Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH.
In the interior stood a small castellated building flanked with towers of a singular solidity and strength, and casements built deep into the solid masonry, the narrow slits and dwarfed arches of the early centuries. The country round was dreary;—marsh and osier bed, with the rushes turning from spring green to autumn hues as the season varied, and to the left, interminable olive-fields, bounded in the distance with a sombre line of cypress, had little beauty, even when the southern sunset gave them its glow; and the place where the building stood, a black and broken pile of irregular rock, with a lake below, hemmed in by dark and stunted trees, lent only a deeper gloom and loneliness to the landscape. In the middle ages the towers had been a robber's stronghold, called the Vulture's Nest, and sorely feared by travellers; now, it was Church property, a few Cistercians held it as their convent, and, if it were ever used for other purposes, the slow swinging of the matins' bell, which dully droned over the desolate lands around, stilled all rumour of the fact.
A tempestuous sun was setting in the west;—intense fire lighted for the moment all the rugged and monotonous expanse, flamed in the salt and sluggish waters of the tarn, and reddened all the arid desert of the parching turf. Through a lancet window it shone into a darkened barren room; the grey stone floor uncovered, the pine-wood walls as bare, and the meagre furniture of a convent cell the only things that garnished it. To and fro in the narrow limits paced, as a lioness may pace her den, Idalia. She was a prisoner of a King and of a Church—two gaolers that never in any age have loosed their prey.
The hour had come that she had long foreseen must sooner or later be her fate; she was in the hands of foes whom but a tithe of all that she had done would have sufficed to hound to their worst fury. Fear was not in her now; the blood of Artemisia and of Manual was in her veins, and the fire of the Sea Queen and of the Imperial Soldier flamed too hotly and too proudly there to let dread enter. But a terrible chafing sense of utter impotence, a longing to dare, to defy, to vanquish, while she was here a captive, a fearful knowledge, a passionate regret for all that she had lost, for all she might have been, made the slow moments torturing passage unendurable—made her hands clench, her eyes flash, her whole frame quiver and rebel in mighty longing, in fearful bitterness.
She knew that she had in her what would have found power to rule an empire—and she was here the prisoner of a Priesthood!
But a more intense and a more poignant pang than that of her own adversity, of her own peril, was in her for other lives lost through her—for the manhood that had reeled and fallen at her feet, for the sightless eyes that had looked up to hers, for the dead, slaughtered through a too true adherence to her will, a too obedient rendering of her word. True, the liberty for which they had conspired was the just heritage of man, and the noblest cause for which human life can ever be laid down; true, it was for their country, and that country's welfare and freedom, that they had fallen; but this was no opiate to still the remorse that pierced and pursued her. She knew that the cause had been far less to those who had died before her than the smile of her own eyes; she knew that with her beauty, and her power, and her sorcery, she had wooed them to passion only to drive them there, by their fealty to her, to perish like netted stags. She knew that it had been through the beguilement of her own unsparing temptation, her own ruthless witchery of fascination, that those who had been murdered in the night just gone had entered on a career which, without her, they might never have embraced.
The very masked banquet at which they had been trapped and slain had been given through her, given for her, and turned by her to that end for which the soldiers of the King had shot them down as rebels. She knew that but for her they would be living now in the fulness of their freedom and their manhood; and the remorse of an assassin seemed to weigh on her and haunt her, with the blood-red glow of that dying sun, in which the uplifted eyes of Viana, as they had sought hers through the mists of his last agony, seemed ever to gaze on her.
She was proud, she was daring, she was unscrupulous, she was self-controlled to a marvel, she was, as men counted, cruelly heartless; but in that moment Idalia could have doomed herself to the curse of any eternal travail of expiation—in that moment she could have rent out her living heart where it beat, and have flung it to the kites that hovered in the dusky glow of twilight as the vilest, darkest, most accursed thing that ever beat with life. She had the coldness of the world, and the pitiless serenity of one long used to study strong emotions only as tools to power; but beneath her acquired calm and cynic indifference the fervency of southern nations still slept in her, and she loathed herself with the fierce unsparing hatred with which men hate their direst foe.
She did herself injustice in much, and loaded herself with heavier reproach than that which had a right to rest on her; but it is ever thus with natures strong, bold, imperial, and used to command, when from the exercise of unmerciful dominion they change to the lash of self-rebuke and self-detestation; as kings in monastic days laid down the sceptre and took up the scourge.
Of her own fate she scarce took a thought; she knew well enough that little mercy would mingle with it; but all her heart, all her mind, all her longing, were with those dead men who had perished for her, those noble and dauntless lives which had been struck down around her as though they had been murrained sheep. In her youth, in her beauty, in her wealth, in her supremacy, she was flung into captivity, and knew that endless imprisonment, if not the shame and labour of some still more humiliating torture, would be her doom, but no throb of pity was in her for herself; the only thought upon her was the thought of those whom she told herself that she had murdered.
The bolts of the cell were undrawn with a slow grating sound; she turned and faced the door; it opened, and Giulio Villaflor entered the chamber. The ruddy flame-like light just fading in the west was shed full upon her; the masque dress she had worn had not been changed, and the diamonds on it flashed amidst its scarlet, its black, and its gold; in her weary musings she had thrust back from her temples the masses of her diamond-crowned hair, and, though her face was very colourless and her eyes heavily circled, she had never looked more magnificent than she looked now, as she turned with an empress's challenge.
Villaflor, entering with the courtly step of his habitual grace, started and paused, with a soft oath murmured involuntarily in his surprise and his admiration. He had seen her in Paris, in Spain, in Vienna; but in that instant her loveliness literally struck him blind; he came to arraign a captive, and a queen faced him in haughty and silent disdain. Fluent, facile, a statesman and a churchman, a libertine and a courtier, he had for the moment no words; he was held in check by his own rebel prisoner.
She looked at him, and a slight smile of contempt passed over her face.
"Ah! I thought so," she said, calmly. "So your lambs were the wolves, holy father?"
The Prince-Bishop changed colour ever so faintly, the sarcasm of the accent rather than of the words pierced his armour of omnipotence and self-love; he understood why men had dreaded the lash and the steel less than they had dreaded the lightest touch of this woman's scorn. But he was a powerful and accomplished personage, to whom defeat or opposition were heresies unknown; he recovered his momentary discomfiture, and came nearer to her, the warm after-glow on his stately stature and his handsome majestic form, while his lustrous eyes smiled gently.
"My daughter, it has grieved us sorely that you should have been so long in rebellion against the Anointed of God; and believe me, the harshness of coercion has only been resorted to in the last extremity, and with the deepest reluctance and regret."
Idalia where she stood turned her head, and let her eyes rest full on bis, with a meaning more than any words could ever have expressed.
"Monsignore, it will be as well for us to lay aside these euphuisms. Neither of us believes them, and they weary both. Let us suppose them already uttered, and speak more truly—if a priest can speak so. I am your captive; it has long been one of the supreme ambitions of your life, and one of the most relentless efforts of your Churcb. I have baffled you long; you have trapped me at last. There is no more to be said."
Monsignore, the silken and astute diplomatist who wove the finest meshes of Court and Vatican intrigue, and was to be embarrassed by no living antagonist's skill, felt the blood burn under his olive skin, and felt the weakness of a bitter anger rise in him beneath the brief, tranquil, ironic words of bis captive. Monsignore was never angered, the dulcet sweetness of his bland repose was never stirred by so provincial and unwise a passion; and he knew her power by that pulse of wrath she could stir in him. Yet he restrained it perfectly; he bowed with the grace for which he was renowned at St. Cloud and Compiégne.
"Pardon me, figliuola mía"
"Pardon me, Monsignore! I am not of your communion; call me simply Madame de Vassalis."
The Prince-Bishop made a gentle deprecatory gesture with his white and elegant hands.
"Even those who have strayed from us we still hope to reclaim; and I speak as beseems me in the name of the Church. You have thought 'there is no more to be said,' since by force you have been brought within our authority. You err greatly; there are many things."
Her old superb, disdainful smile came on Idalia's face; the entrance of the churchman had roused in her all her native pride, all her worldly brilliance, all her royal defiance; she knew well enough with whom she had to deal, and the assumption of authority awoke in her all her dignity and dauntlessness.
"Many things?" she repeated, tranquilly. "Possibly! You would wish to know from me—your captive—the secrets of my party, the names of my associates, the securities of my wealth, many other matters that you consider have become yours by right through my conquest?"
Giulio Villaflor looked at her curiously, a little bewildered.
"It is so, my daughter," he said, blandly. "We would rather, you will be sure, receive these—our rights, as you justly say—voluntarily from you than be compelled to extract them by harsher means."
She laughed a little; a soft, mocking, ironic laugh.
"I imagined so. Well—it is as I said; there is nothing to be discussed between us; for all the weight of your Church, all the steel of your Swiss, will not force one word from me."
Monsignore started, and the purple blood flushed under the olive of his cheek and brow; his lips quivered, his teeth clenched on the full scarlet under lip. It was so utterly new to Giulio Villaflor to be mocked and bearded—and by a woman too!
His dulcet courtliness gave way, his mellow and honeyed sweetness curdled, the fire flashed into his eyes that had used to burn in the darkling glance of the men of his great hierarchy when Savonarola braved them or Kings defied their legate.
"'Will not' is never said to Rome!" he answered, with the haughty grandeur of the mighty days of the Papacy.
She faced him with a sovereignty not less disdainful and supreme.
"Indeed! I think many who have said it have been slain by Rome, silent unto death!"
His face darkened more and more; "contumacy" was the deadliest sin in his eyes; he would have stricken it out with the iron heel of Torquemada or Ximenes.
"Some crave death, and are forbidden it; they must live to do our bidding."
The words were uttered low, and the menace, though vague, was pregnant. For the moment there was intense silence, but her eyes never shrank, only in them deeper and deeper gathered the mute and fiery scorn.
"You threaten me," she said, with cool, contemptuous carelessness, reckless how she provoked, so that she stabbed him. "It is scarcely worth while to so stain your manhood and your calling, Monsignore. I am in your power. There is little dignity in menace to a prisoner."
The kingly potentate, the silken churchman, the absolute tyrant, the tortuous courtier, shook in all his limbs with rage. She took his weapons from him, she rent his panoply, she silenced his eloquence, she pierced his nets, and an insidious passion crept in on him. She looked so beautiful there, in the fading russet light, with her Greek grace and her ironic pride, and her fettered, untamed, deathless royalty!
"She is a Semiramis! She is a sorceress!" he muttered in his throat, as he turned and paced the cell a moment, to still the feverish, angered, impatient bitterness rising in him and unnerving him. He felt to her as in the days of the Middle Age men felt to those women whom they sent to the stake for the dangerous sorcery, the white magic, of their too great charms.
She waited there, serene, unmoved, her eyes looking outward at the desolate and barren marshes, her hair slightly pushed back from her brows, the richness and the glitter of her masque dress the sole point of colour in the grey gloom of the cell. She looked like a picture burnt in on the darkness of the naked prison wall.
His glance, licentious and ruthless under the velvet gentleness of his long-studied regard, devoured her loveliness with thirsty, astonished admiration. He had said of her that she had the daring of the Cæsars, but he thought now that she had the intoxication of a Cleopatra. He had heard of her power, he had heard of her witchery, he had heard of the insanity of men who loved her and thought a world well lost for her; he felt and understood the meaning of those stories now. And a proud, eager, cruel light dawned on his face. "Altro!" he murmured to himself, with the mocking smile of his full lips. What mattered it—her defiance, her beauty? She was his captive! Nominally the king's captive, virtually his. What mattered resistance?
He paused before her, subduing the glow of his thoughts beneath the fall of his silken lashes, long and soft as the lashes of women; and his voice had its sweetest melody.
"Madame de Vassalis, hear me. You have said justly you are a prisoner; in the power of a sovereign yon have conspired against, of a government yon have sought to undermine. To underrate your sway for rebellion and for evil would be absurd; it has been vast, and wrought by the surest spells that subjugate the heart and the soul of man"
Her delicate, merciless smile arrested the words on his lips.
"What do you know of those spells, holy father?"
Though her life was in this man's power, to use as he would, she could not restrain the irony that gave her, the captive, so keen a weapon against her tyrant. A smile for which she could have killed him gleamed under his drooped lids.
"Had I never known them until now, this moment had sufficed to teach them!"
A haughty impatience swept over Idalia's face.
"Sir! I have had my surfeit of such compliments. From a priest I may surely look for immunity from their weariness."
The tiger-glitter glistened more darkly in his soft brown veiled eyes. How could he deal with this woman? Menace had no terror for her, homage no charm! Unconsciously his voice hardened and grew more imperious; she was the first who had ever braved or baffled him.
"Madame," he pursued, disregarding her words, "you know that you are liable to the full rigour of the law?"
"I know that I am in the power of those who never failed to use that rigour with or without right!"
"The church cannot err," he said, with the certain fiery majesty which, tyrannous and blind in its own belief of infallibility as it was, was yet the truest and greatest thing in him. "You fall within the pale of its most severe justice; yet the church, as you know well, will not deal with you; your sins will be left to the Secular Arm. Your wealth will be confiscated, your power crushed, your life passed in a felon's cell. You must know this."
"My wealth cannot be confiscated," she answered, negligently, "for there is none of it lodged in Italy; you could scarcely imagine me so incautious! That you will give me no liberty while I have life I perfectly understand, and that King Francis and the Pontifical States alike treat the love of freedom and of justice as a convict's crime, all Europe is well aware. If you allude to my riches, imagining that I will purchase my safety, you err; I will not swell a tyrant's treasuries to gain a personal indulgence."
Rage, hot and lowering, flushed Giulio Villaflor's brow as he heard; yet something of that unwilling homage which had been wrong from him when he had said, "She has the daring of the Cæsars!" was wrested from him now in an admiration that was half amaze, half intolerance; wholly sudden and very ferocious passion was controlled beneath the suave mellow hypocrisies which by long usage had become to him as second nature.
"Madame," he said, with a wave of his long delicate hand, "there are enormities and conspiracies of such magnitude that the wealth of the world could not purchase condonation or escape for them. Those of the Countess Idalia must be expiated; they cannot buy absolution either from the church she has blasphemed or the throne she has shaken. Captivity awaits you—captivity till death. Has it no terrors for you—for you, in your beauty. your youth, your magnificence, your reign of love and of pleasure?"
She looked him fall in the eyes:—
"Monsignore, you use strange language for a priest. Whatever my fate be, I merit it; not for the things which you quote against me as crime, but for luring to their graves the lives you and your murderers slew last night."
The nerves of his cheeks quivered with agitated wrath; not for his bishopric would he have had it known that he had looked on at the slaughter, and given the death-word at the Villa Antina. She laughed, in the aching bitterness of her heart, and in her dauntless scorn for the foes who had netted her in like a wired bird.
"Ah, that was a noble exploit, beau sire; a gentle and holy duty of an anointed of Christ! The cross has led the van of the slaughterers of life and of liberty many a time; you but followed the mission of priests in all ages,—to sow broadcast war and desolation, and to pile dead bodies by fire or by steel for the glory of God in the mission of peace! Go and kneel with Viana's blood on your head!—go and fill the throne of St. Peter with the murder of patriots heavy on your soul! Go—you have done no more than the men of your office have ever done since Hypatia was slain by Cecil, and the early Christians tore and fought for rivalry in Alexandría, and Rome, and Byzantium!"
The light of the sun had died out, there was only the silvery gleam of a lamp which Giulio Villaflor had brought in in his hand, and set down on the narrow stone table; in the mingled radiance and shadow she stood before the omnipotent churchman, in whose hands her destiny was held, as though she were a feudal monarch who lashed a disobedient vassal with her displeasure and disdain. He stood, doubting his own senses; he, the superb priest, he who aspired to the triple tiara, he the friend of emperors and the ruler of palace consciences, to be arraigned by a revolutionist, by an adventuress, whom his will could consign to the Vicaria, to linger there for life! He was convulsed scarce less with amaze than with wrath; and yet through all something of homage was wrung to the majestic courage which thus defied him.
"Per fede!" cried the prelate, the fury and the amazement in him breaking through the ever-impenetrable masking of his dulcet graciousness. "Per fede! you are bold indeed!"
"I leave cowardice to ecclesiastics, who net brave men like foxes, and who menace a captive when she can no longer revenge!"
A flush of shame and irritation came on his cheek; he was intolerant, cruel, cunning, an intriguer, a liar, a man of unscrupulous ambition, of intense and overweening pride and vanity; but he was withal a gentleman, and he felt the sting of the rebuke.
"I came—not to menace, but to persuade," he said, restraining the ardour she had roused in him, and bending on her the full lustre of his soft eyes. "My daughter, yon cannot suppose but that it is with the utmost repugnance, and only at the last extremity, that force will be resorted to by those you have so justly incensed against you. Your years, your sex, your brilliance, all render the task of chastisement, the exercise of severity towards you, a most painful duty."
She smiled.
"Neither royalty nor priesthood are likely to suffer much from compunction; and as for the things you name, I take no refuge in the shield of my sex's weakness. I believe few men have merited your hatred and your rigour, or the vengeance of any tyranny, more than I have done."
Again she broke his patience, again she rent aside the courteous, polished suavity which never until now had failed him.
"You speak idly," he said, with a jarring anger and insolence in his voice. "You toy with words you know not the meaning of; you little dream what our 'vigour,' what our 'vengeance' can be to those who brave us!"
Her eyes rested calmly and contemptuously on his:—
"Do I not? When my best-beloved friend Virginia von Evon was scourged in the streets of Pesth because she would not yield up a Hungarian 'rebel' who had trusted his life to her keeping; when Pauline Lasla perished under the ice and the irons of Siberia because she had carried despatches for a Polish liberator; when the Countess Rossellio, at eighty years of age, was thrown into a dungeon by your order because she had lost her two noble sons in the cause of her Italy; when the wife of Manuel Canaro was shot down before his eyes by the soldiers of the Pope for no sin save that of loving liberty and him too well; when I have seen those and a score more martyrs like them, do you think I know nothing of how your hierarchy and your monarchy can revenge themselves on women? It is you, Monsignore, who speak idly; I am well aware that yon will essay captivity first, and if that do not break me into betraying my friends to you and assigning you my wealth, why, then, that yon will try—torture! It may be as well to spare you the probation, and to let you know that, though you have fettered me, you have not vanquished me, and never will. Others have died silent, and so can I."
The words were spoken tranquilly, with no haste, with no excitement in them; only beneath their repose of utterance was that fine, keen infliction of scorn, that proud, unyielding patience of resolve, which goaded and incensed him as no torrent of reproaches or of lamentations could have done. And yet, even in his wrath, even in his amaze, even in his outraged majesty as priest and autocrat, he could not but yield her admiration—admiration that stung and fanned the passion in him to fire. He stood before her, as a Papal Legate might have stood before an Empress who defied his mission and the might of Rome, rather than as before a helpless and rebel captive.
"True!" he said, with that grandeur of dominance which made the iron priests of a dead age the scourge and terror of empires. "True! the church. must cut off and root up, even with steel and flame, the unworthy and the accursed who deny her supremacy. Pity can have no place where her holiness is menaced, where her kingdom is denied, where her reign is outraged. True!—even your sex cannot spare you from the chastening that she must, in the fulness of her divine love, bestow on you for the purification of your heresies and your rebellion"
She stayed him with a gesture:—
"Nay, Monsignore! we are not in the Cinque Cento, and you cannot burn me, though yon can slay me more slowly and more cruelly, perhaps. A truce to this melodrame! We are both of the world; let us speak without tragedy. You say the Secular Arm will deal with me for my 'crimes,' why then are you here?"
The direct question staggered him slightly, but Giulio Villaflor was very rarely at fault; he bowed with grace.
"Because I would fain save yon, were it possible, from the fruits of your own misguided recklessness."
"I thought so," she said, calmly, while his eyes fell beneath her smile. "I have said, I betray no one; and I give no bribes."
"In gold—no. And I seek none."
He leaned nearer to her, and his voice sank very low; the flush burnt darker in his olive cheek, and his eyes gazed on her beauty with a boldness that gleamed out under their veiled and velvet softness with a tiger-like ferocity, that those knew well as their death-doom who dared cross the will of Monsignore,
"In gold—no!" she echoed. "You seek my political secrets. Well, you will never have them."
"What!" His voice was very low still, and vibrated with the intensity of restrained passion through the silence of the cell. "You will renounce your pomp, your wealth, your pleasures, your ambitions, your freedom, for the toil of a convict, the chains of a felon, the solitude of a dungeon, the slow, festering, hopeless, endless existence of a prisoner whom no power can release save the warrant of death!"
Her face was still, set, colourless as marble, and as firm:—
"Yes, if liberty be only to be bought by the shame of treachery."
He looked at her, forced out of himself, as it were, by the tribute she wrung from him:—
"Mother of God! What a man you would have been!—you would have ruled the world."
She smiled with a disdainful weariness.
"Who knows? I might have been a court ecclesiastic, and sold my soul for power to a sacerdotal lie!"
The satire pierced him to the quick, and all the darker and more cruel impulses returned on him. He stooped and laid his hand, with the amethyst ring that glittered like a basilisk's eyes, down upon hers; his voice stole very low on her ear.
"Idalia! women of your beauty can bribe more potently than by gold or state-lore. You shall buy your freedom if you will—from me."
She understood him; the blood flashed back into the colourless weariness of her face; she flung his touch off as though it had pollution; she faced him there in the dimness of the lamp-light with a look in her eyes before which he, all fearless, steeled, and omnipotent though he was, cowed like a lashed hound. Even Giulio Villaflor lacked the boldness which should dare twice tempt her with that alternative to purchase back her liberty.
"Monsignore," she said, briefly, and each word cut like ice, "if I refuse to be a traitress, I shall scarce consent to be your mistress. It were a poor choice of dishonour!"
He could have killed her in her haughty beauty, in her unsparing answer that laid bare the shame and evil of his own heart, that spoke out so mercilessly the meaning of his veiled words, of his hinted tempting! She had dared him, she had refused him, she had unmasked him—well, she should know of what fashion was the vengeance of Neapolitan blood, of ecclesiastical dominion! He bent to her, his lips close to her hair, his eyes looking into hers, his brown smooth cheek darkly stained with the purple flush of passions which nothing but that calm scorn of her fixed gaze, which never left him, which never drooped beneath the fierce menace of his own, held in any check.
"Madame de Vassalis, yon might have given your beauty for your freedom and your wealth; you have refused. So be it! It is in my power without terms or concession. You might have reigned my mistress. You shall be now, instead, my toy for an hour, and languish, later, till the grave, in the king's prisons or the galley's shame. You were unwise, my brilliant revolutionist, to make a foe of me; you are mine, body and soul, in life and in death—mine to take when I will, to give where I choose!"
And, with these words, he flung his violet robe closer about him, and, without a glance at her where she stood, swept across the stone floor of the convent cell and left her presence; his keen ear had heard the footfall of a monk without.
"I come, my son—I come!" he said, gently, in his sweet lingering voice. "The captive is contumacious still, but, with discipline and persuasion, she may still be reclaimed to the august faith. Draw the bolts well—so! so!—and deal gently with her; she will see her error."
Alone, where the silver lamp shed its lambent flickering light, Idalia thrust her hand within the folds of the rich scarlet and weighty broideries and sweeping lace of the masquerade dress she still wore, and drew half out from its resting-place in her bosom a delicate gold-sheathed Venetian stiletto, a jewel-studded toy slung by a chain round her throat. She looked at the slender, glittering, lithe blade, and smiled as she put it back.
"His!—while that steel will release me the moment his lips dare touch mine!"
For she had in her the temper of Lucretia.