Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 4

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER IV.

"a temple not made with hands."

The day on which Conrad Phaulcon left her was just in the mellow heat of noon, yet not oppressive where the great overhanging rocks with drooping masses of entwined foliage shut out the sun; and where in the privacy of her villa gardens Idalia came, leaving her prosecutor to his half triumphant and half mortified solitude.

Alone, she sank down on the stone bench that overlooked the sea, while the hound Sulla was couched at her feet; alone, a profound weariness and dejection broke down the pride which had never drooped before her foe, while a passionate hatred quivered over the fairness of her face.

"Oh God!" she said, half aloud in the unconscious utterance of her thoughts, "and I once believed in that man as simple women believe in their religion! Fool—fool—fool! And yet I was so young then; how could I know what I worked for myself?—how could I know what depths of vileness were in him?"

The dog before her, lying like a lion at rest, with his muzzle down, lifted bis head with a loud bay of wrath, and a snarling growl of menace and defiance: he heard the footsteps of Count Conrad passing downward on the other side of the villa towards the beach, and he hated him with all a hound's unforgiving intensity; once, months before, Phaulcon had been so incautious, in a fit of passion, as to strike the stately Servian monarch, and, but for Idalia, would have been torn in pieces for the indignity. Sulla had never pardoned it.

His mistress laid her hand upon his neck, and her teeth set slightly, while her splendid head was lifted with a haughty action that followed the colour of her thoughts.

"Let him be, Sulla. The man who is false is beneath rebuke or revenge!"

And to those who should have known her rightly that proud contempt would have been more than any vengeance she could have given. She sat there many moments—moments that rolled on till they grew more than hours; her eyes watching the boats tjat passed and repassed below in the Capriote waters, her thoughts far from the scene around her. Her life had been changeful, varied, spent in many countries, and conversant with many things; its memories were as numerous as the sands, but what was written on them was not to be effaced as it could be effaced on the shore. The reverse of Eugénie de Guerin, who was "always hoping to live, and never lived," she had lived only too much, only too vividly. She had had pleasure in it, power in it, triumph in it; but now the perfume and the effervescence of the wine were much evaporated, and there was bitterness in the cup, and a canker in the roses that had crowned its brim. For——she was not free.

Like the Palmyran queen she felt the fetters underneath the purples, and the jewelled links of gold she wore were symbols of captivity; moreover, conscience had wakened in her, and would not sleep.

She rose at last; she knew many would visit her during the day, and she was, besides, no lover of idle dreams or futile regrets; brilliant as Aspasia, and classically cultured as Héloise, she was not a woman to let her hours drift on in inaction or in fruitless reverie; no days were long for her even now that she rebelled against the tenor and the purpose of her life.

With the hound beside her she left the cliff, and moved slowly, for the heat was at its height, backward towards her house; a step rapidly crushed the cyclomen, the leaves were swept quickly aside, and in her path stood Erceldoune. The meeting was sudden to both. It was impossible that either could for the moment have any memory save that of the words with which they had so lately parted; over the bronze of his face the blood flushed hotly, from the fairness of hers it faded; she paused, and for the moment her worldly grace forsook her. She stood silent while he bowed before her.

"Madame, I had your promise that you would receive me; not, I hope, in vain?"

The words were slight, were ceremonious: she had forbidden him all others; but in his voice were the feverish entreaty, the idolatrous slavery to her, which, repressed in speech, were so intense in his own heart.

"I do not break my promises," she said, gently; "and—and you will not do so either. Are you staying in Capri, that you are here so early?"

His eyes looked into hers with a mute, imploring suffering that touched her more deeply than any words could have done.

"While I have strength to keep my word, I will. I cannot say my strength will endure long—you put it to a hard test. How hard, God only knows!"

She stood silent a moment; then she moved on with a negligent dignity.

"Pardon me—I put it to no test. I but told you the terms on which our friendship can continue. I told you, too, that it were better ended at once. I say so now."

There was far more of melancholy than of coldness in the answer, chill though it might be. One long step brought him to her side as she passed onward, and his voice was low in her ear.

"We said enough of that last night! I will keep my word while I may; till I break it, I claim yours. Make my misery if you must, but let me cheat myself out of it one little hour more."

She turned her head slightly; and he saw that unpitying though her words were, her eyes were humid.

"If I could spare you any pain, I would!—believe me, believe that at least," she said, with an intonation that was almost passionate, almost appealing; she could not have this man, whose life she had rescued from the grave, and over whose agony she had watched in the Carpathian solitudes, think that she could wanton with his wretchedness, or be careless of his sorrow.

"Then—do what else you will with my life, but do not bid me leave you?"

She was silent, and she shook her head with a gesture of dissent; she knew that he prepared himself but added pain, hut more enduring suffering, the longer he deceived himself with the thought or the simulation of happiness. Yet, she asked herself, bitterly, why was she bound to send him from her as though she were plague-stricken?—why, since it was his will to linger in her presence, should she be compelled to drive him out of it?

Her honour, her pity, her conscience, her reason said—why delude him with a passing and treacherous hour of hope? Her heart pleaded for him—perhaps pleaded for herself;—her mood changed swiftly, though her character never; a natural nonchalance was combined in her with the dignity and depth of her nature. She was at all times too epicurean not to let life take its course, and heed but little of the morrow.

She gave a half-impatient, half-weary sigh.

"Well! be it so, if you will; for to-day, at the least," she said, with the accent of one who throws thought away, and resigns the reins to chance. "You stay in Capri? Have you breakfasted?"

"I thank you, yes; in a fishing-hut on the beach yonder."

"That must have been but a poor meal. I know what Capriote fare is—some smoked tunny and some dried onions! Come within."

He obeyed her, and forgot all else in the charm of that sweet present hour.

She had repulsed his love; she would have done so again had it been uttered; she had told herself that this man's gallant life must not be cheated into union with hers, this fearless heart must not be broken beneath her foot; though she should have spared no other, she vowed to spare him, over whose perils she had watched while her hand held the living water to his dying lips. In what she now did, therefore, she erred greatly; but it was very hard for her not to err. She was used to reign, and was accustomed to allow her own pleasure, answering to none; she had known the world till she was satiated with it; she was in this moment utterly weary of her associates, weary almost of herself. There was a certain repose, a certain lulling peace, in the chivalrous and ennobling adoration she received from Erceldoune. She knew him to be a high-spirited gentleman, candid to a fault, loyal to rashness; with brave lion's blood in his veins and a noble knightly faith in his love; beyond all cowardice of suspicion, and true unto death to his word. It was as strange to her, as it was sweet, to find such a nature as this; stranger and sweeter than any can know who have not also known life as she knew it—it was like a sweep of free, fresh, sea-scented Apennine air, stirred by the bold west wind, after the heat, the press, the bon-mots, the equivokes, and the gas-glitter of a Florentine Veglione.

It is difficult for any who survey mankind deeply and widely, to retain their belief in the existence of an honest man; but if they meet one, they value him far more than they who affect to imagine honesty as natural amongst men as beards.

The hock, the chocolate, the fish, the fruit, were scarce tasted as he took them that morning: he knew nothing but the shaded repose of the quiet chamber, the dream-like enchantment of the hour, the form before him, where through the green tracery of the climbing vine, the golden sun fell across her brow and at her feet. He was almost silent; his love had a great humility, and made it seem to him hopeless that his hand could ever have title even to wander among the richness of her hair.

To have light to win her lips to close on his, it seemed to him that a man should have done such great and glorious things as should have made his life.

A tale of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted.

The full heat of the noon was just passed, the bells of afternoon vespers were sounding from a little campanile that rose above a jumbled mass of rock and foliage, grey jutting wall, and pale green olive woods; through a break in the foliage the precipitous road was just seen, and a group of weather-browned peasant women, with the silver spadella in their hair, going upward to the chapel of S. Maria del Mare. Idalia rose, and followed them with her eyes. In an unformed wish, born of weary impatience, she almost envied them their mule-like round of life, their simple, dogged, childish faith, their nurtured indifference alike to pleasure and to pain.

That animal life is to be envied, perhaps?" she said, rather to herself than to him. "Their pride is centred in a silver hair-pin; their conscience is committed to a priest; their credulity is contented with tradition; their days are all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they do not love, they do not hate; they are like the ass that they drive, follow one patient routine, and only take care for their food;—perhaps they are to be envied!"

He rose, too, and came beside her.

"Do not belie yourself! You would be the last to say so. You would not lose 'those thoughts that wander through eternity,' to gain in exchange the peace from ignorance of the peasant or the dullard?"

She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile on her lips and in her eyes.

"No, I would not: you are right. Better to know the secrets of the gods, even though with pain, than to lead the dull, brute life, though painless. It is only in our dark hours that we would sell our souls for a dreamless ease."

"Dark hours! You should not know them. Ah, if you would but trust me with some confidence—if there were but some way in which I could serve you——"

Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave him a gesture of silence. She thought how little could the bold, straight stroke of this man's frank chivalry cut through the innumerable and intricate chains that entangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do nothing to sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret intrigues.

"It is a Saint's day: I had forgotten it!" she said, to turn his words from herself, while the bell of the campanile still swung through the air. "I am a pagan, you see—I do not fancy that you care much for creeds yourself?"

"Creeds? I wish there were no such word. It has only been a rallying-cry for war—an excuse for the bigot to burn his neighbour!"

"No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held the same faith that Socrates had vainly taught in the Agora; and Zengis Khan knew the truth of theism like Plato; yet the world has never generally learnnt it! It is the religion of nature—of reason. But the faith is too simple and too sublime for the multitude. The mass of minds needs a religion of mythus, legend, symbolism, and fear. What is impalpable, escapes it; and it must give an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree in our creed, I will take you to my temple—a temple not made with hands!"

She smiled on him as she spoke, and a dizzy sweetness filled his life. He did not ask if she had forgotten her words of the past night—he did not ask whether in this lull of dreamy joy and passionate hope there might be but a keener deadliness of disappointment. He was with her; that sufficed. She went with him out into the brightness of the day, down the rocky paths, under shining walls of glossy ilex-leaves and drooping orange clusters of scented blossom. In the fair wild beauty of Capri,—the tranquillity unbroken except by the lapping of the waves far down below and the distant echo of some sea-song, the sunlight that flooded land and water, the shadows sleeping lazily here and there where the lemon and citron boughs were netted into closest luxuriance,—the world seemed formed for love alone.

Since she had bidden his passion die in silence, why did she let him linger here?

He did not ask; he only gave himself to the magic of the present hour, to the sound of her voice as it thrilled in his ear, to the touch of her hair as he lifted from it some low hanging orange branch, to the sorcery of her presence.

The cool sea lay, a serene world of waters, scarcely ruffled by a breeze, and glancing with all the marvellous brilliance of colouring that northern air never can know. The boat waited in a creek, floating there under so dark a shadow from the drooping boughs of lemon and acacia, that it was atmost in twilight: a few strokes of the oars, and it swept out of the brown ripples, flinging up their surf against the rocks, into the deep blue of the sunlit bay; below, above, around on every side, colour in all its glory, all its variety, all its harmony and contrast, melting into one paradise in the warmth of the summer day.

"I love the sea more dearly than any land. It is incarnate freedom!" she said, rather to herself than him, as she leant slightly over the boat, filling her hand with the water, till its drops sparkled like the sapphires in her rings. There was a certain aching tone in her words that sent a pang to his heart: it was the envy of freedom. Was she not, then, free?

"That is the charm my own moors have—the mere sense of liberty they give. Barren though they be, if yon were to see them——"

His voice was unsteady over the last sentence. He thought of the dead glories of his race, of the squandered wealth and the fallen power that once would have been his by right; his to lay at her feet, his to make his fortunes equal with his name.

"You love liberty?" she said, suddenly, almost abruptly, save that all in her was too exquisitely harmonised, too full of languor and repose ever to become abrupt. "Tell me, would you not think any sin justified to obtain it?"

"Justified?"

"Yes, justified!" she said, impatiently, while her eyes flashed on him under their drooped lids. "What! do you know the world so well, and yet do not know that there have been crimes before now glorious as the morning, and virtues base as the selfish chillness that they sprang from? What was Corday's crime—what was Robespierre's virtue? Answer me. Would you think it justified, or not?"

A flush rose over his face; he thought, he felt, that it was of her own liberty she spoke. "Do not ask me!" he said, hurriedly. "You would make me a sophist in your cause. Evil is never justified, though done that good may come; but to serve you, to succour you, I fear that I should scorn no sin, nor turn from any!"

The words were almost wild, but they were terribly true. Though perhaps the less likely thus to fall because he knew his own weakness, he felt that the inflexible justice, the honesty of purpose, the unerring loyalty to knightly creeds, which were so ingrained in him that they were scarce so much principle as instinct, might reel, and break, and be forgotten if once this woman whispered:—

"Sin—and sin for me!"

He thought he could deny her nothing—not even his sole heritage of honour—if she could bend to woo it from him. A look of pain passed for one moment over her face. She thought of him as he had lain in his extremity, while her hand had swept back the dark luxuriance of his hair, and his eyes had looked upward into hers without sense or sight. Was it possible that she had saved him then only to deal him worse hereafter? She shook the sea-drops from her hand with a certain imperious, impatient movement, and replied to him with the haughty negligence of her occasional manner.

"I asked you an impersonal question—no more; and if you cannot frame a sophism contentedly, you are terribly behind your age. We have rhetoric that proves fratrícide only a droit d'aineese, and logic that demonstrates a lie the natural right of man!"

He answered her nothing. She saw a look come on his face mortified, wounded, incredulous. There was something in her words, and in the accent of their utterance, that seemed to chill him to the bone, and freeze his very heart. The stately simplicity of his own character could not follow the manifold phases of hers. Moreover, he had spoken in the fervour of passion: she had answered him with what, if it were not half scorn, half cruelty, trenched close on both.

A certain pitying light glowed in her eyes as they read this, the languid and ironic smile passed from her lips, she sighed slightly, though it was half with a laugh that she spoke:

"Caro es, non Angelus.

Do you not remember the old Latin line? Be sure that you may say it to any human life you meet; above all, to a woman's! There is no angel amongst us; some faint rays of purer light here and there; that is the uttermost, and that so often darkened! I will give you the surest guard against the calamity of disappointment. Learn to say, and realise, of all you fancy fairest or noblest, this only—'Non Angelus'"

He looked at her wistfully still; the temper of the man had too much directness, too much singleness, to be able to divine the veiled meanings of her varying words, the seductive changes of her altered tones: he only knew that he felt for her what he had felt for no other woman.

"Non Angelus?" he repeated. "Well!—might I not also be answered with its companion line, 'Homo es, non es Deus?' I am no sophist; you have reproached me with it. Sophism is to me the shameful refuge of cowards who dare not own themselves criminals; but—but—even while I condemned what I loved, my love would not change; though she erred, I would not forsake her. 'Non Angelus?' What knell to love is there there? It is but to admit a common bond of weakness and mortality."

His voice was low and unsteady as he spoke, but it had a great sweetness in it; the love he was forbidden to declare for her he uttered to her in them.

She stooped and leant her hand over the side again, toying with the coolness of the water. His words had touched her keenly, and their loyalty sank deep into her heart. She shook her head with a slight smile-a smile of great sadness, of great compassion.

"You will be still in error! While you say the 'Non Angelus,' in your meaning, you will still expect more divinity than you will ever find on earth. It is, not that we are not angels—that only idiots dream—it is that we are———"

"What?"

"Worse than the worst of men too often! Hush! we will talk no more. We shall soon be near my cathedral."

She leant back in silence, while the vessel swept with a free, bird-like motion through the water, the boat-song of the Capriote rowers rising and falling with the even beat of their sculls, while behind them they left the rock of Capri, orange crowned in the sunlight, with the soft grey hue of the olives melting down into the many-coloured sea.

A low and darkling arch fronted them—the porch of the temple,—where the broad bay lay coolest and darkest, and the waters deepened into deeper blue. They bowed their heads; the boat shot down into the gloom, passing under the narrow passage-way, close and contracted as a cell; then out of its darkness the skiff glided, without sound, into the silent and azure vault of the cathedral to which she brought him.

It was the Grotto Azzuro.

The sea lay calm as a lake beneath, the blue and misty light poured through the silence, the Gothic aisles of rock rose arch upon arch in awful beauty; there was no echo but of the melody of the waves chanting ever their own eternal hymn in a temple not built of men. It was beautiful, terrible, divine in its majesty, awful in its serenity, appalling yet godlike in its calm; while through the stillness swept the ebb and flow of the sea, and all the sunless shadow was steeped in that deep, ethereal, unearthlike, azure mist which has no likeness in all the wide width of the world. The boat rested there, alone; and high above the arched rocks rose, closing in on every side, like the roof of a twilight chancel, lost in vague and limitless immensity; while through the calm there echoed only one grand and mournful Kyrie Eleison—chanted by the choir of waves. Perfect stillness,—perfect peace,—filled only with that low and murmuring voice of many waters; a beauty not of land, not of sea, sublime and spiritual as that marvellous and azure light that seemed to still and change all hue, all pulse of life itself; a sepulchre and yet a paradise; where the world was dead, but the spirit of God moved on the waters.

Passion was stilled here; love was silenced; the chastened solemnity, the purity of its mysterious divinity, had no affinity with the fevered dreams and sensuous sweetness of mortal desires. The warm poetic voluptuous light and colour of the land that they had left were the associates of passion; here it was hushed, and cast back in mute and nameless pain on its own knowledge of its own mortality; here there were rather felt "the pain of finite hearts that yearn" for things dreamt of and never found; the vagueness of far-reaching futile Promethean thirst; the impulse, and the despair, of immortality.

The boat paused in the midst of the still, violet, lake-like water. Where he lay at her feet, he looked upward to her through the ethereal light that floated round them, and seemed to sever them from earth.

"Would to God I could die now!"

The words broke unconsciously from him rather in the instinct of the moment than in conscious utterance. Her eyes met his, in them that dreamy and beautiful light that seemed to float in unshed tears. She laid her hand one moment on his forehead with a touch so soft that it was a caress.

"Hush!—for what is worth life in us there will be no death!"

And the boat swept, slowly and noiselessly, through the crystal clearness of the waters, through the cold and solemn loveliness, through the twilight of the blue sea-mists, down into the narrow darkened archway of the farther distance, and out once more into the golden splendour of the living day—even as a human life, if men's dreams be true, may pass through the twilight shadows of earth down into the darkness of the valley of death, thence only to soar onward into the glory of other worlds, the radiance of other days.

She stooped to him slightly as the vessel swept away into the breadth and brightness of the bay.

"Is not my temple nobler than those that are built by men?"

He looked upward at her with a look in his eyes that had never been there before.

"You have taught me to-day what I never learned in all the years of my life!"

And the boat passed softly, silently, out of the sea-built temples that the waves had worn, out of the stillness and solemnity of that aërial light, onward through the heavy perfumes wafted from the shore, onward to where the Syren Isles laughed in their smiling loveliness upon the waters, half of earth and half of heaven.