Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
"more great in martyrdom than throned as cæsar's mate."
At the Prince of Viana's villa in the interior there was a masquerade; brílliant, gorgeous, like the splendid feste of mediæval Italy, of Venice in its Dandolo glory, when the galleys swept home with the rich Byzantine spoils; of Florence while Isabel Orsini was in her loveliness, and the Capello beamed her sunny fatal smile, and even grave Machiavel sauntered well amused through the festive Gardens of Delight, when the Embassies of the Ten came in their purple pomp, or the City of Flowers laughed through endless mirth and music. The fête was very magnificent at the palace at Antina, given by lavish princely hands that scattered their gold right and left, and vied with the Grammont and the Doria brilliance away yonder in old Rome. That at it other masks were worn than those black Venetian ones of pleasure, that beneath the swell of the music words of menace and danger were exchanged, that the domino was only donned that the sword might be surely drawn hereafter, that under the dewy orange-boughs, and beside the starlit waters and on the marble stairs, and under the light exchange of frivolous wit, intrigues were woven and dark plans made perfect,—these no more disturbed the gaiety and the glory of the Antina masquerade than such had disturbed the laughing tide of festivities in Venice, or the garden fêtes of the Tuscans in the Cinque Cento. Rather they suited and enhanced it; it was in Italy, and they made it but the more Italian. It was the dagger of Sforza glancing beneath the Arlecchino spangles and colours of Goldoni. Whoso cannot understand this mingling—the laugh and the arlequinade as really joyous as the steel and the stroke are surely subtle—can never understand the Italy of the Past: perhaps not the Italy of the Present.
Around one the maskers gathered with pressing homage, around one the groups were more eager, more sedulous, more vivacious in their wit, more earnest in their under-current of political discussion than round any other; for on the elegance of the scarlet domino was the well-known badge of the Silver Ivy, that rallying symbol which brought to her all the lovers and the vassals of Idalia. She reigned there, as she had reigned wherever her foot fell, since the day eight years before, when she had left the leafy shadows and the yellow corn-lands of Sparta to come out to this world of mystery, intrigue, romance, danger, and pleasure, which she had made so wholly her own.
It has been said, "Every woman is at heart a Bohemian." Idalia was one to the core, all proud and patrician though she was. The excitement and the peril of her life, with its vivid colour and its changing chances, she would not have exchanged for the eternal monotony of the most perfect calm; not even when she most utterly loathed, most utterly rebelled against the bondage which had entered in with the life she pursued. She was weary with herself often for the evil that she had done, she hated with an intense hatred the chains that had wound themselves round her freedom-loving, liberty-craving nature; but all the same, once plunged into the whirlpool of the dangers she directed, of the excitations she enjoyed, Idalia would not have laid them down and left them—left her sceptre and her peril—without a pang bitter as that which tears life out, without a lingering and unbearable regret. It is false philosophy to say that those who have been once launched on a career which bears them now in the sunlight, now in the storm-shadow, now high on laughing waves of pleasure, now low sunk down under black bitter waters, varying ever, yet ever full of a tempestuous delight, of a headlong risk, of an abundant luxuriant glow and intensity of life, will ever willingly return to the dull flow of tideless and unchequered streams. They may in moments of exhaustion fancy that they would willingly take the patience and the monotony of serene unnoted lives—human nature will ever at times, be it in king or peasant, turn from what it has to sigh for what it has not;—but it is only a fancy, and a passing one; they would never for a second make it a reality.
Thus it was with Idalia now; remorse haunted her, captivity in a sense galled her with terrible fetters, often she hated herself and hated those around her; yet once in the vortex of the intrigues and the ambitions which had so long possessed her, she forgot all else. Thus she forgot all save them here at the Antina masquerade. It was not that she was changed, it was not that her other impulses were not vitally and deeply true; it was simply that the dominant side of her character now came into play, and the love of power that was in her usurped its ancient sway.
Moreover here, though she scorned and abhorred many of the companions and tools that the cause necessitated and employed, the cause itself was a pure and lofty one; one for which her will could never slacken, her love never grow cold;—it was the freedom and the indivisibility of Italy.
This was in the hearts, often on the lips, of all those to-night at Antina; amidst the music, the laughter, the wit, the balmy air breathed over a million flowers, the melodies of nightingales' tender throats, the flash of fire-flies among the groves of myrtle; and in the endless reception-chambers, with their jasper and their onyx, their malachite and their porphyry, stretching onward till the eye was lost in the colonnades of pillars, in the flood of light, in the sea of colour. It was a scene from the Italy of the Renaissance, from the Italy of the Cinque Cento, from the Italy of Goldoni, of Boccaccio, of Tullia d'Arragona, of Bembo, of Borgia;—but beneath it ran a vein of thought, a stream of revolution, a throb of daring that gave it also a memory of Dantesque grandeur, of Gracchan aspirations, of Julian force: "One Italy for the Italians!" vibrated through it; an echo, though a faint and distont one, of the ancient challenge, "The whole earth for the Romans."
Suddenly through the glittering gaiety of the masquerade, the magnificence of the princely banquet, the mirth of the Neapolitan revelries, an icy whisper ran; it was vague, unformed, it died half spoken upon every lip, yet it blanched the boldest blood; it was but one sickening, shameful, accursed word—"betrayed."
The music ceased, the laughs hushed, there was a strange instantaneous pause in all the vivacious life, filling the palace and the gardens with its colour and its mirth; there was such a lull as comes over sea and land before the breaking of the storm. Men looked in each other's faces with a terrible dread responsive in each other's eyes; glance met glance in a mute inquiry; friend gazed at friend in a wild search for truth, a bitter breathless thought of unmeasured suspicion; there was a chill, black, deadly horror over all—none knew whom to trust. On the stillness that had succeeded the music, the laughter, and the festivity, sounded dully the iron tread of heavily armed men; where the golden fire-flies glistened among the leaves, glistened instead the shine of steel; on the terraces and far down the gardens gleamed the blades of bayonets, the barrels of musketry; the earth seemed in a moment to grow alive with swarming men, and bristling with levelled weapons; gendarmes filled the piazza and the courts; the soldiers of Francis were upon them. There was an instant's silence so intense that the murmur of the bubbling fountains alone reigned in it; then with a shock like thunder, the bold blood of the sons of liberty, growing desperate, threw them in headlong violence unarmed upon their foes. Little avail;—the solid line of Steel was drawn around, with not an inch unfilled; they were hemmed in and caught in the toils.
Carlo of Viana, with his careless eyes alight like a lion's in its wrath, tore down from where it hung a keen Damascus sword, placed amidst a stand of curiously wrought and antique arms, and strode over the mosaic pavement to one of his guests, whose azure domino was broidered and fastened with wreaths of silver ivy.
His voice shook as he stooped to her ear.
"Madame—Idalia—this is more for you than us. Follow me at once; there is a secret passage that no living creature knows besides myself; I can save you—I will save you!"
"I thank you deeply. But—I shall not fly from them!"
"My God! Not fly? Do you not know that if you are taken"
Her lips might be a shade whiter, but her voice had no hesitation as she answered him:
"My fate will not be worse than others; whatever is theirs, I share."
Carlo of Viana drew the broad blade with a ringing echo from the sheath:
"Mother of Christ, then, we will defend you while life is in us!"
At that very moment the storm broke, the tumult began; the gay maskers fled in from the terraces and gardens like sheep driven wild by a wolf-dog; the banqueters seized the antique weapons, the weighty candelabra, the bronzes, the toy daggers—all and anything that would crash through like iron or be hurled like stones; the double lines of steel drew closer, and filled in every aperture, blocked every door of egress; an officer advanced to the centre of the great arch that spanned the entrance of the first reception-room, and addressed the Prince himself:
"Eccellenza, in the King's name, I demand your unqualified submission, and your surrender to me of all suspected persons—notably, first, of the notorious revolutionist known by the title of the Countess Vassalis."
For all answer, with a mighty oath that rang through all his banqueting-chambers, Viana lifted his arm, and whirled in a flashing arc above his head the bright blade of the Persian steel;—Idalia bent forward with a swift gesture, which caught his wrist, and arrested the sabre in its downward course; then, turning to the King's officer, she removed her Venetian mask, and looked at him calmly.
"If it will spare the shedding of innocent blood, you know me now."
For one moment there was a dead silence—the hush of speechless surprise, of speechless admiration; the emotion of a passionate love, of a passionate pride, in and for her filled the hearts of her own people with an agony of homage and of grief; the soldiers of the Bourbons were arrested for the instant, paralysed and confounded as they looked on her, fronting them with a proud serenity, a dauntless, tranquil contempt, with the light on her diamond-bound hair. Then, as the officer of the Palace troops advanced to arrest her, his soldiers drawn closer and firmer round the banqueting-hall, the shouts of "Viva l'Italia!" "Viva la libertà!" shook the walls with the roll of thunder; a hundred who would have died at her feet to save a dog of hers from injury threw themselves round her as in a guard of honour; driven to bay, the lovers of freedom, the haters of tyranny, were ready to perish, shot down like hunted beasts, rather than ever yield. Carlo of Viana flung himself in the van, his sabre flashing above his head; the gay and splendid dresses of the maskers, glittering in the light, seemed to heave and toss like a sea of colour; they circled her like gardes du corps; their improvised weapons, torn from the tables, from the cabinets, from the walls, whirled in the radiance that burned from innumerable lamps. Idalia's eyes gleamed with such fire as might have been in the eyes of Artemisia when she bore her prow down on the Calyndian; of Antonina when she pierced the armies of the Goths, holding watch and ward to sack Imperial Rome; of Boadicea when she led the Iceni on to the fasces and the standards of the conquering legions. She would have given herself to save them; but since they, with or without her, must be doomed, her whole soul rose responsive to the challenge of danger, to the defiance of submission.
. Her glance beamed on them with a superb light; sign of fear, thought of terror, there were none on her; she stood unmoved, the centre of that tossing ocean of colour, of steel, of floating dominoes, of levelled pistols, and glanced at Viana with a glance that thrilled him like flame and made him drunk like wine.
"Right! If they must take us, let us be dead first!"
As touchwood to the flash of fire, their blood and their wills answered her bidding; with a single sweep of his arm Viana felled down the commander who faced him, in a stroke that cleft; straight through bone and brain; it was the signal of a life-and-death resistance. With a yell of fury, the soldiers closed in; a single voice from one unseen rose clear above the din.
"Reserve your fire, cut those carrion down like straw, and capture her alive!"
The voice was the voice of supreme command; officers and troops alike obeyed it; it was the mellow clarion tone of Giulio Villaflor, if the Priest of Peace could be the chief of such an errand. With bayonets fixed, in ranks three deep, pressing steadily through the courts and chambers, the soldiers of Francis came on to the band of the maskers. Not a man wavered as the pointed file of steel pressed towards them: their masks flung aside, lest in that moment of supreme danger any should deem them guilty of the wish to hide beneath disguise, their right arms lifted, their brave faces set, the Revolutionists waited the approach of the Royalists—waited till there was scarce a foot's breadth between their circle and the naked blades levelled against them. Then, with a marvellous unison, as she raised her hand, they launched themselves forward, Viana in their van, and the weapons with which the haste of extremity had armed them fell with furious strength and lightning speed crash down on the ranks of the soldiers. Strange weapons—the embossed barrels of old Florentine arquebuses, the butt-ends of toy ivory pistols, the bronzed weight of lifted statuettes, the gold-handled knives of the banquet-tables, the massive metal of Cellini vases, the arabesqued steel of mediæval rapiers,—anything, everything that could have been torn down in the moment, from the art-treasures round, were hurled—as stones are hurled from a barricade,—down on the advancing troops of the king with mighty force, with tremendous issue. The Bourbon legionaries reeled and wavered under that pitiless storm, that fell like thunder-bolts upon them; more than one swayed back stone dead as the bronze or gold missile of some statuary or amphora felled him to the ground. Forbidden to fire, they hesitated dismayed before that terrible band of revellers turned to warriors, of maskers changed to foemen, of idle laughing wits and dancers grown desperate as men who fought for more than life. The Royalists recoiled; they were chiefly the dross of various nations; they could not front the blazing glance, the tiger-swoop, the proud, passion-heated scorn, the fearless menace of Italian nobles and Italian patriots. From the gloom of the night without, the same clarion voice rolled, clear as a bell's, merciless as a Nero's.
"Cowards! perdition seize you. Advance and fire on them."
It was a strange battle-field;—the beautiful ballroom and banqueting-halls of Antina! It was a strange battle-scene!—the circle of the dominoes like a ring of many colours were belted round the form of Idalia like guards around their menaced queen; the dead men were lying with their blood slowly welling out over the rich mosaics and the velvet carpets; the soldiers of the Throne had halted in a broken line; the light that had been lit for the gaieties of the masquerade was shining on carnage and on combat; the splendours of the palace were stretching out and away beyond aisle on aisle of porphyry columns, through circle on circle of rose-wreathed arches, while without, through the marble pillars of the piazza, were the silver silence of the night and the shadows of innumerable forms gathering closer and closer to seal all hope from those who fought for liberty.
Idalia stood tranquil; and as they saw the serene disdain, the unwavering courage, the mercenaries of the king paused involuntarily. They dared not fire on her.
The voice from the gardens rang imperiously through the stillness.
"Dastards! you shall be shot down with them. Fire!"
The last word was not for the halting and paralysed soldiers of the front; it reached farther, to where, unseen, the picked men of Francis's Guard had marched noiselessly through the opposite doors of the banqueting-room, and circled the band of patriots in the rear with an impassable barrier—meshing them in one net beyond escape. They had not heard, they had not seen, they knew nothing of the ambuscade behind them, where they stood gathered around Idalia, facing their foes and holding them back by the menace of their eyes, as men hold back wild beasts, in gallant and dauntless chivalry, willing each one of them to lay down his life that night rather than yield her up in passive cowardice to her foes. They never saw, they never heard—behind them stole the murderous tread, filling up the rear of the lofty hall with rank on rank of soldiers. Then suddenly, as the word to fire rang in its merciless command from the outer court, the line of rifles belched forth its flame; the sullen roar of the shots echoed through the chamber, raking the glittering colours of the masquerade robes as the driving hail rakes the wheat and the flowers of a full corn-field. Shot down from the rear in that craven murder, they fell, the balls in their brains or their shoulders—a fourth of them levelled low; yet not a moan, not a cry escaped one of them, not a prayer broke from the lips wet with their life-blood, not a sigh escaped those whose nerves were rent, whose bones were shattered, whose lungs were pierced by that dastardly masked attack. Not a cry, not a supplication, broke even from Idalia, as the crash of the firing rolled over the devoted band that guarded her. Not for the first time did she look on bloodshed, nor for the first time meet the likeness of her death; but as they fell downward at her feet, stricken like felled trees, a mortal anguish came into her fearless eyes; she stretched her arms out less with entreaty than command.
"Spare them! To save them, I will surrender."
"By Christ, not for ten thousand lives!" cried Carlo of Viana, where he stood out of the deadly press, his reeking sword held aloft before her. "Surrender you! They shall only take you when we all lie dead around you!" She grasped his arm and looked up in his face: there was no more of fear, no more of shrinking, than there were on his own; only in her eyes a superb heroism, on her lips a passionate entreaty.
"Serve me better still, my noble friend! Turn your sword here."
The tumult was at its height; emboldened by the fate of those shot down from the rear, the Royalists of the front pressed in. Wedged between two barriers, the patriots fought with mad despair. Where Viana stood, pausing one instant as she turned and made her prayer to him, he knew that death were sweeter far to her than the fate that would await her from her foes; he knew that she had in her the courage of Lucretia, the force of the wife of Pætus; but to slay with his own hand that perfect loveliness, to destroy with his own steel the pulse of that splendid and gracious life!—he drooped his head with a shudder, "I cannot!"
Scarcely had the words left his lips when the blade of a bayonet pierced his lungs; he fell like a mighty cedar lightning-stricken, not dead, but dying fast. The roar of the combat, the ring of the shots, the tumult of the conflict, as the betrayed were pressed between the wedge of the Royalist van and rear, were filling his palace-chambers with their riot; he knew no more of sight, or sound, or life. He only looked up with blind eyes, that, through their mists, vainly and solely sought for one; his lips parted with a murmur, "Idalia!—Italy!" Then, with those names his latest utterance, a shiver shook him as the red blood streamed through all the laces and the silks, the violet and the silver and the jewels of his dress, and, with one other deep-drawn, lingering sigh—he died.
She sank beside him on her knees, and her own danger and the conflict of the night that raged in its fiery struggle, its mortal misery, around, died from her memory, and grew dull upon her sense. She only remembered the man who lay here at her feet—dead; dead through the love he bore her; dead through the creeds she had breathed in him; dead for her and by her, as though her hand had slain him.
The fearless grandeur faded from her face, that had been there throughout all chance of her own death; it grew white, and cold, and fixed; a tearless grief, a burning remorse, were in her eyes, which only saw that crimson stream of flowing blood staining the tesselated floor, and that brave, bold, serene face turned upward to the light of million lamps studding like stars the vault of the dome above.
"Let them take me," she thought, "it is just. What am I better than a murderess?"
From the gloom of the outer court rang once more the voice of command.
"Seize her! You can choke the dogs of rebels at your leisure."
She never heard the pitiless clarion of those clear tones; she never felt the hiss of the balls past her; she never saw the ghastly conflict that filled the palace festive chambers with its clamour and its carnage, as men armed strong with the weight of tyranny and law pressed down on men who fought for liberty, for conscience, for their land, and for their lives. She thought only of the dead who lay around her.
Two officers of the guard, obedient, stooped and laid their grasp upon her; the action roused her from the unconscious stupor with which she knelt beside the lifeless limbs; she shook them off and rose facing them, still with that look of terrible remorse in her tearless eyes, though on her face were a scorn and a daring which held those whom she threw off at bay as sorely as the most desperate resistance of shot or steel.
She glanced down the hall, under the dome of the light-studded ceiling that stretched over so vast an area, that had been a few brief moments before filled with music and mirth and the murmur of laughing voices. She took no heed of those who had sought to seize her, but her eyes gazed with an infinite yearning out on her defenders holding that unequal life-and-death struggle between the closing bayonets, and her voice echoed, clear and eloquent, yet with a misery that thrilled the hearts even of her enemies.
"My friends—my friends!—lose no more for me. Death is liberty, built it cannot be mine; give me no other murdered lives to lie heavy on my own. Save yourselves by surrender, by flight, how you can, and think no more of me. The future will yet avenge us all."
The voice of the chief in command rang down again from the dusky shadows of the piazza.
"Soldiers! seize and silence her. She speaks sedition."
The officers, gentler than he who hounded them on to their work, stooped, hesitating, to her.
"You surrender?"
She looked at them with a look that for the moment flashed back all the proud contemptuous light upon her face, and lit in her deep eyes the glow of the old heroism.
"If the carnage cease."
The voice from the outer courts answered her, imperious and unyielding—
"We make no terms with revolutionists and rebels."
"I make no peace with tyrants and assassins.
Her return-defiance challenged her unseen foe with a calm grandeur; she stood above the fallen dead as some prophetess of Israel, some goddess in the Homeric age, might have stood above the slain, and called down vengeance.
From the darkness of the piazza a hot and heavy oath broke through the clamour.
"Yield! or we will deal with you as we deal with men."
A smile of utter unspeakable scorn passed over her lips—scorn for the cowardice that could threaten her thus—scorn for the craven temper that could deem death so victorious a menace.
She looked down tranquilly on the gleaming barrels of the rifles, and as her lover, in the far Carpathian pass, had given the word for his own death-shot, so she gave hers now. Her eyes rested steadily on the Royalists.
"Fire!"
The soldiers of the King gazed at her, then dropped the muzzles of their muskets slowly downward and downward; they hung their heads, and their eyes fell, while from one to another ran a sullen rebellious murmur,
"Non possiamo!"
There was an instant's intense stillness once more; the tumult ceased, the clamour died away, the uplifted steel sank, the iron grip relaxed; aggressors and defenders, revolutionists and royalists, alike were mute and awed before the courage of one woman. Then, with the fury of a mighty oath; a fresh command was hissed in its ferocity from the garden gloom, where the chiefs looked on into the courts and chambers.
"Make her captive, dead or living!"
There were ruffians in that Royal Guard, brigands of the Abruzzi, mountaineers of Calabria, who had imbrued their hands in innocent blood, and knew no check upon their crimes, though they would mutter Aves for their black and poisonous souls like any nun before her crucifix. These heard but to obey. They launched themselves upon her; they flung themselves through the press to seize her; their swords flashed naked above her head; their ravenous eyes fed gloatingly upon her jewels and her beauty; their brutal hands stretched ruthlessly to grasp and crush the gold of the shining hair, the mould of the delicate limbs, the fairness of the transparent skin; their gripe was on her shoulder, their breath was on her bosom. With the horror, and the grace, of outraged dignity, Idalia shook their hold from her, and drew herself from the loathsome insult of their villanous contact; her eyes shone with the lustre of a passionate scorn, her voice mellow, imperious, unshaken, rang outward to the terrace where her tyrants herded.
"I surrender!—not to escape death, but to escape the pollution of your touch."