Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
"ATHÆNE TO A SATYR."
By dawn they had reached the shore, having bent far southward of where Naples lay, and so round to the sea.
Here the worn-out horses, fasting and drenched with steam, and spent with fatigue paused, under the great shadow of a mighty wall of cliff that rose up from the breadth of smooth and yellow sand, its sides jagged and honeycombed, its crest overhung with festoons of wild vine and crowned with the grey plumes of olive, the waters idly lapping the amber beach below, and reaching outward till the dim sea-line and the mist-laden skies of morning blent in one. Involuntarily she stretched her hands to it in welcome and in prayer, as though the Sea-God of her fathers lived and heard.
"Oh waters! give me your liberty."
They looked so wide, so cool, so deeply still, stretching out in their measureless freedom to the infinite.
"It is gentler than earth," she muttered. "Men die hardly on the bitterness of the land—the land which devours them that she may blossom and laugh with fruits born of corruption;—but the very death that the sea gives is dreamy and tranquil. And the sea will not render its dead, but loves them, and lulls them, and holds them ever with their stories untold. Where is there any other thing so merciful as that?"
There was the longing of a melancholy, weary to despair, through the poet-like thought of the murmured words; in that moment she would gladly have sought the unbroken rest that could alone be found in the deep sea-bed, beneath those fathomless and changeless waves.
She sank down on a broken pile of rock, with the ribbed sand at her feet and the bulwark of the mighty cliff rising above; her face was colourless, haggard, almost stern, as though there were set on it such hatred of herself that all its youth and brilliancy changed to one bitter heart-sick scorn; her hair was thrust back off her brow; her eyes looked with a tearless, thirsty pain over the waters. There had been silence between them well-nigh through all the hours of that night-ride to the sea; there was silence still; he stood beside her with the darkness of her thoughts flung back on his.
"You are certain,?" she said, suddenly, at last.
"Do you think men forget their murderers!"
She laughed slightly—a laugh that sent a shudder through his blood.
"Well—your murderer was the man that had the hewing and the shapíng of my life. Do you wonder now that it was evil?"
"Of yours? Oh God!"
"A fair comrade!—a noble tutor! What think you? A lofty close for my imperial ambitions, is it not? A priest's cell my prison-house, a criminal's flight my safety, a thief and an assassin my associate, my"
Her teeth closed once more, shutting in the word that would have escaped them; a shiver of agony shook him as he heard.
"Twice you have checked my vengeance, and bidden me 'spare!'" he muttered. "If these brutes be your foes, why call me off their throats?"
"A lion shall not choke snakes."
The brevity gave the deeper meaning to the words.
"Why speak in parables? You must know"
"That your faith is dying? Well, let it die. It has every right. I will not reproach you!"
"It will never die. But—why should you wring my heart to test it?"
"Test it! Ah! do not wrong me like that! Do you think I would cause you an instant's pain that was in my power to spare? Do you think I would spend a woman's miserable chicaneries and heartless vanities on you, or triumph in them at your cost?
"Answer me," she pursued; her voice had changed to intense appeal, to vivid emotion, and she held his hands cióse against her heart, looking upward at him with a longing that broke down all her courage and her pride—the longing that he, at least, should know that she was true to him, though she must withhold him from his justice, and deny him all he had a title to hear. "Be my law, my conscience—I have been steeped so long in evil, I have lost all fitness to judge honour or dishonour aríght. To tell you all, to lay my Ufe before you as it should be laid, I must break my oath, I must belie my word, I must be false to the chief thing that has ever redeemed my past. Answer me—shall I do it?"
She saw a tremor shake him as a great storm shakes the rooted strength of cedars; his head sank; a fierce conflict was at war within him. For a while he hesitated; torn by an anguish of desire to speak the word that should unloose the bonds of silence between them.
Then a brave gentleman's inborn instincts conquered him:—
"No," he said simply. "Be true to yourself, and you will never be false to me. For the rest, you know me. I can wait."
And she who heard him knew that with that refusal he had put from him what cost him more in the renunciation than sceptres laid aside have cost to those who put them by at the dictation of a pure and generous honour beyond all selfish sway, as his was now beyond it.
"You are great beyond men's nobility," she answered him. In that momentary weakness she had longed that he should bid her sacrifice her word and her bond to him, but he was far higher and dearer in her sight because he denied that weakness its way; she had much strength herself, and she loved such strength in men. "But—but—have you no fear when I tell you that my life has been tainted by such as he?"
"I have but the fear that, if I look ever on his face again, I shall turn murderer like him."
A shudder passed over her.
"Nay! why not revenge yourself on me? I was his associate. How can you know I was not his accomplice?"
"How! Have I not looked into your eyes?"
The infinite trust that the reply breathed was rather in the tone than in the words.
"Well! What do a woman's eyes ever do but lie? And yet look, look for ever, if you will, so that you learn from them that my heart is truth, but that my past is—shame!"
He stood beside her, silent; his faith would not leave nor his love forsake her, but the abyss of a heavy guilt yawned between them, the barrier of a pitiless silence severed them.
Yet—passion and faith were strong in him; stronger than wisdom, stronger than vengeance. He stooped and laid his lips upon her brow.
"The shadow of others' shame may darken you; no sháme of yours is on you. Whatever you are—be mine!"
The sea stretched outward, league on league of still grey water, with no colour on it in the young hours of the dawn, no life, save the movement here and there of some awakening ocean bird. The cliffs, tawny and water-stained and sun-browned, rose aloft, curving inward, and shaping one of the many indents of the irregular southern coast; mighty ishafts of stone that seemed to touch the skies, and were deeply riven here and there in fissures filled with the clinging of the vine. Grand, solitary, wild, there was no human aid, no boat's help to be looked for here.
The sea lay there, but between them and liberty it stretched, an inexorable desert, impassable, and giving no freedom except death.
"Moments are years; we cannot waste them," he muttered, as he looked across the waters, where no sail broke the space, and upward at the rocks which frowned, sterile and lonely, locking in the breadth of ribbed beach-sand. "A fisher-boat, sea-worthy, might save us still. There is a village that should lie not far from this. A cluster of fishing-cabins"
"Yes, there is one a mile northward of us. A few huts under the cliff, and men who have the sea's strength in them when once they are afloat. Go you to them."
"Go! And leave you?"
"Else we must perish together."
"Better that!"
"No; you shall not die by Bourbon steel for me. I am known well in the country; the story of my arrest must be common to all now. This masque dress, which is all they left me, would draw curiosity at once. Yon look like a marinaro; you can hire the boat unsuspected, you can steer here, and, once here, with our pistola at their foreheads we can make the sailors take what way we will. Go. I shall fire if any danger come. You will hear the shot far in this still air."
"Is there no other way?"
"None. Leave me—there is no fear. And, in truth, I could not move farther yet. I am worn out at last."
She spoke faintly, wearily, and a grey hue stole over all her face, as she leaned her head upon her arm, her eyes lustreless, and with their lids heavily drooped, looking outward at the sea, whose grave she coveted. The fearlessness that had challenged death; the force that had endured any torture rather than purchase peace by the betrayal of comrades; the high and dauntless spirit that had laughed at danger, and loved peril for its very hazard's sake: these, which would never have yielded to any tyranny, or pang, or jeopardy that could have tried them, were unstrung and crushed by the horror which had possessed her from the first moment that she had seen the sleeping Greek and heard his crime. Humiliation rested on her; the deadliest suffering such a nature as hers can ever know—a thing which, until the sun had set in the past day, had never touched her temper. A shame that was ineffaceable seemed to her burnt into her life for ever, and under it a strength which had never succumbed, a dignity which had never blenched or quailed before the sternest trials, surrendered at last. She had had the fortitude of men, the fearlessness of soldiers, but they seemed, for the hour at least, to die out in her now.
He looked at her, and he saw that the privations of her prison, the scant food of many days, the exertion of the long and breathless ride, had told heavily upon her;—and he who would have coined his very life to purchase aid for her, could do no more for her than the flock of sea-gulls that flew past them with the breaking of the morning.
He struck his heel into the sand with an agony of powerless grief.
"You will perish here of hunger, of thirst, of sun-stroke, of misery! I will go. I will bring help, if there be help on earth."
He went down the low strip of sanded shore, under the beetling shadow of the cliffs, northward to the fishing village on the edge of the waters, with low rounded cabin-roofs that were like clustered brown bee-hives beneath the giant shadow of the rocks. The wall of stone screened him from view; the hamlet was a mile or more along the coast; she was left alone, with the hound at her feet, the loaded weapon in her hand, the glistening sea ebbing away into the distance where her eyes were fixed.
She sat motionless, whilst the noise of his footfall on the wet sands died gradually away. She listened to them to their last faint sound.
"Ah! if only for his sake he could pass out from my life for ever," she murmured. "Either way I must sin to him;—by forsaking him, or by cleaving to him. To go to his heart with such dishonour as that untold"
She could have wished that the stroke of the sun, rising stormily eastward, could reach and still her life; that the waves rolling slowly one on another to her feet could come to her and wash her down into their darkness. For she felt tainted with an assassin's and a traitor's guilt of secrecy and shame. She laughed a little, with the unutterable weariness of futile pain; with the ironical temper which had so long made jest of every suffering, that it scarcely now spared her own.
"I know now what sort of despair fills monasteries and makes saints," she thoúght. "How honourable to Deity, to give him the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked existence!"
Twelve hours before she had said, and said truly, that none of her race ever failed; she had known that her life had been great in much even whilst blamable in more; she had spoken of a future, in which much of dominion, of magnificence, of a pure and noble ambition would still linger;—a future in the glow of eastern suns, in the lands of her inheritance, in the exercise of a chieftainship, where boundless evil remained to be conquered, and boundless liberty to be enjoyed; a future in consonance with the hatred of all bondage, and the genius to rule, that were inborn in her. Yet now—now, since she had stooped down and seen the ruddy afterlight upon the face of the slumbering Athenian—an endless night seemed to have fallen on her, and every dream of future and of freedom to be mockery.
Through the silence of the quiet dawn she sat without any movement; the half-dead horses were feebly trying to find food from the salted grasses and drink from the brackish pools; there was no sound, except the monotonous chiming of the Mediterranean at her feet, no refuge in the hard and barren surface of the colossal seawall. She had sent him from her, chiefly for his sake, that he should not wait beside her till he was netted by the Church's webs, or slaughtered by the monarchist's steel, and an unutterable loneliness was about her; there seemed no mercy on the face of the waters, but only a cold and dreary smile. Beyond them lay liberty; but she felt as though even the force to arise and seek it had been killed in her.
Time passed in slow, sickening measure; the sullen light of a tempestuous morning burned higher in the heavens; full day was come; the couchant hound awoke with menace in his eyes; across the sands at her feet a shadow fell: there was no sound, no word, but she felt the presence, as men feel the gliding abhorred presence of a snake, the stealing velvet-footed approach of a tiger, ere they know that either are near. She started, and rose to her feet, and fell slowly backward step by step, till she rested against the wall of cliff, her gaze fastened on Conrad Phaulcon as he stood, with the crimson sun in his face, and the grey water lying in a lonely waste behind him.
"Ho, Miladi!" he cried aloud, "others can ride a wild ride besides your lover and you. I have been on your track all the night through. Where is he?—where? Answer me, or"
She threw up her hands wíth a gesture, that even in that moment awed him:
"Never dare breathe his name!—you, his robber, his assassin."
"Robber! Assassin! Strange words to me."
The fire of his wrath was bated for an instant before the resurrection of the crime he had deemed buried from her reach beneath the solitary shadows of the Carpathian pine-woods.
"Would that they were strange to you! I knew that coward sin had your hand in it, and you swore by the only memory you have ever reverenced that you were innocent. I believed you—I was fool enough for that!—because, though treachery was your native air, you still at your worst had never taken perjured oath by that one name."
She spoke slowly, wearily, with an unutterable reproach and bitterness in the quiet words; under them he was for the moment cowed; he shook «lightly through all his limbs, and his teeth gnawed the gold curls of bis beard.
"It was to serve what you worship—Liberty!" he stammered.
"Liberty! No marvel that the peoples are in chains if the apostles of their freedom think to serve them thus."
The words echoed over the stillness of the tranquil seas with a profound eternal pathos; it was the sigh of the Girondists, when through the death-mists of the scaffold they saw the ángel of freedom they had dreamed of changed into a vampire of blood.
The man before her, the lover who had left her were alike forgotten; in that moment her heart was with the nations of the earth, the blind who find but the blind to lead them when they escape the iron heel to track them down; the vast sum of suffering and heart-sick humanity that has no choice betwixt those who leave it to perish in its slough, or beat it forth to rot on battle-fields, and those who fill its parching throat with the fetid water of distorted truths, and fool its patient ignorance with lying grossness, that by it they may force upward into power.
First—beyond all, grief for them was with her; for those innumerable, uncounted, uncompassionated millions who are the prey alike of despot and of demagogue; by each alike condemned to be the long, unnoted, pitilessly-consumed coil of fuse, lit and burnt out, to bear the flame by which ambition may show red against the skíes, or to carry incendiarism in a conqueror's van. This reigned with her beyond all things; had so reigned ever, and would reign until her grave; this impersonal love, this infinite pity, for the concrete suffering, the weary destinies of the peoples, on whom "the burden of the unintelligible world" is bound so hardly, so unequally.
Phaulcon laughed out in defiance of the scorn that lashed him like a whip of scorpions.
"Fine acting—you were always a fine actress!—but this could come as nothing new to you, Miladi. You were sure that your friends were in it"
"God forgive you! I was sure until you swore your innocence; and then—though I might have known that truth trying to pass your lips would become falsehood in such tainted passage!—I did you too much honour, and believed you."
No virulence and no invective could have cast on him so much shame as these last words.
He laughed carelessly still; where he felt himself a coward there he became a bravo; with the rankling wound of humiliation came the brutalised instinct to insult.
"Said you believed me rather! The Countess Vassalis was always famous for her finesses. Beyond a doubt she had the tact to assume a fitting ignorance of anything that might have compromised her."
She looked him in the eyes till his own fell: she deigned no further answer.
"Idalia "—he began to plead more huskily and hurriedly.
"You have lost all title to call me by that name. Put land and sea between us henceforth for evermore. Never let me look upon your face again—never, never, never!"
Her voice, losing its controlled coldness, broke from her with an irresistible intensity, while as her arm pointed outward to the waters, she banished him from every soil she touched, from every air she breathed. For one moment the force of the magnificent gesture, rather than of the words of banishment, thrilled, awed, and intimidated him; he fell back involuntarily a step or two upon the tawny sands.
"Go, go!" she said, still with that movement of her hands which thrust him from her with such command as that wherewith the Scandinavian priest thrust back with his golden crosier the bloodstained King who came to the altar-steps with murder on his soul. "Go! Show the only remorse and reparation that you can still reach, and let my life be free of you for ever."
Again it had its weight on him, that sentence of banishment, grandly given, yet withal having in it a certain aching regret as of one who once had loved him well, though he had fallen: as of one who owed him deadliest wrong and abhorred in him deadliest guilt, yet who, for memories not wholly perished, could not yield him up unpitied to the dominion of evil, to the wreck of body and soul. He remembered all that this woman had endured through him; he remembered how by him shameful treachery had attainted the glorious morning of her youth; how by him shadows that could never wholly pass from her had been flung across the splendour of her womanhood.
"Stay, hear me a second,!* he said, with a gentler accent in the hesitation of the words. "You think I bear you no tenderness—I do, by Heaven I do, though often I come so near to hate you. If I had been at Antina, those brutes should never have touched you. Ever since I first heard of it, I have been seeking you. And it is in peril of my life I stay an hour in the kingdom; two fold peril, from the Bourbon's grip, and from one surer still to know it and to strike."
"Surer? One does not live."
"Yes, one does; one that is ten thousand eyes and ears and lips incorporate, one that is thrice ten thousand intellects fused together, one that may strike me down from behind, and throw me like a dead dog into a wayside ditch, only for this, that I disobeyed and stayed in Naples to be near your prison."
She knew that the "many in one" he spoke of, the far-reaching invisible hand, the wide unerring prevision and condign vengeance that he dreaded, were those of the political society to which he had been bound in the early days of his manhood, when fretting poverty had goaded, restless intrigue had allured, and a warped yet at the first not ignoble love of freedom and of country had impelled him to its far-spread nets.
"You say this? So you also said, by all you held most sacred, that you had no share in and no knowledge of this attempted murder?"
She spoke slowly, and with icy chillness that cast back on him a hundred-fold more piercingly than by invective the thousand times of falsehood when he had dealt treacherously by her, and so forfeited all right, all power to force on her that he now uttered truth. The last two words cut asunder, and broke down as though they had never been, the softer better thought, that in the moment previous had made him well-nigh forget all else except the peril of death, or of a life worse than death, to which she, wronged in so much, had but so late escaped by a hair's breadth.
In that instant, whilst she spoke, the fear had passed from him, the knowledge of his power had risen again; jealousy, and avarice, and lust of tyranny were stronger-lived in him than the sting of conscience, than the awakening of shame.
"Wait an instant," he said, sullenly. "There is too close a tie between us for us to part in that fashion."
"To a tie that you have outraged you cannot appeal."
"We are too needful to each other to sever so"
"I am needful to you, doubtless. But you will never again make of me, or tool, or weapon, or guide, or gold-mine for your evil service."
"Ah! Fine thing a woman's word. But a few days since you told me, with imperial scorn, that you had some reverence for your oath?"
"I had;—how much, let all I have lost, and sinned, and wrecked, and slain for you bear witness."
"And yet!"
"And yet—here in your hands I break it, and break from it, I am absolved from my vows for ever. I swore them to a patriot; you I know not—you, a brigand, an assassin!"
"Is an apostate nobler than an assassin, then, that you vaunt your treachery and upbraid mine?"
"Nobler in nothing; but apostacy is your guilt, not mine. To truth, to liberty, to the peoples, I am loyal; you have forsaken these—forsaken! were you ever true to them? did ever you know aught of them?—and leagued yourself with fraud, with avance, with slaughter."
"Bitterwords."
"Bitter? God pardon you—if you heard but sheer and simple justice of all your guilt to me, would not the blackest words in language fail to yield your due? But—let us part in silence; I cannot give you over to your proper fate, for the sake of the only life we ever cherished in common. Tempt my vengeance no longer; if you be wise, go—go while I can still let you go unharmed."
"I stayed, at peril of life, to succour you if I could —to learn your fate, to find your enemies, and, in reward of that, saw you ten hours ago lavishing love upon your foreign favourite, on his heart, in his arms—you!"
"Well?"
She looked him full in the eyes still, with a deep and steady gaze; there was a firm, lowering gloom in her own, like the look which comes into the eyes of one who, brave and resolved, still counts the danger that lies before him, and finding it vast, yet resolves but the more fixedly to go through it.
"You did it maybe to dupe him?" he pursued, with the insolent riot of his silver-toned laughter, the louder because he had no belief in his own translation of her acts. "He had a strong arm to force back your gaol bars, and a wild brain to be lulled with your charming. You played the comedy with many—who so well?—was it but acted once again with him? You have done scores of daintier and more dangerous things, than so easy a victory as blinding and duping this mountain athlete, and you have fooled men for far less stakes than to free yourself from the gripe of our holy Monsignore. Tell me that was your project, and I will pardon it, though you blackened my name so heavily in the little melodrama. Was it? Yes, or no!"
"No!"
The answer was brief and cold; she knew that for it this man was likely enough to fire into her bosom, where he stood before her, the weapon whose muzzle thrust itself out from the folds of his striped canvas shirt.
For once he kept his coolness; she knew him then to be at his worst; his vehement, eloquent, womanish wrath was never so dangerous as when, contrary to all his temperament, he held it in check and waited, softly, silently, warily.
"No?" he laughed in echo. " What! has Miladi Vassalis gone scatheless in her scorn, for all these years to be charmed by a rough-rider's iron sinews and gigantic limbs at last! Bathos!—terrible bathos! And what will you do, madame, with your new lover?—have him killed to keep the secret of your weakness, like that fair frail Jewess of the French Regency of whom we read?"
Under the coarse infamy of the sneer her face never flushed, her eyes never relaxed their steady challenge of him; but a hatred beyond all words gathered darkly in her regard, a scorn beyond all words set on her colourless lips.
"What will you do with him?" he repeated, scoffingly. "How will you square his claims and mine? If you should get your liberty again, my Countess, your favourite courier will slightly embarrass you!"
"You possess no claims."
"Truly? We will see that. But first, what will you do with him?"
"What shall I do ? I will tell you. Give him my life, and defy yours."
"Ah! As his mistress or as his wife?"
"His wife."
"Indeed! And make him a chieftain in Roumelia, I suppose ? "
"Why not?"
"Why not, truly! He will be admirably fitted to play the mountain king, the barbaric lord; and you—well, your new fancy may endure six months. I will give it that lease of life; and then—men easily disappear in those hill fastnesses, where every creature is your humble vassal!"
Her face flushed with a dark tempestuous shadow as she heard; she gave one movement, rapid, passionate, involuntary—it was to raise her pistol for the signal shot. The gesture was restrained; she looked her antagonist firmly in the eyes.
"Cease this. There are none here to be cheated with your outrages, and to insult me will bring you no result. Once for all, hear and understand;—this one man has become dear to me, and, what is more, is honoured by me. I shall be true to him, and I shall defend him—as he has given truth and defence to me."
The words were very passionless, but they were inflexible as steel; his face changed lividly as he heard.
"Wait! You know the fate we give deserters?"
"Death? Well, you can slay me if you will. It will worthily close your course. Be sure of this—you will not scare me with the threat of it."
"Threat! Miladi, you will íind it more than threat."
"Too likely. But I shall be his before it is borne out."
"What! you love him well enough to risk death for him—such a death!—by night, by stealth, in your beauty, in your youth!"
"Else should I love little."
The Greek looked at her in silence for a moment. He had dealt with her in many moods, but never yet in one where this emotion ruled her. He had never known its pulse beat in her; he was stunned and bewildered by his own rage; he could almost have found it in his soul to deal her there and then the fate that she so tranquilly accepted and defied.
"Wait, then," he said, slowly, "You do not fear it for yourself—do you for him?"
She did not answer ; he saw a slight shiver pass over her; he had found the one weak link through which to pierce the annour of her proud and resoluto strength.
"You do? That is well. Then listen to one warning: the first night this man sleeps in your arms shall be his last. Wed him and kill him, if you like!"