen, after hours of intense excitement, and a night of extreme bodily fatigue. There was nothing to awaken him here, and lulled by the pleasant murmur of the seas and the warmth of the young day, he dreamt on still. The Greek started violently, and a fierce panther-like longing was the first thing that seized him, mingled with supreme amazement; a ferocious vindictiveness darkened and flushed the glory of his face; he paused, his lips a little parted, his teeth ground, his whole form quivering with the longing to spring; his temperament was intensely vivacíous, and years had done nothing to chill if they had done much to harden him, and little by little be bad so gathered up bis hatred towards the man be had injured, that it was as great as though that injury had been received, instead of given, by him.
He stooped over the sleeper, noting the unarmed powerlessness of that slumber, while his glance wandered by sheer instinct towards a loose, weighty, mallet-like mass of granite lying near him. One blow from it in a sure hand, and the life would be still before it could waken for a struggle, a shout, a sigh.
"I might crush out bis brains as easily as a fly, and, by God, I could do it, too!" he thought, in a fierce blindness of hatred that remembered only that night ride through the pomegranates, and forgot all the vileness of bis own brutality towards this man who lay sleeping at bis feet.
Witbout waking, Erceldoune stirred slightly; his right band that lay open, clenched; be turned with a restless sigh—he was dreaming of Idalia still. At the movement bis foe cowered, and drew back involuntarily; pusillanimity ran in his blood, and he had a keen dread of this "Border Eagle," who had been invulnerable under so many shots, and had had a resurrection almost from the grave; a dread nearly as strong as his hate for him. Moreover, with that action be remembered many things, policy before all, which forbade him to attempt any risk of reckoning with the man he had left for dead in the Carpathians. He took one long glance at him—the glance of hatred is as lingering as that of love, and of still surer recollection—then hastily and noiselessly turned aside over the thick grasses, and went bis way down to the beach.
It was not through any sense of shame or of humanity that be left the sleeping man unharmed, it was not even that he would have shrunk from crushing the life out of him as mercilessly as out of a cicala; it was only that he remembered the danger and unwisdom of such self-indulgence, and also, in some faint emotion, he felt a sense that Idalia was near them both—too near for him to sink into such crime as this. In his own way he loved her, in his own way revered her, though he cared nothing how he tortured, almost as little how he ruined her. While under her influence he could not be his worst.
An hour later he had crossed the bay, and approached a palazetto smothered in orange trees, whose terraces overhung the sea, odorous, and shaded deep with myrtle. He made his way unannounced, and passing through several chambers entered one in which he found the temporary owner of the house, who looked up wearily and listlessly;—the owner was Víctor Vane.
"Well?" he asked, as the door closed.
"That Scot! That courier!" panted Phaulcon.
"He is in Capri. I passed him lying asleep on the grass; I could have killed him like a dog. Does he know Idalia? Is it possible he can have learnt that it was she who saved him?"
"Know Idalia? Yes, beyond doubt, he knows her."
"He does? She never named him to me!"
"Very possibly; but you remember how she saved him, and Miladi has her caprices!—she had him with her day after day in the East."
The words were languid still; there was no irritation expressed in them, but there was a significance for which, had Erceldoune been there, the speaker would have been hurled out on to his terrace with as little ceremony as though he had been dead Border grouse.
Even his comrade and sworn ally darted a look on him savage, passionate, but withal that better than any look he had given, for a hot and frank wrath was in it, with something of generous challenge.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean what I say—no more. This gentleman—your Carpathian friend—found her out while he was chasing what he very absurdly calls his 'assassin' down the Bosphorus shore; he dined with her when we were there, and the Countess appeared to take a very flattering interest in the landless laird. He is a handsome giant, you know, and I have often noticed that your women of intellect have a wonderful eye for physical perfections!"
With every quiet word he plunged a stab of steel into his listener's heart, with every one he veiled more closely the passions that were moving in his own. The colour changed in Phaulcon's face, he writhed under every syllable, but he could resist none; the same merciless tyranny as he had exercised over Idalia was used over him now, and he had not the fearless and haughty strength which was in hers that could have enabled him to defy or to disdain it.
"In the East—in the East?" he muttered. "With her?—and she never told me!"
"Caro! Did you imagine you had your fair Countess's confidence? I can assure you you are excessively mistaken."
Phaulcon shook in all his limbs with restrained passion. Well as he knew the art of word-torturing, he was scarce so perfect an adept in it as his friend.
"Do you mean" he began impetuously, and paused.
Vane laughed, rose» and sauntered a little way from the table.
"Have you breakfasted? Do I mean what? Just taste one of these citrons; they are the first ripe this season. Do I mean that your friend, the Border Chief, has lost his head after the Countess Vassalis? Yes, I do mean it. He is wildly in love with her, and he has eyes that say so remarkably well, considering that he had loved nothing but tiger-shooting and hard riding till that charming piece of romance in the Carpathians."
The words were easy, indifferent, a little flippant and contemptuous: they stung the Greek like so many scorpions. He flung himself out of his seat, and paced to and fro the apartment with fierce breathless oaths ground out on his lips. Vane looked at him with an admirable affectation of amused astonishment.
"Pace, pace, caro!" he said, softly. "Why will you always be so impetuous? Vesuvius yonder, who looks rather dangerous to-day by-the-by, was never more impulsive! What annoys you so much in this colossal courier being in love with Miladi Idalia? He is not the first by many a score!"
Conrad Phaulcon swung round and strode up to his tormentor.
"By Heaven, if you taunt me, or scoff at her with that"
"Gently, gently, très cher! We do not quarrel. Besides, there is really no object in assuming all that with me. Just recollect how long I have known you—and how well!"
Phaulcon was silenced, and lashed into obedience: his head dropped; he turned again, and paced the chamber with fast, uneven steps.
"This idea annoys you," pursued his counsellor, leisurely. "I grant his presence is troublesome, awkward indeed for you; and Scotch patience with Spanish fire is a disagreeable combination. Besides, your own excessive impetuosity made that little affair very notorious; if he were to recognise you, I fear, do what you would, something extremely unpleasant would result. Still, with due caution this might not happen, and no danger need occur from it if Idalia do not betray you, and that she probably will not do, unless—unless" Victor paused a moment, and let his eyes drop on his companion. "He is a magnificent man to look at, and adores her in all good faith, which might have the charm of novelty," he added, in a musing whisper.
"Damnation! I would lay her dead at my feet if I thought"
Vane raised his hand in deprecation.
"Pray do not be so very excessive! That language was all very well in the middle ages; both you and Sir Fulke Erceldoune have dropped in on us by mistake, out of the Crusades. But your brilliant Idalia is not a woman to be murdered. In the first place, she is too beautiful; in the second, she is too notorious; in the third, a glance of her eyes would send any assassin back again unnerved and unstrung. No; you must neither kill him, nor kill her. The idea! What barbarism, and what blundering. It is only—excuse me—madmen who use force; is it not their own necks that pay the penalty?"
"But do you mean that she has any sort of feeling for this accursed Scot?"
The other smiled.
'Dear friend, is it for me to say what new caprice your fair Countess's will may indulge in? Certainly, if one might attribute such a provinciality to the most accomplished woman of her time, I should have said, by the little I saw in Constantinople, that she did feel some sort of tenderness to your Titan of an enemy. At least, she made him win at baccarat, bade me harm him 'at my peril', and spent the hours alone with him in a very poetic manner. Though really I cannot imagine why she should smile on a penniless Queen's Messenger, except by the feminine rule of contradiction!"
Lashing him like the separate cords of a scourge, each word fell on his listener's ear. Vane watched his fury with gratified amusement; this thing had been bitter beyond all conception to him, lightly and idly as he purposely spoke of it, and it rejoiced him with a compensating satisfaction to turn its bitterness elsewhere. Furious oaths in half the tongues of Europe chased themselves one after another off the Greek's lips. Vane let this galled and futile passion spend itself in its vain wrath some moments, then he spoke again:
"The idea annoys you? Well, certainly he is an inconvenient person to be on the list of her lovers. But what can you do? As for shooting him, or doing anything of the kind, that would create a fracas,—ít is not to be thought of. If yon let him see you, all he will do will be to knock you down, and give you into arrest. Beside this, Idalia is in a great measure independent of you; over her wealth you have no legal control, and all moral claim to coerce her you have yourself forfeited. True, you have a hold on her by many things; but that hold could not prevent this beau seigneur of the barren moors from being her lover, if she choose to break her vows for him, especially if she be quite frank with him, and let him know all. Really, on my honour, placed as you are through that terrible impulsiveness which you never will abandon, I do not see how you are to step between Madame de Vassalis and this modern Bothwell, if they choose to play at Love for a little while with each other."
And Vane softly finished his citron, having spoken the most stinging words he could have strung together with the gentle, persuasive accent of a woman coaxing her best friend. Phaulcon swung round and strode up to him as he had done before, his eyes glittering with fire, his face darkly flushed.
"Perdition seize you! if you dare to make a jest of"
"Chut!" said Vane, with the suavest hush that ever fell from any lips. "Caro mio, if I speak a little lightly of your lovely Idalia, whose fault is it?—'is it not thine, O my friend?' Altro! keep that style for men who have not worn the badge of silver ivy with you at an opera ball. As regards this affair—he is certainly in love with her; she possibly encourages it. Unlikely, I know, but still—I repeat—possible. He is an excessively fine man! Therefore, since you cannot appear in the matter, owing to various little intricacies, what steps will you take? It is a delicate question, cher Conrad; the Countess Idalia is not a woman to brook open interference:—even with your title to give it. She is very proud! I am wholly with you, and I am not inclined to be very simpatico to that Arab-looking courier; but you must really be cautious how you touch him; that matter would look very ugly if it turned up against you. The idea of firing at him at all!—and then of not hitting him when you did fire! Will you not believe me how very mistaken all impulsiveness is?"
Phaulcon writhed under the negligent, gently-uttered phrases; all the pent passion in him was tenfold hotter and darker, because it was in so great a measure powerless; but he was blinded to all that Victor chose him to be blind to—namely, his panion's own love for her of whom they spoke—and he dreamed of nothing in his words beyond their mutual antagonism for the man they had mutually injured.
An hour went by before they parted; left alone, the master of the dainty palazetto overhanging the Neapolitan waves neither peeled a citron, nor toyed lightly with this thought of Erceldoune's presence in Capri. On the contrary, admirably though he had veiled them, passions fiercer than the Greek's had lightened in him with the intelligence: the delicate colourlessness of his face flushed with a faint hot hue, his blue smiling eyes gleamed like steel, he set his teeth with a snarl like a greyhound's.
"She loves him, or she will love him;—how soft her eyes grew for him in the East! There is no assassinating him—only fools kill. There is no challenging him—that is long out of date, and, besides, he is as good a shot as any of us, or better. There is no ruining him—his fortunes are ruined already, and he is too world-wise to attempt any lies to her with a chance of success. If she choose to allow his love, who can prevent that?—Conrad cannot exert his title while the Moldavian affair hangs over his head. There is only one chance;—if he be such a fool as to take his passion seriously, if he be ignorant of her history, and give her headlong faith. But that is such a hazard!—he is in love with her beauty, what would he care though one proved to him that she were vile as Messalina? Ah, Idalia! bellissima Idalia! yon are haughty as a queen, and beautiful as a goddess, and dangerous as a velvet-voiced cardinal, and brightly keen as the wisest statesman, but"
And while these thoughts strayed through his mind, he thrust the knife he held up to its haft in a pomegranate amongst the citrons; and while the red juice welled out, and the purple pulp seemed to shrink as though wounded, he plunged the blade, down and down, again and again, into the heart of the fruit, as though the action were a relief to him, as though the stab to the pomegranate were an allegory.
Yet with it a nobler feeling, a melancholy that was for the moment too deep to be able to replace regret by retaliation, came on him.
"She could have made me what she would!" he thought. "I could have won a throne for her. Greece swings in the air for any bold hand to seize; a turn of the wheel, and Hungary may be thrown in the lottery; free Venetia, and she would give the sceptre to her deliverer. Such things have been; they will be again. Valerían was a common soldier, Themistocles was a bastard, Bonaparte an artillery officer—what has been may be again. They were once far farther off power than I. For myself, I could do all that is possible—with her, I would do the impossible!"
A smile crossed his face at the dreaming wildness of his own thoughts; his profound acumen could never so wholly desert him that he could be the prey to any emotion without some sense of ridicule and disdain even for himself; but there was more of paín at his heart than of self-contempt; he felt, even amidst the jealous bitterness that was turning his love into hatred, that he should have become a better and a truer man had Idalia returned his passion.
"I dream like a boy, or a madman!" he thought, while his hand crushed with a fierce gesture an odorous crown of orange-flowers, and flung the bruised petals out to the sea. "And yet,—with her,—I could have had force in me to make even such dreams real. If she had loved me, I would have slaved for her, dared for her, conquered for her. If she had loved me, there is nothing I would not have compassed."
Even where he stood in solitude, his lips quivered and his forehead contracted, as under some unbearable physical pain; hardly thirty years were over his head, all the maturity of life lay before him; he felt that he had the genius in him to rule men and to carve himself a memory in history; he had the ability that would have made him a supreme and triumphant statesman; he would have been this, he would not have failed to be it, had opportunity been his. As it was, he saw the portals of fame closed to him through the disadvantages of position, and the exercise of power denied to him because he had not the primary power of money. Impatient and bitter at his exile from legitimate fields he had thrown himself into bastard politics; and adventured his fate with the secret and uncertain gambling of intrigue and conspiracy.
He hated Austria, and would have schemed night and day to humble her; beyond this feeling he had as little unison as might be with his associates; for the grandeur of theoretic republicanism, for the regeneration of Italy, for the freedom of Hungary or Poland, for the advance of the high-flown quixotism of Garibaldians, or for such poetic partisanship as breathed in "Casa Guidi Windows," he had never a single throb of sympathy. But he loved the power that it seemed to him he might obtain through them; he loved the machinations that in their work he wove so wisely and so well; he foresaw what had not then come, the certain downfall of the Neapolitan Bourbons; he had the spirit of the gamester, and was happiest in the recklessness of chance; he had the ambition of a statesman, and he aspired, in the revival of nationalities and in the turmoil of new liberties, to seize the moment to advance himself to the prominence and the predominance which he coveted. Therefore he had embraced a party with which his temper had little akin, whose views his own mind disdained as chimerical, and whose cause only his thwarted ambitions induced him to embrace. As yet, though he held a great power in his hands over the lives of men whose projects and whose aspirations were all confided to his mercy, no substantial power had accrued to him; he had reaped but little, he had risked much, and his accumulated debts were very heavy. As he saw himself now—although in general, when in the full excitement of his life, the full complexity of its intrigues, he thought other- wise—he saw the truth: that in the flower of his manhood he was without a career, without a future; that with all his talents, graces, and fashion, he was no more than an adventurer; that bankruptcy, pecuniary and social, might any hour fall on him; that—stripped of the brilliance of his elegant world, and of the euphuisms of a political profession—he was neither more nor less in literal fact than a gamester, a spy, and a beggared speculator in the great hazards of European destinies. In such a mood he hated himself, he hated all he was allied with, he hated the world that he had the genius and the tact to rule, yet in which he absolutely owned not even a sum enough to save him from hopeless ruin whenever the fate that hung over him should fall. And a greater bitterness than even this came on him: for once he loved; for once he felt that greater, better, truer things might have been possible for him; for once a pang, almost as sharp as agony, seized him in dreaming of what he might have been.
For once he suffered.
Every disdainful word, every contemptuous glance, every cold rebuke, of the woman he coveted with the passion of ambition, as well as with the passion of love, seemed burned into his memory and perpetually before him. He could not even make her believe that he loved her!—that was the deadliest pang of all. Hate, cruel, fierce, remorseless, the most insatiate hate of all, the hate which springs from baffled love, wound its way into his thoughts again. Before now, he had been a cold tactician, an unscrupulous intriguer, a man who cared nothing at what cost his ends were gained, but still one who, from innate gentleness of temper and instinctive refinement of nature, had felt no sort of temptation towards grosser and darker evil; had, indeed, ridiculed it as the clumsy weapon of the ignorant and the fool; now he was in that mood when the heart of the man possessed by it cries thirstily, "Evil, be thou my good."
"I have all their cards in my hands," he thought, where he leaned, musingly flinging the buds of the gum-cistus into the water below. "A word from me—and her haughty head would lie on the stone floor of a dungeon."
The thought grew on him, strangely changing the character of his features as it worked out its serpent’s undulations through his mind. His clear and sunny eyes grew cruel; his delicate lips hardened into a straight acrid line; his smooth brow darkened and contracted; this man, who had had before but the subtle, graceful swoop, the bright, unerring keenness of the falcon, now stooped lower, and had the merciless craft, the lust to devour and to destroy, of the fox.
He drew out of his pocket a letter in a miniature Italian hand; such a hand as a Machiavelli, a John de Medici, or an Acquaviva, might have written. He read it slowly, weighing every line, then put it back into its resting-place, with a certain dísdain and sneer upon his face:—there was not the brain in Europe, he thought, that could outwit his.
"Austria will bid higher than that," he mused, "and the young wretch here will fall as Bourbons always fell. Six months, and he will be driven out of Naples—it would be much to be his 'Count d'Avalto' and his 'Lord Chamberlain' then! Fools! do they think such a bribe as that would take? If I make terms, it shall be with the Hapsburg; they shall pay me in proportion to my hate. They know what my enmity has meant!"
He leaned musingly over the marble parapet of his terrace, the lines of cruelty and of craft sinking deeper into his fair unworn face; even to him, free from all such weaknesses as an unprofítable honour, and not unwilling to sell his hate, as he would have sold his intellect, for power, even to him there was something bitter and shameful in the thought of treason—something that made him recoil from the desertion of those who had been allied to him so long, and acceptance of those who had so long had his deepest hatred; something that made the very silence of the Italian noon, the very melody of the Italian seas, the very cadence of a boat-song, that echoed dreamily over the waves from a distance, that only let its closing cadence, "Libertà! O Libertà!" come upon his ear, seem like a reproach to him by whom she—this Italy in chains, this Italy ruined through her own fatal dower of a too great beauty—was about to be betrayed.
There never yet was the man so hardened that he could play the part, and take the wage of an Iscariot, without this pang.
"She does it," he said, in his teeth, with a sophism that ere now he would have disdained. "She might have made me what she would; she chooses to make me"
"A traitor," was not uttered even clearly in his thoughts; who thinks out clearly such thoughts as these to the last iota of their own damnable meaning? A shiver, too, ran through him as he recalled a risk that even his fertile statecraft could not avail to ward off from him, the step he meditated once being taken;—the risk of the stab-thrust in the back from the poinard of the "Brotherhood", which even in this day, even in the streets of polished European capitals, strikes soon or late, howsoever high they stand in a traitor's guilty purples, those who have broken the oath of those secret bonds.
Then he laughed; a smile in which the last instinct of his better natura died.
"Faugh! my good Italians shall believe that I join the White Coats to serve Venetia: my blind Viennese shall think I wear a fair face to Italy to entrap her confidence for them. It is so easy to dupe both. And she—Naples will suffice for that. A whisper of mine to Monsignor Giulio, and scorn and wit, and statesmanship, and wealth, and all the cozenries of her loveliness, all the resources of her art, will avail her nothing. There, in the Vicaria, what will she do with her beauty, and her kingdom, and her lovers, and the insolence of her pride, then? Better have shared a crown with me!"
As his thoughts formed themselves into ruthless shape that dulled remorse, and stole swiftly and surely on the evil path which tempted him, the whole man in him changed: the gentleness of his nature grew into fierce lust, the unscrupulous subtlety of his intellect was merged into a deadly thirst for retaliation. On the woman who had scornfully repelled him he could have dealt a hundred deaths.
Yet for one moment more the love he had borne her vanquished him again, and he remembered nothing but its pain, its wrong, and its rejection; for one moment more he gave himself up to the misery, the weakness, the shame, as he held it, of this fool's idolatry;—it was the one thing alone, loathingly as he contemned it, that could have made him a better and a truer man.
His head dropped till it sank down on to his arms, that were folded on the marble ledge, and a sharp quiver like a woman's weeping shook him from head to foot.
"I would have forgiven her all—even her scorn," he thought, "if only she would have believed that I loved her!"