Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
“CRAVEST THOU ARCADY? BOLD IS THY CRAVING. I SHALL NOT CONTENT IT.”
The day had sunk away into evening before the boat returned; the splendour of the Capri moonlight was on sea and land, on the grey terraces of olives, with their silvery plumes of foliage, and on the green vines, clustering in the early summer over the steep stairs of rock and the stones of high monastic walls.
As they passed up the winding ascent, an old peasant, sitting watching for the boat under the orange-boughs, a nut-brown, withered Capriote woman, of full seventy years, started from the shadow in Idalia’s path, and fell on her knees before her, pouring out on her gratitude and benedictions. Idalia stooped and raised her:
“Do not kneel to me, old friend. You owe me nothing.”
“I owe you my children’s life, my children’s souls!” cried the Italian, in the patois of the bay, lifting her brown stem face all bathed in tears. "To whom should I kneel, if not to you? Day and night I prayed to S. Theresa to save them, and she never heard my words; you heard them. The saints in glory never had more fairness than your face, 'llustrissima;—they never had the pity of your heart, the charity of your hand. They let us pray on, pray on, and never speak; you heard and saved us."
The one she blessed raised her once more, with a gentle veneration for age in the action.
"You have thanked me too much, madre mia; far too much. The little any one of us can do to relieve sorrow is but such slight payment of so great a human debt. When Fanciulla is old enough to marry, tell her I will give her her silver wreath and her dower. No! no more thanks—you shame me! You, who have led so long a life of goodness, to bless me!"
She stooped lower still towards the old peasant, to drop some gold into her kerchief unperceived, and passed on, while the praises and prayers of the Capriote were poured out, with tears staining weather-beaten, age-worn cheeks that in youth had never known so sweet a rain of joy and peace.
"Ah!" murmured Erceldoune to her, "you cannot ask me now to believe you, when you say 'Non Ángelus!'"
She turned her eyes on him with a sudden weary wistfulness, a sudden ironic scorn intricately commingled:
"I do say it. Repeat it till you believe it; it is a terrible truth. Here and there we do a little good;—save, as I saved to that poor Capriote, the life of starving infants, a legacy of grandchildren that her dead son left to drag her into the grave; children as bright as the morning, dying for want of the bread we throw away as we eat guinea peaches and two thousand-franc pine-apples!—what is the worth of it? It is a grain against a mountain — of evil ! "
He looked at her with appealing pain; he felt vaguely that she, who to him was stainless as the morning, had the darkness of some remorse upon her, and yet he could neither follow the veiled intricacies of her nature, nor divest her of that divinity with which to-day yet more than ever he had clothed her. She glanced up at him and laughed.
"Do not look so grave! I never murdered any one in poisoned wines, or medicated roses; it is a good deal to say in these days of artistic slaughter! Believe me—a woman. If you rightly understand all those words say, you will never attribute me too much divinity, or ask me to oblige you with consistency. Mephistopheles always takes a woman's guise now; he has found he can change his masks so much more quickly! Will you dine with me? Dress? Oh! I will pardon your costume—it is velvet, picturesque, rather Spanish."
She motioned him to take his way into the deserted library, and went from him down the corridors of the Villa Santilla, that they had reached whilst she spoke.
Had she any love for him? He had no belief that she could have. And yet—if there were none in her heart, was it not rankest cruelty to toy with him thus? No—he could not reproach her that it was; she had bidden him over and over again leave her, she had refused to hear words of love from him, she had only acceded to his remaining near her at his own persisting prayer; there was no blame here. He had no thought that she could care in any way for his fate; the caprice of her manner, the mockery of her satire, the profound pathos that had tinged her words, the strenuous force with which she had bidden him think evil of her—these were not the ways of women to one they loved; they were the inconstancies of a heart ill at ease, of a spirit without rest and not without regret, but they were not the ways of a woman who loved. And yet an agony of passion was on him; he only felt, lived, thought, breathed, for her; and the purity of the sea-temple in which he had looked upon her face in the past day shed on her its own sanctity, its own exaltation. Nothing loftier, purer, more superb, ever rose in a poet's vision of idealised love than he had incarnated in his worship of her—worship whose grandest element was faith sublime in its very blindness.
At her villa that night there were a score of guests; all men, and all unknown to him; amongst them the Italian, Carlo of Viana, whose subjugation to her sway had been so proud a triumph. Men of the world though they might be» there was not one of them, not even the brave, bright, cordial southern Prince, who could wholly conceal the surprise and the dislike, almost the offence, with which they saw a stranger; their glances ranged over him curiously in a jealous challenge, and he felt as little amity to them.
"Count Phaulcon is not here?" asked the Prince of Viana of her.
"No. I regret to have to make his apologies; he is unhappily prevented the honour of meeting your Highness," she answered him, as they passed into the dining-chamber.
"And this foreigner; has he your pass, madame?" asked Viana, softly bending his head.
"He is not one of us, but he is my friend."
"Your friend, madame!" said Viana, with a certain smile that Erceldoune caught; and for which, though he could hear no words accompanying it, he could have tossed the Tuscan prince into the sea sounding below the cliffs. "A fair title, truly: but one with which none, I think, ever rest content!"
Viana said no more on the subject, but Erceldoune saw that, as in Turkey, so also in this larger gathering, his presence was unwelcome, and imposed a restraint on her guests, though not apparently on her. He was a curb put on them, and they bore it with chafing impatience, deepened in many of them by a jealous, surprised intolerance of this foreigner, with whom their hostess had entered the salons.
He himself sat in almost unbroken silence, eating little, drinking unconsciously much more than his wont. His thoughts whirled; he felt a fierce, reasonless hatred for all the men by whom he was surrounded. He saw her, through the haze of light and perfume and wine-odours and incense; he felt giddy, maddened, reckless; the fiercest jealousy was at riot in him, and the spiritual beauty of the earlier day was gone for the while from him, as it was gone from her.
He saw her now as she was in all the varied scenes of her dazzling and careless world. She took little heed of him, rarely addressed him, rarely looked at him; her silver wit, barbed and ironic, scathed all it touched; her delicate laughter rang its mocking chime at things human and divine; the diamonds on the rose hues and black laces of her costly dress glittered like the dews on a pomegranate. Her resistless coquetries enslaved whomever she would, and cast their golden net now on one and now on another; the heartlessness of a heartless code, the caprices of a world-wise imperious woman, used to be adored, and to tread the adoration at fancy beneath her foot, the recklessness of one accustomed to defy the world, and to stake great stakes on fortune, ruling her as utterly as a few hours before in the Grotto Azzuro high thoughts and noble regrets had reigned in her.
Which was truly herself of those characters so dissimilar? It would have been hard to tell. He would best have comprehended her who had judged—both. But to the man who loved her, let her be what she should, let her treat him as she would, the Protean changes in her tortured him as with so many masks that shrouded her beauty from him; the frank singleness of his nature was without key to the intricate complexity of hers. Had he seen her first and solely as she was to-night,—lying back in her chair, toying with her exotics glowing with rose and purple, touching the golden Lebanon wine or the luscious Lachryma, letting her eyes dwell with their lustrous languor now on one, now on another, and holding all those about her with a silver chain, surer than steel in its hold on them, ductile to her hand as silk,—he would have dreaded her power, he would have doubted her mercy, he would perhaps never have loved her.
Erceldoune listened to the words around him, but insensibly and uncertainly; bis thoughts were on her alone; but when they reached bis senses he heard the most advanced opinions of Europe, with the politics of the extreme Left, form the staple of all deeper discussion, and the basis of a thousand intricate intrigues and abortive projects that were circulated, often to be passed current with the seal of Idalia's approbation, much more often to be broken in two by some hint of later intelligence than theirs, or some satirically suggested comment languidly let fall by her on their excited warmth, like the fall of an icy spray. And yet there were moments when she was not thus, when she was more seductive in her eloquent expositions, her sudden and then impassioned earnestness, than in her nonchalance; moments when she spoke low, swiftly, brilliantly, with a picturesque oratory, persuasive, vivid, irresistible, till her guests' bold eyes glowed with admiration as they listened, and they were ready to lend themselves to her hands, to be moulded like wax at her will, without a will of their own. Then, as often, when she had roused them or wooed them to the height of the enthusiasm, the rashness, or the sacrifice she had sought to win from them, she dropped the topic as suddenly, with a languid indifference or a sarcastic jest, sinking back among her cushions, playing half wearily with the scarlet blossoms of her bouquet or the velvet ears of the hound, with hardly a sign that she remembered the presence of her numerous comrades.
Varied and glittering though the conversation that went on round him was, infectious and free as its gaiety of tone was also, marked as might seem her confidence in him to introduce him there, and intoxicating to every sense as the entertainment to which she had brought him might be, Erceldoune was wretched in it; he could comprehend nothing; he was jealous of every man at her table; everything he heard related to a party, but to which he referred, however indefinitely, his seizure in Moldavia. She scarcely looked at, rarely addressed him; in nothing, save her personal loveliness, could he recognise the woman with whom he had floated through the azore air of her sea-temple before the sun had set.
It was late when they rose from the table; cards were begun, while the windows stood open to the midnight, where the southern moon flooded the Mediterranean. Idalia threw herself into the hazard with the eagerness of a gamester; she played with the utmost recklessness, a hectic excitement shone in her eyes, the insouciant defiance of her wit rose with the risks of chance; she staked heavy sums, lost them, and only played the more eagerly still. Impair her charm even this insatiate passion could not do, distasteful though it be in women, and even abhorrent in women who are in their youth; as seductive she was, but there were danger, levity, heartlessness in the charm. She was now at her worst.
Once she glanced at the solitary form of Erceldoune standing out against the flood of moonlight; his face was pale and very grave, while his eyes had a pathetic wonder, rebuke, and pain in them;—she never looked at him again. The hours went on, and the play with them; only broken by intervals when hookahs and cool drinks were brought round, and the homage offered to hazard was offered to its beautiful empress. She lost very considerably for a while, but the more she lost the more extravagantly she staked upon the cards; and fortune changed, pouring in on her its successes at length as lavishly as it had previously squandered her gold. So the short sweet night passed away, over the scattered hamlets that crowned the piles of rocks or nestled in sea-grey olive-woods;—passed away in the whirl of gambling, and the bitterness of jealous heart-burning, and the stir of restless passions. Without, where the waters lapped the shore so softly, and the islands hung in the starlit air like sea-birds' nests brooding above the waves, the aged, dying peacefully, dreamt of immortality, and children slept with smiles upon their lips under the low brown eaves of cabin roofs, and the eyes of poets, wakeful and laden with voluptuous thoughts, dwelt, never weary, on the silent sailing clouds, warm with the flush of earliest dawn; but here, within, there was but the fever of unworthy things.
Erceldoune, where he stood apart, glanced once or twice at that fair tranquil neglected night with an impatient sigh, as though to take relief from its balmy freshness and cool serenity amidst the glittering martyrdom of the scene before him and the tumult of passion at work in him.
In the intensity of his pain he could have believed himself like the men in the old legends whom a sorceress bewitched; it was anguish alike to stay or to go; every moment he spent there was suffering as intense as when he had lain prostrate with the vultures wheeling above his eyes in the sickly light of the sun, yet he could not tear himself from its terrible fascination any more than he could then have torn himself from the power of the carrion birds. He believed in her; yes, not less utterly than when a few hours before he had heard her lofty and spiritualised thoughts unfold all diviner things, and lead him through the dim and glorious mysteries of a poet's speculations of eternal worlds. But he felt like a man in delirium tremens, who struggles with a thousand hideous and revolting shapes, that rise again as fast as he overthrows them. The atmosphere about her, the glances that dwelt on her, the profane mocking wit that woke her laughter, the eyes that met her own in such bold language, the gaming-passion that, while it possessed at least enslaved her, all these were so much desecration and profanatíon to his idol, so much blasphemy against the woman who had been with him in the pure stillness of the Grotto Azzuro.
The sun above the eastward circle of the bay rose, breaking over the sea, while te stars were still seen through its golden haze, in which they would, with another moment, die. Idalia looked at the sun, then left the gaming-table.
"There is the day rebuking us. Good-night!"
As she spoke she paused one moment, the full fresh light of the broken morning falling upon her, while around was still the wax-glare of the chandeliers; the pure light lay before her, the impure glitter was behind.
She paused one moment, looking seaward, then turned negligently to her guests and dismissed them, with much carelessness, little ceremonial.
Viana pursued her with eager whispered words; she put him aside with a coquette's amusement and a graceful gesture of denial, and passed out, while the Nubian appeared and followed her.
The Prince, with stormy petulant anger on his face, left the room with his equerry. The others went out one by one.
Erceldoune remained silent and motionless, he neither saw nor heard what passed before him; he had bowed his farewell instinctively, but all that he knew were the smiles he had seen cast on others, and the bold look with which Viana had followed her, and for which he could have struck him down as men of his race struck their foes when a back-handed sweep of a heavy iron gauntlet dashed down all rivalry, and washed out all insult. Each of her guests, as they passed out, cast a look of suppressed and envious dislike at him where he stood, as though he had a right to remain thus behind them. He noticed nothing, was conscious of nothing; an intolerable agony, a burning, boundless jealousy alone were on him. He stood there like a man stunned, looking blankly out at the sunlit sweep of waters. Evil passions were not natural to him; but the life he had led had left the free untameable strength of the old Border Chiefs unaltered in him.
He stood there with no remembrance of how little right he had to remain, scarcely any remembrance even of where he was. All at once he started and turned. As a dog feels, long before human eyes can see or human ears can hear it, the approaching presence that he loves, so he felt hers before she was near him; through the inner chambers, dark in twilight, where the lights were extinguished and the dawn could ill penetrate, Idalia returned. Her step was weary, and her face, as the illumination from the chandelier, still burning in the window where he stood, fell on it, was pale, even to the lips on which, as some poet has it, "a sigh seemed set"—unuttered.
"You have remained after the rest!—how is that? It is as well, though, as it is. I wish to speak to you—alone."
The words themselves might have fed many a wild hope, many a vain thought, in any man less single-hearted and less incapable of misconstruing her meaning than he was. With him all the light died out from his face as he heard: he knew that if she would have listened to his passion she would not have returned to him now—she would not have addressed him thus.
He bowed gravely, and stood waiting for her pleasure. The forbearance was not lost on her. Idalia, more than any other woman, could appreciate this deference which gave her untainted comprehension, this delicacy which took no advantage of her return to him in solitude. She moved on towards one of the windows, and stood there, between the grey light of the rising day and the radiance of her own card-room.
"You have offered me many pledges of your service," she said, gravely, "nor do I doubt their sincerity. I am now about to test it; not on any ground that, as you think, my past slight aid to you gives me any claim upon your life—I have none whatever—but rather simply because I trust you as a gallant gentleman, as a chivalrous nature, as a true-hearted friend."
He bent his head in silence; he offered her no protestation of his faith: he knew that none was needed.
"I am about to ask you much," she resumed. "To ask you to undertake a service of some danger, of immediate action, and of imperative secrecy; it may involve you in some peril, and it can bring you no reward. Knowing this, are you prepared to listen to it?"
His face grew a shade paler beneath its warm sea-bronze. He divined well what her meaning was in those few words, "it can bring you no reward." But he answered without a second's hesitation.
"Do with me what you will," he said, simply; "I am ready."
There were no asseverations, no eager vows, no ornate eloquence; but she knew better than they could tell her that he was hers, to send out to life or to death at her choice.
She put out her hand to him with royal grace to thank him as sovereigns thank their subjects. She let his lips linger on it mutely, then, with no more emotion than queens show at that act of homage, she sank into a couch, and bent slightly forward.
"Listen! I want no political controversy, but it seems to me unutterably strange that yon, with your bold high spirit, your passion for liberty, your grand contempt for conventionalities and station, should have no sympathy with a party whose cause is essentially that of freedom."
He looked at her wearily. What were creeds and causes to him now?
"I am no politician," he said, briefly. "I have never mingled in those matters. I am neither a student nor a statesman. I hate tyranny. I would stamp it out wherever I saw it; but the codes of my race were always conservative. I may unconsciously have imbibed them."
She smiled with ironic disdain. He had touched the qualities in her with which she could rule men like children, and could have swayed a kingdom with the sceptre of Russian Catherine or of Maria Theresa.
"'Conservative'! To reverence the divinity of rust and of corruption—to rivet afresh the chains of tradition and of superstition—to bind the free limbs of living men in the fetters of the past—to turn blind eyes from the light, and deny to thirsty lips the waters of truth—to say to the crowned fool, 'You are God's elect,' and to the poor, 'You are beasts of burden, only not, like other beasts, worthy shelter or fodder—to cling to fakehood, and to loathe reason;—this is what it is to be 'Conservative'! Do you, who love freedom like any son of the desert, subscribe to such a creed as that?"
Now he saw her as those saw her who were subdued to her will, till no sense was left them save to think as she thought, and to do as she bade. The magic of the voice, the charm of the eloquence, the spell of the fearless truths, uttered with an imperial command, wrought on him as they had always done on others—as they could not fail to do on any man with a heart to thrill and a soul to be moved.
"I will believe what you believe!" he cried, passionately. "You are my creed; I have forgotten all others."
The brilliant fire which had been upon her face as she spoke, faded.
"Too many have made me their creed;—do you take some surer light to guide you. I do not seek a convert in you. You are happier, perhaps, if you can live thinking of none of these things. What I seek of you now is your service, not your adhesion. I want little else except your high courage; and I know that will never fail either you or others."
"Try it as you will."
There was a curious conflict of feelings in him as he heard her. He was moved to strong pleasure by the mere thought that she placed confidence, of whatever sort, in him, and he knew by her words that she held his honour, his faitb, and his courage in full esteem; yet as strong a pain smote him heavily. He felt that these great purposes of her life, vaguely as he could imagine them, were dearer to Idalia than any individual love could become, and he felt also that in her manner to him which seemed to place him farther off from her than he had ever been.
She bowed her head in thanks to him.
"What I need is told in few phrases," she resumed. "The Conservative faction, that you favour, is in the full exercise of its iniquity in Naples—for a little while longer; a very little. There are to-night in my house—concealed here, I do not shirk the word—two of its greatest victims, an old man and a young, father and son. The elder is as noble a patriot and scholar as Boethius, with no other crime than his;—he wishes the freedom of his Italy. King Francis plays the part of Theodoric. Once arrested, the fate of Boethius will be his. Less severity, perhaps, but the galleys, at best, awaits his only son, fresh from the campaigns of Sicily. By intelligence I have of the government's intentions, I know they will not be safe here three hours longer. I left my own yacht at Trieste; besides, it could not approach Naples without being searched, or probably brought-to by a broadside. Yours is here; will you save these men, take them secretly on board, and land them on the coast of Southern France? I give you my word that they have no other sin than one that is the darkest, perhaps, in the world's sight—to love truth and liberty too dangerously well;—how much they have suffered for these you will know when I tell you that they are Paolo and Cesario Fiesole."
An eager light flashed into his eyes, a noble indignation flushed his face; he knew the names well—the names of men who, for the choicest virtues of the patriot's and thinker's and soldier's characters, had endured the worst persecutions of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Whatever he thought of creeds and causes, he loathed tyranny and oppression with all his heart and soul.
"Save them? Yes, if I lose my own life to do it."
She looked at him with a smile; how often she had seen that lion spirit, that eagle daring, lighten in temperaments the most diverse at her bidding!
"Ah! I thought your sympathies must always rise with liberty, and your hatred with oppression, or you would have belied your whole nature. I would make you 'with us' in an hour's reasoning."
His eyes met hers with something pathetic in their wistful gaze—as though they besought her not to trifle with him.
"You never need to reason with me. You have only to say, 'I will it'"
An absolute obedience this, an utter unquestioning submission, prostrate as any that ever laid Marc Antony at Cleopatra's mercy, or Héloise at Abélard's; yet he did not lose his dignity in it; it was lofty even while it was subject. It touched her, yet it pained her; it brought home to her the intensity and truth of this man's devotion; she would not, or could not, return it or repay it; she had no right, she bethought her, with a pang, to use it as she had used it with so many, to the furtherance of her own aims, however generous or just those aims might in this instance be. Moreover, she had come to say other and more bitter things to him than this.
She was silent a moment, looking at him where his gallant height rose against the clear subdued light of the breaking day; her future task was more painful than she, consummate mistress of every toil and art, and used to control every mood and every passion of men, had ever known one yet to be.
"Weigh the peril well," she said, after a pause, with something of restraint upon her. "It must be great—I mean, if you are discovered. Discovery may be guarded against, but it cannot be positively averted at all channels. If you will risk the danger of detection, your yacht can weigh anchor at once. She is, of course, in readiness? The Fiesoli, father and son, disguised as Capriote fishermen, can row you to the vessel amongst others. They are ready to take the alarm at any instant, and sleep dressed in their disguises. They will probably pass in safety; the Marinari here are dull and unsuspicious, nor would they harm what I shelter for a thousand ducats each. But, should detection occur, remember, the Bourbon government will not spate you even for your country's sake. You will have rendered yourself liable to the law for assisting the escape of condemned 'conspirators' and 'insurgents,' as the Court terms them, and you will share the fate they suffer."
The words were almost cold, but uttered with a visible effort; in the instant, even though the urgency of peril for those she sought to save, and the motive for which she bade him expose himself to this risk at her command, excused it to her, she loathed herself for sending him out to chance the slightest danger in fealty to a love that would never bring him anything except its pain. Indeed, his life was dearer to her than she, disdainful of all such weakness, yet would know.
He raised himself erect.
"I have given you my word; I am not used to weigh the hazards of any dangers that may accrue to me through keeping it."
She answered him nothing; the implicit obedience this man was ready to render her, even to the rendering up of his life or liberty at her word, moved her the more deeply beside the bold honour and the fearless independence of his carriage towards men, such as now flashed out even to her in his reply. Once again unseen by him as she leaned her brow upon her hand, there came upon her face the warmth, and in her eyes the look, with which she had gazed upon him in the previous night. It passed; she rose and stood again in the shadow of the myrtle-covered casement, looking from him out towards the sea.
"When will you be ready, then?"
"I am so now. Your friends can row me on board when you will, and the yacht can weigh anchor with them at once."
"And you take no more thought than that of perilling your life for strangers?"
"I have never taken much thought for my life that I can recollect. Besides, what need is there of thought? You wish it."
He spoke only in the singleness of his fidelity, in the earnestness of his devotion to her; but the most refined subtilty of art and purpose could not have taught him a better means to win his way towards the tenderness of Idalia's nature, and an infinite tenderness there was, let her lovers and her foes say what they would.
Her cheek lost the warmth it had regained, her face had the same sadness on it which it had worn as she had entered the chamber, the intense melancholy which now and then fell on her at rare intervals gathered in her eyes. She pitied him, she honoured him; she would willingly, at all cost to herself, have effaced every thought which bound him to her, and saved him from every pang that came to him through her; but she was too proud and too world-worn to recognise that there might be a feeling even beyond this in her heart for him. Even had she recognised it, it would not have changed her purpose—the purpose which had made her let him see her as he had done through the past evening—the purpose to toy with him no more, but to put from him, now and for ever, the vainness of hopes which could but fatally beguile, only to as fatally betray, him.
She could do this as no other woman could have done; she had dealt with men in all the force of their enmities, all the height of their follies, in their most dangerous hours as in their most various moods; through paths no other of her sex could have approached, Idalia passed unhesitating and with impunity, and one of the secrets of her great power lay in her perfect and unerring knowledge of human nature. With the first hour in which she had seen the man who now stood with her, she had known his character as profoundly as she knew it now. She turned to him, and spoke softly, yet with a certain grave and haughty grace.
"I do not pretend to misunderstand you; to do so would be but to imitate the mock humility of foolish women. You would do this thing for my sake; if done at all, it must be done for the pure sake of justice and compassion, not for mine. You gave me your promise that no other words like these should pass between us, and I told you if it were broken we could meet no longer."
He looked at her bewildered; she seemed to him to toy with him most recklessly, it was a deadly trial to his faith not to believe most mercilessly also.
"That promise I must break, then. It is the only one broken in my life. My God! why do you play with me so? You know what my love is!"
His voice sank to a breathless fervour; he stooped forward, his lips trembling, his eyes seeking hers with an anguish of entreaty. That look almost broke down her resolve; it was so easy to soothe this man's loyal heart with a smile, with a glance; it was so hard to put an end for ever to that imploring prayer. Hard to her at least, now, when for the first time some portion of the heavy blow she had so often dealt fell on her, some scorch of the fiery pain she had so often caused touched herself, if it were but by sympathy and pity. Yet she was unmoved from her resolve; she was unflinching in a course once chosen, and she was resolute to fool him on no more with empty hope, to let him blind himself no longer. She wished to save him, as far as she could still effect this, from herself, and to do so she sacrificed his faith in her with a ruthless and unsparing hand.
"I do know it," she answered him; and her voice had no tremor in it, her face no warmth, her eyes dwelt on him with a melancholy in which no softer or weaker consciousness mingled. "And because I know it, and know its strength and its nobility, I will not dupe it or dupe you. What avail to lead you on after a mirage, to let you cheat yourself with fond delusions? Better you should know the truth at once—that what you feel for me can only bring you pain; strive against it for your manhood's sake."
He staggered slightly, and bent his head, like a man who receives a sudden sickening blow; despite the revulsion of the last few hours, it fell on him with the greater shock after the peace and beauty of the day they had passed together on the sea.
She looked at him, and a shadow of his own suffering fell on her; she could not strike him thus without herself being wounded—without a pang in her own heart. Yet what she had determined to do as she saw him standing aloof that night with the rack of wondering grief, of incredulous reproach upon his face, she carried out now, cost her in its loss—even to her fair fame—whatever it should.
She turned to him with a sudden impulsiveness most rare with her, and in her eyes something of the defiance with which she had fronted Conrad Phaulcon mingled with an infinitely softer and more mournful thing.
"Listen! As you have seen me to-night, I am. That higher, holier light you view me through is in your own eyes, not in me. Ask those whom you saw with me; they will tell you I am without mercy—believe them. They will tell you I have ruined many lives, blessed none—believe them. They will tell you you had better have died in the Carpathian woods than have fallen beneath my influence—believe them. Take the worst that you can learn, and credit it to its uttermost. Tell yourself till you score its truth into your heart, that I have never been, that I shall never be, such as you imagine me. Your love can be nothing to me; but I would save it from its worst bitterness by changing it into hate. I would not even forbid you to change it into scorn."
Her eyes were prouder than they had ever been as she thus bade the man, who had centred in her his purest and most exalted faith, give to her the shame of his disdain. As she spoke, with her resistless beauty touched to a yet nobler dignity as she uttered this attainder against her own life, he must have loved her less, or have believed evil swifter than the one who heard her now, who could have followed out her bidding, and stamped the warning down into his soul, till all love of her was dead.
He looked at her in silence, and in the heart-stricken pathos of that look she saw how utterly she laid life desolate for him—she felt the recoil of the living death she dealt, as now and then the hunter feels it when he meets the upward dying gaze of the stag his shot has pierced.
In that instant, while bis faith was beaten down for the first moment under the scourges of her words, and the chivalrous idolatry he bore her was bent and blinded under the dead weight of her own self-accusation, the baser alloy of passion alone was on him—he was only conscious of that madness in which men are ready, as to yield themselves to an eternity of shame and torture.
"So that this woman may be mine!"
She saw that in him; she knew its force, its meaning, she knew that in this instant of his anguish her loveliness was all he felt or sought.
"No matter what you are," he muttered, breathlessly, "no matter what you bring me—I love you, O God! as no man ever, I think, loved before. Have you no pity on that? Be what you will, if—if"
His voice sank, leaving the words unfinished; he felt powerless to plead with her; he felt hopeless to touch, or sway, or implore her; and also, beyond all, he could not even, on the acceptance of her own testimony, dethrone her from his stainless faith, any more than a man can at a word tear out from him as worthless a religion that he has cherished as divine through a long lifetime.
The darkest passions had no terror for her; she had known them over and over again at their worst, and had ruled them and ruled by them. But deepest pity was in her heart for him; she sought to save him, even at all sacrifice to herself, and she saw that it was too late; she knew, as his eyes burned down in to hers, that, though they should part now and for ever, this longing she had wakened would consume him to his grave.
A woman weaker and more pliant would have yielded to that impulse, and have given him tenderness: to the pride and to the truth of Idalia's nature to have stooped so far had not been possible.
"Love is no word for me," she said, with calmness, underneath which a vibration of deeper feeling ran. "I am weary of it; and I have none to give. I have played with it, bribed with it, ruled by it, bought by it, worked on it, and worked through it—evilly. I cannot do that with you. I must give you suffering, I will not also give you danger. Take your promise back; I absolve you from it."
Her eyes were turned towards the sea, and not to him, as she spoke; she could not watch the misery she dealt. She knew as though she saw it the look that came upon his face—darker and deadlier than the physical anguish that had been upon it when she had found him dying in the Carpathian pass. She had stricken him strengthless; she had refused his love; she had refused even his belief in her, even his homage to her; she had condemned herself for the evil that she wrought, and she stood aloof from him, imperial, world-weary, rich in the world's wealth, without a rival in the sovereignty of her beauty and her will. Rich himself in those accidents of power and possession which she owned, he might have pleaded still, on the ground of his wretchedness, against her fiat; but in the pride of his beggared fortunes his lips were sealed to silence; he could not force his love, having no treasure upon earth save that to give, upon the empress of those brilliant revels on which the dawn had lately broken, upon the mistress of those high ambitions which seemed alone to reach her heart; upon a woman so proud, so peerless, so throned in every luxury and every splendour as this woman was. She was not haughtier in her magnificent command than he in his ruined poverty; and in that moment he had not force, nor memory, nor consciousness left to him. He only suffered dumbly and blindly, like a dog struck cruelly by the hand he loves, the hand he would have died in striving to obey.
She looked at him once—only once—and a quick sigh ran through her. Had she saved him from the fangs of the carrion beasts and the talons of the mountain birds, merely to deal him this? Better, she thought, have left him to his fate, to perish in a nameless grave, under the eternal shelter of the watching pines! Yet she did not yield. Without a glance or sign she moved slowly away across the chamber —their interview was over, its work was done.
His step arrested her: he moved forward with a faint slow effort, like one who staggers from the weakness of long illness.
"Send those you spoke of to me; I do not take my promise back."
She turned her eyes full on him with a sudden light of wonder, of admiration, of amaze.
"You would do that—now?"
"I have said—I will."
She looked at him one lingering moment longer; all that was great, and high, and fearless in her nature answering the royalty in his; then she bent her head silently.
"I thank you. Be it so."
And with those words only, she left him.