Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
"the devil tempted me, and i did eat."
In the Neapolitan palazetto, which was the residence of Victor Vane, the light of the summer morning made its way through half-closed blinds, the odours of orange and myrtle were heavy to oppression on the air, the waters beat a lulling measure below, at the foot of the little pier; it was still, soft, indolently charming, slumberously restful in the noontide hush; yet he himself—commonly so calm, so languid, so supreme an artist in the science of lazy pleasures—had no repose in it or in his own life. He was pacing up and down the chamber that opened on the terrace with a restless impatience, a feverish irritation with all things that were about him. He drank down some claret fresh from the ice; it seemed to have no coolness in it; he twisted some grapes asunder, and they seemed to parch his mouth; he smoked an opium-filled narghilé, and flung the tube away with a curse—the nicotine had lost its charm, and irritated where it was wont to soothe; then he flung himself down on a couch, with his head dropped on his hands, and sat there immovable many moments, with a quick shudder running through his limbs, and the silence about him like a dead intolerable weight. For now that his work was done he loathed it; now that he had betrayed her, he could have killed himself; now that he had given her over to captivity and torture, he was haunted, and wrung, and maddened with the thoughts that for ever pursued him. Yet—he would not have undone it if he could; he would not have foregone his revenge had it been in his power; since she was denied to him, he loved to know that she suffered, that she had pain, and fetters, and shame, that she would live to wish she had listened to his love, and to feel the cost of having mocked him and repulsed him.
She had refused him all the sweetness of passion; he would not have loosened his hand on its vengeance. Since she could never be his, let her lose all likeness of herself, and perish as she might! There was fierceness enough in him to feel that ruthlessly; there was sufficient savageness in him beneath the polish of the world and the serenity of his egotism to be eager—thirstily and brutally eager—to know that what was beyond his reach, what he sought vainly, what he desired unavailingly, would be scourged, and defaced, and insulted, and shut out from all place on the earth. And yet, though he had given her up to her suffering, and would not, had he owned the power now, have released her from one pang of it, he suffered himself—suffered a torture not less than that to which he had delivered her. He knew the doom that would be hers under the revenge of a Church and a State so bitterly incensed against her; he knew that the net which had enclosed her would never unloose to let her issue with her life; he knew that if she ever came forth from the captivity into which he had betrayed her, it would only be when bondage, and stripes, and the companionship of infamy, and the approach of age, would leave no trace on her of all which she once had been; he knew—for against them all his hatred had been borne and his skill arrayed—the full meaning of the tyrannies of Bourbon and of Rome: and there were times when his passion endured agonies at the memory of the scourge that would cut the fairness of her skin, of the rough hands that would unveil her beauty, of the gaol-ruffians who would strip the delicate raiment off her limbs, of the villanous glances that would gloat unchecked on her fallen loveliness. Mercy he had none; such love as he had borne her was of the character to change into a relentless and envenomed hate; but it was passion still, and there were times when the thought of her yielded up to her adversary's will, and buried for ever beneath the stones of a dungeon-vault, drove his own revenge back into his heart, and tortured him not less than that revenge could her. Moreover, he had betrayed her; he had sold her into the hands of her foes, and though the subtle art of silken treachery had long been a science in whose proficiency he took his highest pride, there was manhood and there was dignity enough in him to make his forehead burn with a red flush of shame when there rose in remembrance before him the challenge of her eyes, and to make him long to know her dead in her youth, so that those eyes should never be turned on him in accusation and rebuke.
"Great heaven!" he muttered in his teeth, where he lay with his head sunk on his arms, "if she would only have believed I loved her!"
That was the one misery which had goaded him on to his crime. For once in his life he had been in earnest; for the sole time, from his boyhood up, an emotion genuine, however alloyed, had risen in him. In what he had felt for Idalia he had been true, with. a truth he had never known before; for her he would have become anything that she had bidden him; to win her he would have endured and achieved all tasks she could have pointed out; and in the single hour in which this sincerity and this reality had possessed him, his own sceptical mockery had recoiled on him in hers; he had been powerless to induce her to hear one beat save that of egotism in his heart; he had been powerless to make her credit one throb of love or loyalty in him. That she should have rejected him he would have pardoned her; that she disbelieved him was the iron which went so far down into his soul, and changed every desire in him into one cruel thirst—the thirst for his vengeance and for her destruction. She had contemptuously doubted the force of his love. Well! he had said in his teeth that she should feel that force—feel it in the weight of fetters, in the burden of ignominy, in the oppression of dungeon solitude—feel it till she cursed the day that ever she braved it and mocked at it.
Awhile ago, and he would have laughed in the beard of any man who should have told him that such barbaric folly, such desert passions as these, could ever blind and rule him. Now he never resisted their sway, but let them burn out his strength and consume his intellect as they would. There were times when he shook opiates into his wines with a hand that recked little whether it shook too little or too much, and would have poured out a death-dose without a tremor; times when ambition seemed worthless as autumn leaves, and he loathed life because life could never yield to him the beauty of one woman. All who once loved Idalia drank of a mandragora that left them little of their natures, nothing of their wisdom. Even he had no antidote against it, but let it steal away his brain and pour its fire through his limbs till the soft courtier grew a brute, till the subtle politician became a fool, till the gentleman turned a traitor.
A sound in one of the many chambers leading off from the terrace-room in which he was, roused him. He was still too much governed by long habit and discipline not to recover himself instantly. Whatever he felt was only given way to in loneliness; no looker-on could see any change in his delicate, immutable face, in his soft calm smile, in his easy velvet indolence; he would have profited little by his long study of the world if he could not have held his own in finesse to the last.
Into the apartment, with little ceremony and no apology, Conrad Phaulcon came. His disguise was perfect. He was used to assume one at any hour and for any need; and in the dress of a melon-seller, with his fair skin stained and his auburn beard dyed black, his closest friend might have passed him by, his sworn foe failed to challenge him. He neither paused to watch nor ask if his host penetrated the mask as he swept up towards Vane, his mobile mouth working, and his large brown eyes aflame.
"Is this true?"
Victor had known him before he had heard his voice, and was on his guard. He shrugged his shoulders where he leaned against the side of the vine-shadowed window.
"You incarnate volcano! you will destroy us all some day! An ostensible melon-seller forcing his way in to me in this fashion! Have you ever stopped to remember what the household can think?"
"Felix admitted me, and I gave him the password. But, answer me, for God's sake, what of Idalia?"
"What of her? Why, this of her, caro, that she is the subject for a tragic study by that eminent artist Monsignore Giulio Villaflor, to which you will form a companion picture if you trust to a basket of melons to pass you unnoticed through Naples."
The words were quite cool, quite unstudied, with just enough of regret in their half-languid banter to keep them from being mockery. Phaulcon's fine frame shook passionately as he heard; under the olive dye his cheek grew ashen; he threw himself down and sobbed like a child, wept as if his heart would break, in uncontrolled emotion.
His friend stood looking at him some moments in silence with a certain impatient disdain. This Greek, handsome as an Apollo, cruel at times as a Nero, and stained deep with many a crime, was yet as a child in the sight of the more controlled and astute Englishman; a child in cowardice, in impulsiveness, in caprice, in tyranny, in emotion, with all a child's unguardedness, recklessness, mobility, and love of torture.
"Naturally, you regret!" he said, at last, very softly. "You have not even killed your goose with the golden eggs yourself, my poor Conrad, but see bird and gold both stolen at a blow! Very naturally, you regret!"
The silken irony, the mockery of pity, stung Phaulcon like a shot. He started up, dashing the waves of his hair out of his eyes, while great drops of dew stood on his forehead.
"Can you credit me nothing better than that?"
"Caro mio, how can I credit you with anything better than caring for money? It is the one prudential virtue which the world does crown!"
The Greek's teeth crushed his silken beard, while his features quivered with the vivid, uncontrolled emotion of his changing temperament.
"I am not thinking of her wealth; I think of her—of my own sins to her, of her beauty, of her genius, of her life."
His voice sank in a deep sob; he spoke but the truth for the moment; he thought for the instant not of himself, but of Idalia; not of his own danger, not of his own loss, but of her torture. He loved her in his wayward, tyrannous way; and for awhile the love alone remained with him.
"She is in the power of Villaflor!" he said, fíercely. Remorse was in him, and remorse made him long to wreak some savage vengeance somewhere; he would have little cared how or on whom.
"They say so. You know as much as I do. It has been a terrible blow to us; to keep quiet, and cover as much as we can, is all we shall be able to do. There was great carnage at Antina, and the arrests swept off all the musketry spared—among them your Countess. Indeed, she was doubtless the chief object of all."
"Where have they taken her?"
He spoke in his throat. At that moment he would have rather had a hundred balls fired into his own breast than have heard this of the woman he had so pitilessly chained and tormented.
"Poverino! how can we tell? It is not the fashion of the court to disclose its secrets, nor of Monsignore to let profane eyes see where his nets are spread."
His voice was unmoved, and almost careless, though it wore a natural gravity of regret, but in his heart he endured an agony greater than that of the man before him; the thought crossed him, to what fate would the Prince-Bishop devote a captive of the sex and the years and the charms of the prisoner he had betrayed to him?
Phaulcon's hand clenched; the muscles of his throat and chest, where the loose shirt of the contadino left them to view, swelled to bursting. Idalia was his treasury, his sovereignty, his world, his sceptre; without her he was nothing; of her he had made with a twisted mixture in him of fear and homage, of tyranny and weakness, of hate and love, an empress who to him alone out of all the earth was a slave, an enchanted wand with which he summoned what he would, an idol that he treated as hunters treated their statue of Pan when they reviled him because they needed more wealth than he gave, and yet feared him with a strange mingling of dread, of reverence, and of jealous love.
"Villaflor?" he repeated hoarsely. "That Satan of the Church? Better she had gone at once to her death. Are you sure? How can you know?"
Vane had let slip in a momentary incaution the name of his great priestly confederate; he veiled the indiscretion with his finest tact.
"How can I doubt?" he said, with an acrid impatience that passed well enough for aversion to a mutual and omnipotent foe. "Was Giulio Villaflor ever absent from such errands as those? Did his brain ever fail to hatch such plots as those by which the maskers of Antina were entrapped, however little his hand might be seen, or his will be guessed in them? His special hatred always bore down on the Countess Vassalis; there is no more doubt that he works beneath this, if he do not wholly originate and govern it, than there is doubt that the sun is shining out yonder."
Phaulcon swore a mighty oath in his teeth as his lips shook, and his face flushed purple.
"If he harm her, I will find my way into his palace and drive a dagger down his throat, though he stand at the altar itself!"
"Carissimo! what would that avail, except to have you hanged, or disposed of in a still less humane fashion? Be reasonable. Tragedy will avail nothing. If you killed Villaflor, there would remain a score of monsignori to take his place and play his cards. The arrest of Madame de Vassalis is a terrible stroke for us—we could better have afforded to lose fifty men than to lose your irresistible Idalia; at the same time we shall not better her, and we shall surely imperil ourselves and all our projects, if we go like men in a melodrama, slaying priests and calling on the gods for vengeance."
"What! You would have us stand calmly by in inaction while she may be—may be" The words choked him; he knew what the power of Giulio Villaflor meant to all, meant above all to a woman.
"Inaction! What action can you suggest?"
The Greek was silent; his swift thoughts swept, far over a thousand schemes that rose only to bear with them the sentence of impossibility.
"I—as eagerly as yourself—would be the first to try all things, and to risk much in the service of the Countess Vassalis," pursued Vane, with the soft, even, almost unnatural calm which he had held throughout his interview with the Roman prelate. "But, frankly, I see nothing that is to be done with any sort of benefit. To penetrate the secrets of the government will take time, and, what we have very little of, money; to avow ourselves her partisans will be only at once to share her imprisonment and be lodged in the casemates yonder; to attempt a rescue requires the one thing we do not possess—knowledge of where she has been taken. What remains? We are as helpless, so far as I can see, as if their chains were already about our limbs. There is nothing for it—yet at least—except to wait and watch."
Phaulcon sank down again, with his head drooped and his hands locked savagely one in another,
"You are right, I dare say," he said, bitterly; "and very cautious! But—you never loved her."
There was not even the flicker of an emotion, not the faintest flush on his companion's face; but a smile passed for a second over his listener's lips; he had not loved her!—he whose thwarted love had betrayed her to her fate! The Greek's utter ignorance was almost ludicrous to him.
"Your heart and your conscience have come into sudden play, Conrad mio," he said, indolently. "I never knew before that you kept such old-world weaknesses; no one would have accused you of them!"
"Well! I have been guilty enough to her!" he answered, sullenly, with a dark red flushing his cheek; he was ashamed of his better emotion, as the man he was with now had always made him ashamed of any purer or higher touch that lingered in him.
"It is rather late in the day to think of that!"
"Too late!—my God!"
A terrible remorse was on him, passing, fitful, evanescent, but very ardent, very contrite, whilst it was in its first poignancy, whilst he thought of the ghastly doom in which had closed the splendid life that he had made and marred, the career to which he had wooed and to which he had enchained the youth and the power and the genius of Idalia—a remorse in which he suffered acutely; in which the uncertainty and the peril of her unknown fate were tortures to him; in which he seemed very vile, very accursed in his own sight.
His friend looked on impatiently; it incensed him to see this callous, thoughtless, tyrannous, unscrupulous Greek moved by her danger thus; it made his own traitor-shame weigh heavier on his heart. He did not lose his self-command; but he spoke almost insolently, on the spur of the misery that he choked down out of sight.
"Your beautiful Countess is too fair for the scourge and the cell, there is no doubt of that. I dare say she will never be condemned to them. Giulio Villaflor has too good a taste for such dainty paintings to shut them in solitude; he will not be likely to let so rare a flower wither in a prison-court. Miladi Idalia has better coin to buy indulgence with than all the gold of Europe!"
In his own wretchedness it was a cruel relief to him to fling dishonour at the woman he had betrayed, and to torment the man whose self-acusing contrition made him feel more sharply his own baseness.
Conrad Phaulcon started up impetuously, with deadly blasphemies muttered under his breath, as he paced the chamber like a leopard lashed to fury.
"You do not know Idalia," he said, savagely. "She would die sooner"
Vane laughed a flippant, nonchalant, silvery laugh. "Oh, believe me, fair women are not so enamoured of the ugliness of death; and—as for the rest—she has gone very far for the sake of public liberty; she will scarce grudge a good price for personal freedom. Not know Idalia? Altro! I don't think, with all your title to her confidence, that you know her very thoroughly yourself. Perhaps she will treat with Villaflor de couronne à couronne. We are playing a losing game; she will have the tact of her sex and go over to the stronger side. She is far more fit for courts than conspiracies. She could make good terms, I have little doubt, and I would back her to match the bishop in subtlety,—I could scarcely give as much praise to any one else in Europe."
"You mean that"
"That she will forsake us and coalesce with the royalties. All women are rakes at heart, as Pope says, and he should have given an alliterative line to it, all women are royalists. They may talk liberalism, but they are Optimates to the core, and adore a despot, public or private. Madame de Vassalis will see herself in imminent danger; she will barter herself and her knowledge and her power to buy her emancipation. Not a doubt of it. She is a republican; she is of the advanced school; she is of us—oh yes! but she is a woman of the world, a wonderfuUy clever one too, and she will do what is expedient, and never die for a chimera."
He more than half believed what he said; he saw far into Idalia's character, but not far enough to fully gauge its depth. He had, moreover, a natural disbelief in the existence of any nature proof against a bribe, or capable of preferring a creed to a sovereignty. The Greek looked at him with fiery scorn.
"You think that? I tell you that, rather than play for one hour into the hands of King or Church, Idalia would suffer a hundred deaths. Her word is her bond, and treachery has no place with her; she will never buy liberty by a renegade's cowardice"
"Sublimely virtuous, but—scarcely true, I fancy. Miladi is too world-wise to be an idealist."
He spoke carelessly: but such conscience as was in him, and all manliness that had not been polished away by the plane of sophism and of expediency, were pierced to the quick by the words that unwittingly stung him so closely.
"By the way," he went on carelessly, "I dare say that the Court, having snared her, would be willing to treat with you. What do you say, amico mio? You have not made a very good thing of Liberalism; would you try Absolutism for a time, and change the Phrygian bonnet for a Neapolitan coronet?"
"Well—you. If they do not take you prisoner too, you may conclude very good terms just now, in all probability. Our party is bruised, but not killed. We have danger enough in us to render us worth bribing, though not strength enough to giye us a straw's weight of success. Under the circumstances, you might make a very lucrative bargain. There is no reason on earth why a democratic condottiere like you, my good Conrad, should not be metamorphosed into a courtíer and a son of the Church. What do you think of it?"
Phaulcon's eyes had fastened on him throughout his speech with a glistening light that he—he who had told the Prince-Bishop that he could buy this man at a momentos notice—had construed as the eagerness for change, for security, and for a costly bribe, of an avaricious and reckless adventurer. As he ceased, the Greek's rich voice broke across his final words like thunder.
"By Heaven, if I thought you spoke in earnest I would kill you where you sit! If I did such villany as you hint at, I should deserve the shot or the steel that would find its way to me as surely as night follows day. You tempt me to such shame—you!"
Victor raised his hand with a slight warning gesture; the gesture that controlled his companion's tumultuous passions like a spell.
"Why not?—to try you? Frankly, I scarce gave you credit for such sublimated idealogy and self-devotion. Do you mean to say that you would rather swing or be shot by the Bourbons to-morrow than get a court place and an Italian title?"
He spoke with a contemptuous, incredulous insolence; he would as soon have expected Vesuvius to vomit gold and diamonds as to find anything like loyalty and probity in the man he dealt with—a man who checked at no crime, and knew no contrition.
The Greek flashed restlessly and painfully under the brown dye of his skin.
"Sneer as you will," he said, sullenly, "I have so much conscience in me, whether you believe it or not. I am vile enough, I dare say, but I am not so vile as that. There are few sins I have not plunged into, there is not one that I fear; but a renegade I never was yet, and never will be. By Heavens! if I felt myself turning traitor, if I thought that my strength would fail me to keep true, I would set the mouth of a pistol against my own head before my lips had time to dishonour me!"
In the moment he was true; in the moment the one higher thing in his nature asserted its domination; with all his falsity, his guilt, his ruthlessness, his baseness—and these were very black—he was loyal to an idea, he was faithful to a bond. He would betray others without a scruple, but he would not turn a traitor to his cause; he had so much still left of affinity with the codes and the freedom that he ostensibly served. It went far to redeem him, all warped and erring though it was—went far to raise him above the higher intelligence and the finer subtlety of the man who tempted him.
Vane heard him with an acrid wrath; this madman, this tool, this wax in his hands, this guilt-stained adventurer, whom he thought no more of than he thought of any pistol that he could use as he would, full of danger to others but to him a mere toy of wood and of steel, shamed him, stung him» escaped from him. What Conrad Phaulcon shrank from as too foul to stoop to must be foul indeed!
"I congratulate you on your new nobility, mon cher," he said, indolently, with that covert sneer which the Greek had learned to dread as a hound dreads the lash. "I did not know there was anything you had scruples about, but I am glad there should be;—it is a new experience! I take your assurances, however, cum grano salis;—you are quite wise to make them so fervently, seeing that, as you observed, a shot or a stab would follow your desertion as surely as night follows day. And.now, you will allow me to remark that you are very imperfectly disguised, that you will involve me very disagreeably if you are discovered here, and that I shall thank you to remove yourself from Naples at once."
"But Idalia?"
"You can serve Idalia in nothing by putting yourself and every one else in jeopardy. The Church has her; the Church does not lightly let go its prey. All that can be done, you are sure, will be done"
"But"
Victor lifted his hand again; a very slight gentle movement, but before it the fiery impetuosity, the mutinous impatience, of the Greek fell into a soldier's submissiveness, a spaniel's docility. In their armies there were many ranks, but there was only one discipline—implicit obedience and silence unto death. If his chief had bidden him throw himself from the heights of Tiberio, Phaulcon would have cast himself headlong down without a question, when once they stood on the ground which that slight gesture warned him they were on now—the ground of authority on one side, of obedience on the other.
"Leave all to me. And for the present quit Naples while you can—if you can. Go to the old quarters at Paris immediately, and there await instructions. Adieu!"
Phaulcon's eyes looked at him with a piteous entreaty; he did not speak, but the great muscles of his throat swelled and throbbed, and his nervous hands clenched; the mute appeal spoke better than any words his prayer against that merciless dismissal.
"Go, caro," said his tyrant, gently; but the gentleness was immutable and cold. "If you feel such tenderness for your fair Countess, you should not have drawn her into such dangerous paths. Make yourself easy; she can take care of herself; there are few men—and I doubt if Giulio Villaflor be one of the few—who can match the wit and the science of La Vassalis. Now, go; your presence is embarrassing, and your melons are a blunder; but you always would be so impetuous! Bon voyage; and if the Bourbonists should stop you on the way, remember—and die mute. An unpleasant and discourteous allusion, I confess; but one must face possible contingencies."
Conrad Phaulcon looked at him one moment with a fierce glare under his curling lashes; but for the bond that bound and the authority that fettered him, he would have tossed up the Northerner's slender frame in his strong lithe arms, and dashed on the marble without those subtle astute brains that baffled and that ruled him. Then he dropped his head as a chidden hound drops his—and went.
Alone, his chief sat motionless, his eyes fixed, his arms resting on the table before him, his face white and rigid as though its profile were the profile of a marble bust. He had been bitterly stung, though he had never shown it; he had been deeply moved, though he had given no sign of it. This lawless tiger, this velvet-skinned wild brute, this worthless adventurer, this mountain-thief, who shot men as willingly as he shot sea-birds, had flung off treachery as a villany too black for him; and he—a scholar, a gentleman, a wit, a man who ridiculed the barbaric errors of crime, and who knew that he had in him intellect to compass the statecraft of half a world—had found no issue for his ambitions, no crown to his career, no end for his attainments, except a traitor's shame! No rebuke from pure or lofty lives would have made him feel his own degradation so deeply as the revolt of the man whose hardened guilt he had known so long, and whose scruples he had never before found check at any baseness that was offered him; the man in whom he had himself killed all remnant of better instincts, and whom he had looked on as a mercenary, to be hired at will for any infamy, by whichever side could bid the highest. No scorn from those of stainless honour or of blameless deeds could have cut him so unendurably as the contempt for his own sin of renegade betrayal which had flashed from the glance and lashed him in the words of the Greek, whom he had known steeled to all remorse and careless of all disgrace.
"Faugh!" he thought, with a disdainful bitterness that availed little to reconcile him to himself; "his is just such bastard honour, such childish folly, as we see a thousand times over in the most shameless scoundrels of Europe. The brigand murders at his fancy, and reverences a leaden saint in his hat; the brutes of the Abruzzi flay their prisoners, and pray to the Madonna; the soldiers of the Pope kill women and children as they would cut the throats of pigs, and tremble when their master blesses them on Easter-day;—it is all over the world, that trash of superstition, that fit of spuríous repentance, that ague-attack of poltroonery which men, because they are ashamed of it, dignify into conscience or creed! He would sell his soul to the devil if there were such a thing as a devil, and yet he prides himself on clinging to an idea which he has never followed except for the sake of adventure and self-interest, and to a cause which he has never embraced except as a vent for his own listlessness and discontent! And men call that king of straw, that random folly, that weakness cloaked in borrowed purples, honour!"
But the ironies that he wove to himself, the contempt in which he strove to steep and still the pangs of shame that Conrad Phaulcon's single virtue had awakened, had little potency. He was a gentleman, and the disgrace of his sin was as gall to him. Something of that humiliation and unendurable hatred for his own act which made Iscariot slay himself, finding no value in the silver pieces for whose glitter he had wrecked his peace and sold the guiltless, smote even through the ice-mail of his graceful callousness, the steel cuirass of his worldly policies.
And—though cowardice had no place in him, as it had in the fiery but mobile temper of Phaulcon—a shiver ran through him as he thought of those words—"the shot or the steel that follows the renegade, as the night follows the day." He knew that they were no hyperbole, no metaphor; he knew that men who were false to the political Order of which they were sworn, died so by that Order's vengeance, almost as surely as darkness falls on the sun's setting—died with a dagger-stroke in the winter nights of Rome, a pistol-shot in the gay chambers of Paris, a blow from behind in the riotous carnival times of Venice; died wherever they were, struck by unerring hands, and knowing that it was but wild justice for their own Judas sin, though the world saw in their fall but some common street scuffle, some murder of continental lawlessness, some thief's assassination for a few gold coins.
He knew it, and a chill tremor passed over him as he mused. But a few months before, a sculptor had been found at the door of his studio in Rome with a great wound slashed across his breast, and the blood choking his voice, so that he died speechless. The talk of the day had drafted that death in amongst the deeds of violence that Roman thieves will deal in, and babbled of the insecuríty of life under the Papal tenure, and of the sad fate of the young genius struck down for a few bajocchi on his own threshold. Victor Vane had been aware, as many like him also, that no Roman thief had been the dealer of that stroke home to the lungs as the sculptor felt his way up the dark winding staircase, whose blackness the oil fiicker of a single lamp only rendered deeper gloom; but that it had been a pitiless vengeance for an oath taken in boyhood, and in manhood broken.
He knew it; wherever he went, whatever he did, howsoever high he rose in eminence, whatsoever fruitage he gathered from the seed of treachery, the possibility of that doom would pursue him, the dread of it would haunt him—a worse fate than the stroke itself, sharply and swiftly dealt. The sword would ever hang above his head wherever his banquet should be spread, whatever nobles and princes should be summoned to it. Let him dupe his early comrades, or reign in his new sovereignties as he would, he could never dismiss this from him—this chance, that soon or late the vengeance for his desertion would search him out, and strike him in the hour of his surest security, of his proudest triumph.
Yet the step was taken; there was no receding now, and he knew that he had in him to rule empires if once he could grasp but the hem of power. He ground his teeth where he gazed down on the mosaic on which his arms rested, with the sharply-defined delicacy of his features, death-white in the golden sun-glow that fell through the broad leaves of vine.
"I was wrong to say there is no devil," he thought; "there is one that cripples the strongest and tempts the wisest, and sets the fool above the sage, and kicks genius into a hovel to die, and gives diadems to idiots, and makes great lives plod wearily for daily bread round the ass's mill, and in the ass's shafts; there is a devil that runs riot in the world, flinging all the prizes to the dullard, who let them rust, and tossing all the blanks to the men who only want a chance to prove their mettle; there is a devil that leaves thrones to brainless dullards, and scratches out the winning blood from every race because it has no pedigree, that fills swine's troughs with pearls, and seals lips that drop eloquence; there is a devil that flings the wheat to the flames, and calls the chaff blessed bread, that lames the boldest ere they can start, and curses the new-born child in his cradle; there is a devil—the devil of Caste!"
When the failings of Democracy are hooted against her, one fair thing in her should be remembered—that in her sovereignties this one deadly bitterness, this passionate, poignant regret for all he might have been, had not Position warped, and cramped, and proscribed, and starved him, can come unto no man.
And there is no evil worse than this; for by it the man casts back on accident (and often with a terrible justice) all the errors, the failures, the sins, and the disgraces of his life. "I never had a fair field!"—it may be sometimes a coward's apology; but it is many a time the epitome of a great, cramped, tortured, wasted life, which strove like a caged eagle to get free, and never could beat down the bars of the den that circumstances and prejudice had forged. The world sees the few do do reach freedom, and, watching their bold upward flight, says rashly, "will can work all things." But they who perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who never see the sun; who pant in darkness, and wear their breasts bare beating on the iron that will never yield; who know their strength, yet cannot break their prison; who feel their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet wild western winds of liberty; who lie at last beaten, and hopeless, and blind, with only strength enough to long for death to come and quench all sense and thought in its annihilation,—who thinks of them—who counts them?
Where he sat, with his teeth clenched and the nerve of his lips twitching, the finished tactician cursed his fate as passionately as any Gilbert on his death-bed, any Mirabeau in his dungeon. A consuming passion was upon him; and under it his philosophies mocked and his worldly wisdom forsook him. It had made him a traitor; it made him now weak as any woman. While he had lightly laughed with a scoff to the Greek of her sorcery over the Italian Prelate, his heart had been sick with jealousy and dread. He had remembered too late what manner of man Giulio Villaflor was; what manner of ransom the voluptuous Churchman was likely to exact from such a captive as he possessed now. He had thought too late that, in yielding her up to her foe, he was delivering the woman he loved to one who would feel the spell of her beauty as utterly as he, and would be armed with the power to do with that beauty howsoever he would. So that he were revenged on her, he had never heeded how that vengeance might recoil. It smote him keenly now, as he mused on the amorous, ruthless, unscrupulous priest to whom he had surrendered her.
In the power of Giulio Villaflor!—he turned hot and cold as the memory passed over him. He had delivered her into bondage, that she might be shut away from all eyes—that her smile might be seen of none—that what could not be his should be no other's—that the empire of her sorcery should end for ever in a life of ignominy, of suffering, and of slavery. But now he shuddered where he sat immovable, with the yellow light streaming down through the vine; he had given her over to one who never spared, to one who would look on her loveliness at once with the admiration of a voluptuary and the sway of a tyrant; to one who could offer her release from lifelong misery as the purchase coin of her love, or could take it, if denied, with the mailed grasp of an irresistible and irresponsible dominion.
It fascinated him with its very horror, it enchained him with its very torture, this thought which he had flung at the name of Idalia, to insult her and to taunt his companion, and which grew into a phantom that he could not exorcise, a vision that he could not drive away. Every second was horrible to him; he saw the sovereign grace, the proud glance of the woman he had betrayed; he saw the full lustrous eyes of the arrogant priest as they would be bent upon her; and he writhed as under some bodily agony—he had dealt himself a sharper torment than any he had condemned her to endure. He had given her to bondage—yes, but he had given her also to Giulio Villaflor!
There are women who rouse a passion far more intense than can be held in the word love, which makes the man who feels it lose all semblance of himself, which sweeps away his memory, his honour, his reason, his ambitions, his very nature. And leaves him no sense of anything save itself. This was the passion which made her traitor now—cold, and keen, and subtle, and world-worn, and sceptical as he had been—choke down the great sobs in his throat, as he thought:
"Only to know her dead, so that no other can ever look on her; only to know that! Dead, dead, dead! she would seem mine then. And yet—I should rifle her grave like the madman in legends, for one sight of her face, for one touch of her lips!"