Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
"BY MORNING TOUCHED WITH AUREOLE LIGHT; BY SUNSET STRANDED."
The day declined from its noon height, and neither knew or asked how the hours were numbered.
When the sun was touching the lowest cloud, and the amber glow was burning into scarlet, he started to his feet: he remembered that the forester would be coming homeward, and that with evening their flight must begin. As they left the cabin, Idalia looked round it with a long and wistful glanee; the day would be dear in her memory beyond all others, and in her own heart she believed that it was the last they should ever pass together. Then she lifted one of the rude wooden bowls to him with her old half-tender, half-haughty smile.
"The child is not here; put some coins in for us both. You must give me your gold to-day; if ever we are free, you shall be lord of all I own. Ah! you only care to be lord of myself? Do you think that I do not know that? But I shall care to crown you, and give you such purples as I have. You are royal to the very core of your fearless, kingly heart; and you shall reign over my kingdom, such as ít is, if ever we can reach it."
They went out into the stillness of the forest, so still that they might have been alone in an unpeopled world. Here and there through the network ,of branches the flushed sky glowed as fire; darkness already had fallen on the slopes of the hills, behind which the sun had sunk down; on the foam of the waters opposite gleams and breadths of prismatic colour still sparkled; the evening air was heavy with fragrance, and under the foliage the lucciole began to glimmer. Erceldoune went towards the grazing horses, tethered in camp fashion by a long heel-rope, beneath the cedars; she followed him, stroking the neck of the brave sorrel that had borne her with such unflagging speed through the whole of the past night.
"Carry me as bravely again, caro," she murmured to him, drawing the silken mane through her hand. "Take me to freedom, and you shall have such pathless meadows of wild grass to wander in, eastward, at your will!—no curb shall ever touch you, no spur shall ever gall you!"
As she caressed the hunter, the hound at her side dropped his muzzle earthward with a low smothered growl, then lifted his head and looked at her with anxious, eager questions in his imploring eyes.
"The dog scents some danger. What is it, Sulla?" she asked, giving him that sign of silence which the animal had learned so well.
"A wolf, maybe. We will unearth him if he be anything worse," said Erceldoune, as he swept back with one arm the heavy boughs, while with his right hand he loosened the pistol from his sash. The rocks sloped sharply down; the sunset light shone on the dell beneath as he bent forward.
A cry broke from him, loud, wild, exultant as the cry of the eagle swooping to its prey. With one hand still holding upward the matted veil of foliage, he stood rooted there, all the worst passions of his nature roused in an instant into deadliest strength.
There, almost at his feet, far beneath in the curved hollow of a moss-grown, cup-shaped dell, sleeping as he himself had slept on the Capriote shore at his foe's mercy, with one arm beneath his head and the other flung idly outward, in the loose linen dress of an Italian mellon-seller, lay the Greek, Conrad Phaulcon. Such disguise as he had given himself could not shield him from the glance of the man he had wronged.
Erceldoune motioned her to him with a gesture that let the leaves fall for an instant back into their places; his teeth were clenched, his words hissed broken through them, his eyes were alight with the blood-thirst of desert animáis.
"Look—look!" he gasped. "There—at last—there in my power—the brute who shot me down"
He swept the boughs backward and upward once more with the dash of his arm, and she bent to look through the twilight of the leaves; her face changed to the whiteness of death as her eyes fell on the upturned face of the sleeping man, her lips drew their breath gaspingly; a shiver of unutterable horror ran through her,
"He!—he!"
That one word seemed all her voice could whisper, and in it a whole world of loathing, remorse, hatred, and shame unbearable seemed told.
Erceldoune, with the lifted boughs still held above their heads, stood and gazed at her in a horror scarce less than that with which the sight of the slumberiüg Greek had stirred her.
"You know him!"
She seized his wrist, and, with the convulsive force that comes to the most delicate women in their hours of extremity, shook his grasp from the arm of the tree, whose foliage fell once more between them and the sight of that bright Athenian beauty that lay there in the careless rest of the Lykegênes.
"Know him!—do I know him!"
"Ay! Do you know the man who sought to murder me?"
There was the first sternness of waking fury, the first unconscious violence of stealing doubt, in the question as it broke from him, while he vainly wrought to wrench his wrists from the close grasp she held them in, and be free to fall upon his enemy as lions fall on their foes. With them her courage returned, her self-command came back to her, though her face was bloodless still, and anguish was set on it; she looked him full in the eyes—eyes for the first time bent on her with the searching severity of an accuser.
"Yes. I know him. I did not know that he was your assassin, though—though—I grant I feared it." "Feared it! What is he to you?"
She was silent.
"What is he to you—this brigand, this brute, this vilest of the vile scum of Europe?"
He spoke with the imperious vehemence, the intolerable horror, that possessed him. She was silent still; over her face a hot flush came and went, the flush of an intense humiliation.
"What do you know of him? Answer me, before I wring it out of his throat!"
She shuddered where she stood; but with a strength scarce less than his own, she held him from the place where the Greek slept, and drew him by sheer force farther and farther outward.
"Let him be! He has been the curse of my fate; he will be the curse of yours."
"Never! I will stamp his life out where he lies. Let me go—let me go!"
"Go for what?"
"To deal with him—justly."
"Justly!"
"Yes. Men kill murderers; and it was through no lack of will in him he was not one. I will not kill him sleeping, but I will wash my wrongs out once for all. Let me go!"
She flung her arms close around him, so that he must have wrenched her beautiful limbs asunder before he could have left her; she drew him backward and backward, her breath against his cheek, her hair showered on his breast, her dignity broken, her self-control forgot, vivid emotion, agonised abandonment, making her a hundredfold more resistless in that hour than she had ever been in her proudest moments of supremacy. She knew her power; under that embrace he stood subdued, irresolute, remembering nothing except the loveliness on which he looked.
"Is that your love?" she asked him. "Is that your trust?"
She felt a tremor run through all his frame—the tremor of the blind rage against his foe, of the blind idolatry of her, that warred within him.
"I break neither because I will deal with my assassin! What is he to you that you should shield him?"
The first taint of jealousy ran through the words. The tremor of shame that he had seen when her glance first fell upon the Greek passed over her; yet her gaze met his, and never sank beneath it.
"I cannot tell you."
There was an accent of hatred deep as his own in the low words; he looked with a terrible eagerness into her eyes.
"Cannot! Wait. You say you never loved; were you never wedded where you hate?"
"Never."
"Then what is this villain to you?"
She seemed to shrink and shiver where his arms held her, as though his words stabbed her through and through. She kept silence still.
"Tell me," he swore to her, "or, as God lives, that tiger shall, with my shot through his brain to pay for the confession!"
"Hush, hush! If he wake, we are lost!"
"I will wake him in such fashion that he never wakes again! An assassin your care? Let me go—let me go, I tell you!"
He strove to put her arms from him, to fling off him the coil of her hair, to break from the paralysing spell of her beauty; but she would not loosen him, she would not be shaken off—she drew him farther and farther from the Greek, let him seek as he would to escape from her.
"Oh, my beloved—my beloved ! where is the faith you promised me? One trial—and it breaks! With such a life as mine, do you not know that there must be far darker things than this to try you? Have you not said that you will cleave to me through all? Have you not refused to believe even my own word against me?"
"God knows it, yes! But"
"Here is the first test, then; were your oaths empty words?"
He was silent; he stood motionless and unnerved under the brief touch of the rebuke. She knew that she had bound him in those withes of honour that he would never break; and she knew that she had touched him in the one noble weakness that laid him utterly at her will and mercy. She loosened her hold from him; she stood apart, and left him free.
"Go, if you will. Suspect me, if you will. Avenge your wrong, if you will. But if you do, we never meet again."
His lips parted, without sound; an anguish of appeal looked at her from his eyes; he stood consumed by the passions of his hate and of his love that strove with one another in a deadly conflict.
"Choose," she said, simply—and waited.
His chest heaved with a mighty sigh.
"Great Heaven! You ask me to spare him after such a críme!"
"I ask you nothing. Take your vengeance, it is your right; but you will never look upon my face again."
"Because I am his foe?"
"No! Because you doubt me."
With that one word she pierced him to the quick.
He had no strength, no memory, no thought, save of her and of her will; he looked back once to where his slumbering traitor lay, with the mad longing of denied vengeance in the look, then slowly, and with his head bent, he turned away.
"Be it as you will. I yield you to-day more than my life itself."
And as she heard, all her coldness and her imperious resolve died out, as though they had not been; she sank into his outstretched arms, and wept as she had never done in all her haughty womanhood—wept uncontrollably, agonisedly, in such abandonment, in such weakness, as the sovereign temper in her never, ere then, had known.
At sight of that grief he forgot his own wrong, his own doubt, his very vengeance; he remembered nothing, except that the woman for whom he would have laid down his life suffered thus, while to her suffering he could bring no more consolation than though he stood a stranger before her. It was not in him to have one thought of his own cause of hatred against this man, when once he saw that she endured this poignant and deadly pain through his assassin, this unutterable misery at sight of the sleeping Greek, whose face turned upward, with the sunset warmth and flickering shadow of the leaves playing on it, thus had broken all their dreams of the future, all the sweetness of their solitude.
She lay passive some moments in his arms, her whole frame shaken by convulsive, tearless sobs.
"Oh God!" she moaned. "And I dreamt of a Future, while he was living there!"
A gloom like night swept over her lover's face; the evil spirit was upon him, which in the midnight chase through the moonlight of the Bosphorus shore had been on him, thirsting for his enemy's blood. He stooped his head over her, and his whisper was fearfully brief.
"Let me go, and he will not be living long."
He had surrendered to her; he had yielded up to her this vengeance, which had been the one goal of such ceaseless search, such vain desire; but though he had let her for awhile hold his hands from it, his whole heart and soul were in tempestuous rebellion still; his blood was hot for war, his conscience was strangled by hatred.
"Let me go," he whispered, thirstily. "You shall see him lie dead at your feet—dead, like the bravee horse that rotted to carrion through him."
She shivered, as though an ice-cold wind had passed over her; but danger had been too long her atmosphere, and the tempests of men's hearts too long the powers by which she swayed them, not to nerve her to force and calmness when both were needed. She was deathly pale, except for those flashes of shame that had made the blood rush backward to her veins; but she spoke tranquilly, laying her hand upon his mouth, and with that command which never, in moments of need, deserted her.
"Peace. Those are not like yourself—those tíger instincts. Leave them to him; they are beneath you."
"They are not. They are my right."
"Is revenge ever a right?"
"We deemed it so in old Scotland. A right divine!"
His face was stern and evil still, with the storm of his longing wrath, with the pent tide of his loosening jealousy.
"Divine? Devilish! Right or wrong, lay it down for my bidding,"
He was silent. Under her hands she felt the muscles of his arm thrill and swell; against her breast she felt the stifled panting of his breath. To hold him back, was like holding in leash a gazehound when it sees the stag.
"Lay it down, or you are man-sworn, and fore-sworn."
She spoke with a vivid intensity in the words that left her clenched teeth so low, so slowly; she knew every chord in the nature of this man, as fine artists know every note in the diapason of the instrument that echoes and vibrates to their slightest touch.
He held his peace; he would not break his word to her—break his word to a woman, and that woman defenceless, and his mistress, and his life's pledged law; but his hunger of desire was terrible to fall on that sleeping panther lying so near, and to deal on him ten thousand blows.
She saw the struggle in him, and her heart went out to him in it—went out to the strength and the weakness that were so blent in it, the strength of honour and the weakness of passion. How often she had seen these two antagonists strive against each other to hold and to keep a soul!
"Oh, my love!" she murmured, as she drew him farther and farther from the place where his foe slept. "Give me this one thing, and you shall have all my life. Let him be—let him be. He took all; he shall not take you. Come, come, come!"
He held back still, while still her arms clung to him, and drew him onward and onward to leave his murderer in peace.
"One word only," he muttered, close in her ear, while his lips, as they brushed her throat, scorched it like fire. "You deny me my vengeance. Is it for love of me—or pity of him?"
The eyes, that he could have sworn were true as he would have sworn that the stars shone above them, looked up long into his; there was a depth of pain in them that smote and stilled his wrath as with a sudden awe.
"Both. I love you, as I never thought it in me to love any—the living or the dead; and I pity him, as the earliest, the latest, the most wretched of all my enemies, though they are many as the sands of the sea. Have I answered you now! Come!"
The intonation of the words, rather than their meaning, laid their own solemnity on him; he read that in her eyes, before which his own wrongs seemed to dwarf, and pale, and die out.
"Do with me as you will; I cannot reach you—in all things—but I will follow as best I may."
She seemed to him so far above him with this royal past, that had given her the sway over royalties, with this lofty serene generosity from which she looked with compassion on one whom she declared the greatest enemy of her life.
She started as if the homage stung her like an adder—as if the reverence of his words were some unbearable disgrace.
"Never say that ! Never,—never. Follow me in nothing. Teach me your own brave, straight, knightly creeds. Let me see your noble honesty of thought and purpose, and let me steep myself in truth, and have it cleanse me if I can! Ah! once before we go, let me hear you say that you forgive me. Forgive me all you know—forgive me all that is hidden from you."
The remorse with which, in the dawn of that day, she had bidden him flee from her for ever, the abasement that had broken down her dignity, and laid her subject before him, were tenfold intensified now in a humiliation that crushed down like a bent reed the bold imperious spirit that had never quailed beforo. She seemed broken by an unutterable contrition; stricken before him by the conscious guilt of a criminal before her judge; the prayer for pardon, the thirst for his mercy, seemed to be as intense as if the crime against his life had been woven by her brain, and instigated by her will, as though the hand of the Greek, sleeping unconscious in the hollowed cleft of rock below, had been her tool and servant.
Yet there was not one pause of doubt, one hesitation of dread, in the answer that came to her with a gentleness, grave and infinitely sad.
"Forgive! That is no word between you and me. Yet,—if there be anything of pardon needed from my life to yours in past, or present, or future, I give the pardon now, once and for ever; you cannot stretch it farther than my love will yield it."
She heard, and her head sank downward, till her lips touched his hand in the sign of homage and allegiance that she had refused to the claim of monarchs. Her eyes were blind with tears, her heart was filled with a despair bitter as death, with a sweetness sweet as life; he was at once her slave and her ruler, her judge and her saviour.
"Ah, Heaven!" she said, in her soul. "How vainly I sought for a great nature amidst those who called themselves the leaders of the earth. I never found it until now; and now—how little it knows itself as great!"
Without a word he loosed her from his arms, as though by that abstinence from any utterance or caress of passion to show that no mere passion goaded him to the forgiveness which a higher and purer tenderness bestowed, and would so bestow through the uttermost ordeal, and up to the last hour. Silently he led the horses from the place, their hoofs noiselessly sinking in the rank deep grass, drew the girths closer, and made the few preparations that were needed for their night-ride to the sea.
His foe was left in peace; it was a heavier surrender to her than any that had ever been made, many and wide and weighty though they were, the sacrifices that she had wooed, or commanded from those who had obeyed no law like the bidding of her lips. His heart was sick within him. The old religión of revenge, which had been sacred to his forefathers in the age when murderers were proven by bier-right, and the flaming cross of war was borne alight over moor and mountain, was in many a moment his religion still; it was "wild justice" in his eyes, and a justice best meted out from foe to foe without the judgment of any alien voice. To turn away and leave his enemy unaroused; to skulk and flee as though he were the evil-doer; to let the murderer lie there unawakened, unarrainged,—a deadlier thing than this she could not have demanded at his hands.
The sweetness of the day had died with the setting of the sun, and the darkness of night had fallen on their lives as on the earth where they dwelt. Silently they mounted, and passed away; silently they turned and looked backward with a long and lingering gaze at the forest roof, which well might prove their last refuge together, the last shelter in which they should ever dream of freedom and of a future. Then through the first shadows of evening, under the deep gloom of the woods, beside the melancholy moaning of the hidden river channels, they went onward in their flight from Church and King, onward to the sea, if they could ever reach the sweet fresh liberty of its wide waters.
And as they went—where the leafy depths enclosed, and the forest twilight hid them—the Greek rose slowly, with the heavy lethargy, and the weakness of overwrought fatigue still on him, like some fíerce yet timorous panther that has been roused from rest to a craven dread and a longing for slaughter both in one. Through his sleep words had come to him, mingling with his dreams; instincts had stirred in him while yet the weight of that death-like slumber had laid like lead on his eyelids; a voice had roused the dormant images of memory; a sense of some presence, some peril, some rising of hate and of fear, had come on him ere he had been sensible; he had shaken the clinging stupor from him with supreme effort; he had glanced upward through the boughs of cedar; he had made one eager, springing movement like a panther, with a panther's lust in his eyes, and a thousand warring passions at his heart;—then the craft of his nature, the cowardice of his nation, conquered the bolder and more ferocious impulse, as well as the jealous, wayward, tyrannous affection that still, with all his vice, lived in him; the dread of his antagonist was blent with the instinct of his blood towards treachery in the place of defiance. He feigned sleep afresh, lying as though still in the profound peace of that dreaming rest; lying so with the soft brown lashes on his cheek, and his head idly thrown back upon his arm, until the hoofs of the horses had ceased to crush the cyclamen and hellebore, and the screen of forest foliage had fallen between him and the man whom he hated with the reckless bitterness of the injurer to the injured, the woman whom he loved despite all, though he adored tyranny and evil, and gold and selfish gaíns, and the brutal exercise of a pitiless jealousy, far more.
Then, as they passed away, he staggered to his feet, and stood a moment, in the red after-glow that streamed upon him, erect, quivering, instinet with rage like some lithe, beautiful, murderous forest beast, the ruddy light burning in the glow of his eyes, and cast luridly on the spirited head and perfect form that were graceful and splendid as the legendary beauty of Arinthœus.
"She can love? The world should end to-night!"