# Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 10

Under the pen name “Ouida”
CHAPTER X.
"I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THTS."
The oxen toiled laboriously on their wearisome way; the waggon jolted on its large unpainted wheels; the soldiers marched on either side, and in the van and rear: the tawny leathern covering flapped idly to and fro, whilst about it clung a faint sweet fragrance from grass crops and vine-loads carried through many changing seasons of the earth.
Where they went she had no knowledge; they had bound her eyes; that the noon in time passed and the cooler day followed she could tell by some diminution in the intensity of heat, and by the tender music of birds' throats that every now and then broke out from myrtle thickets and lemon-gardens that they wended their way through as the hours advanced. The measured march of the men, and of the heavy tread of the cattle, at intervals ​paused; then she heard the muttering of voices, and some change in their guards' position round the waggon, as though uneasiness or insecurity was prevalent amongst the scanty troop. Time seemed endless; but she knew that she might easily err in its reckoning, for the oxen moved with great tardiness, and neither man nor beast could press on with any swiftness till the sun had sunk lower. At her feet Erceldoune lay motionless; she could not see or touch him, she could only listen for each sigh of the painful breath he drew through his aching chest. A feverish lethargy held him insensible. They had screened him from the heat with some broken boughs;—the soldiers compassionated him as the prey of the "evil eye." At times, from the weakness that had followed on the ordeal he had endured, his breathing and the pulsations of his heart were so low, that neither could be detected by her eager ear; she could not tell whether life had ceased or not, and her own heart stood still with a fear that no jeopardy of her own life had ever roused in her. And yet—what would existence, if it lingered in him, be to him! Only an existence dragged out at the galley-oar amidst the companionship of felons. Or,—even if his country and his friends gained freedom for him.—only one ​unending misery through his memory, through his loss of her.
Through the darkness and the stillness round her the sounds of the declining day, that was still bright upon the world, came with strange dístinctness. The song of a child's voice on the air; the noise of a water-wheel ín a stream; the slow droning notes of monastic bells; the laughter of vinedressers among the budding vines; the mournful chaunt of a requiem as a village funeral passed with the crucifix borne aloft; a thousand murmurs of sweet sunlit idyllic life, came on the stillness with a jarring cruelty through the ceaseless tread of the soldiers' feet, and the slow creaking of the reluctant wheels.
At length they paused and bade her descend. She drew back : "Where he goes, I go!"
She spoke, not with the supplication of a woman who loved to rest near what she loved, but rather with the entreaty of remorse to share the victim's fate, with the demand of a leader to endure whatever fell to the lot of one who too loyally obeyed such leadership. The soldier laughed noisily:
"Oh, yes! you shall have your lover, 'llustrissima. Come!—or it will be worse for him."
She obeyed, obliged to be content with such a promise, lest the threat against him should be borne ​out. Her eyes were still bound from the light. She heard them lift him down from his bed of straw. She thought they bore him after her, as heavy steps followed in her rear; and a heavy hand thrust her forward down long stone passage-ways. Where they had brought her was a large granary, or group of store-houses, very lonely, and built strongly in early days, when the ungathered grain had to be not seldom defended with a fierce struggle from the raids of foreign bands that fought their quarrels out upon Italian soil. The building was two-storied, and the vast barn-like chambers were of stone, with slender windows barred with rusty iron, and with a faint dreamy odour in them from sheaves of millet stored there, and from a quantity of the boughs of the sweet myrtle, which had been cut away to lay clear the stems of olives to the air.
They undid the cord that bound her hands, and left her as they closed the door, and drew the bolts without.
She tore down the bandage that covered her eyes, and saw that they had played her false. In the darkened room she stood alone.
For many hours afterwards time was a blank to her.
Whether sleep succeeded to the exhaustion, the ​endurance, and the sleepless toil of the past days and nights, or whether she again lost consciousness, and lay aa in a trance, she never knew. The irresistible reaction that follows on over-wrought excitation came on her. The worn-out limbs and the strained nerves succumbed to it, and it stole upward at length to the bram, and deadened it to all sentient life, to all remembrance, to all thought.
When she awakened, she was lying, thrown forward on the heap of dying myrtle. All was intensely still; through the slit of the casement the midnight stars were shining, and the hooting of an owl carne wailingly on the stillness.
Her first memory was of him. Her first action was to arise and look out on the night. A beautiful country lay in the pallor of the young moon's rays; she knew the landscape well; it was but few leagues from Naples. Below, under some great trees of olive and of lemon, two sentinels were pacing with their carbines slanted; except for their measured tread there was no sound. The place was lonely and deserted; the out-building among maze-fields and olive-slopes of a farm belonging to the Crown. She looked; then went back to the couch of withering myrtle, and sought to make her thoughts grow clear; and the manifold hazards and remembrances of her ​past become of use in her extremity. But the task was beyond her strength. She was fasting—she was devoured with thirst; she was conquered by physical fatigue; she could see, hear, remember, nothing but the face of the man who had been willing to perish for her sake,—the gallant beauty bound to the stone-shaft, mutilated, bruised, agonised,—the voice which yet gave her no reproach more bitter than that one rebuke, "Why have you so much mercy on my body?" She loved him with the voluptuous warmth of southern passion; but she loved him also with that power of self-negation which would have made her accept any doom for herself, could she thereby have released him to freedom and to peace. Her pride of nature, her imperial ambitions, her habit of dominion, and her desire of homage, had given her long a superb egotism, even whilst she had been ever willing to lose all she owned for the furtherance of lofty aims. But now all heed of herself was killed in her; on her own fate she never cast a thought of pity. She had played a great game, won many casts in it, and lost the last. That was but the see-saw of life. But he—for his loyalty he perished; for his nobility he suffered as felons suffer; by the very greatness of his faith he was betrayed; by the very purity of his sacrifice he was lost for ever!
​Time crept darkly on. The odour of the myrtles was like the mournful fragrance from flowers strewn upon a coffin. From below, the monotonous sound of the slow regular steps sounded faintly; in the gloom bats flew to and fro, and an owl, who had her nest among the rafters, flitted in and out through the bars of the unglazed casement, seeking and bringing food for her callow brood. The silence was unbroken; the darkness filled with a stealing, sickening sense of unseen life, as rat and lizard darted over the stones, and the downy wings of the night-birds brushed the air; she felt as though she should lose reason itself in that horrible stillness, that fettered misery, that impotent inaction.
Amidst all, there came on her a strange dreamy wonder how the life of the world was passing. For twelve days she had been as dead as though she had lain in her tomb. When they had seized her at Antina, the time had been pregnant of great things; whether they had been brought forth or strangled in their birth she could not tell. All that had been done amongst men was a blank to her.
Then all such memories drifted far from her again. One remembrance alone remained—that of the man who suffered his martyrdom for her rather than render up to justice one by whom he believed ​himself betrayed more foully than the sleeping Sisera slain under the sanctity of the roof-tree. She knew it might well be that never again would they look upon each other's face; that they might drag their lives on asunder, chained apart at the labour of felons, with eternal silence betwixt them, and knowing not even when each other's lives should cease.
It is a horrible knowledge—that one living, yet will be for ever as the dead.
Fear had never touched her; yet now a supernatural terror seemed to glide into her veins. The black shades of the stealing lizards, and the cold touch of the bat's wing as it passed, grew unbearable; the darkness seemed drawing in on her closer and closer; the eyes of the night-birds glowed like flame through the gloom; she uttered a bitter cry, and threw herself against the bars, and shook them with all the forcé of despair. "Let me see him once, that he may know!" she cried out to the peace of the night. "Oh God! that he may know!"
The cry, though not the words, was heard.
The door was unbolted, and opened. The light of a lamp fell on the floor. The Calabrian entered.
"So! what is it, Miladi?"
He came, careless and ready for a braggart's ​insolence. She turned her eyes on him, and the look smote him speechless.
"You played me false," she said to him. "Where is he?"
He stammered, then was silent. She dazzled and affrighted him, as her sudden apparition had done in the blaze of the noonday. He thought coarse and evil things against her; he had heard them said, and deemed them true; but in her presence, even to think them seemed a sacrilege.
"Where is he?" she repeated. "Answer me."
"He is near you." He spoke at random; with the flicker of the lamp on the scarlet of her dress, and the gleam of her loose-hanging hair, her beauty looked to him unearthly.
"In this building"
"Yes. You are both—kept here because—until——" He stopped confusedly, and bent above the wick of the lamp, as though it needed trimming.
"Until what?"
"Until the king's pleasure," he replied, sullenly.
She came closer to him.
"You are a soldier?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Well then, brave men are commonly pitiful. Let me see him for one hour to-night."
​He would have laughed out a coarse jest; but as he met her look he dared not.
"Impossible !" he answered, curtly. "No prisoners must commune with each other."
"I know—I know!" she interrupted him. "But gold keys unlock all barriers? I am rich. Name your price. You shall have it if you can give me one hour with him."
"Impossible!" he muttered once more. "No: possible—if you will do it. What can it harm you? You have both under lock and ward. All I ask is a little speech with him. See—I told you I had wronged him deeply. Can you not think I want his pardon?"
The humility of the words coming from lips so proud, and bending a spirit so indomitable, touched the soldier, who, under a rough rind, had a certain latent kindliness.
"Nay; I would do it for you if I could out of charity," he made answer. "But it is not in my power, I tell you."
"It is in your power, if it be in your will. An hour—a half-hour—but a few moments—and you shall have a thousand—five thousand ducats!"
He looked at her stupefied; he was avaricious, like most Italians.
​"How can you get them? They will have confiscated all you have?"
"In Italy—yes. But that was little. My wealth lies elsewhere. I will write you an order on Paris, that will give you the sum down in gold."
"You speak truth?"
"Did you ever hear that I spoke any other thing?"
He laughed. "Basta, never. They all say that you lash king and priest with your tongue! Well; I will see what I can do."
He left her; barring her in. She waited in an anguish of dread. She had spoken calmly and briefly to him; but alone, the great veins stood out on her forehead, and her limbs shook with the passion of hope and fear. She would have laid her head down on a scaffold with the breaking of dawn if to-night she could thereby have purchased the power to say but a single word to the man who believed her his traitress.
Before long the Calabrian returned; he had nothing of the soft grace common to his countrymen; but he had a rough good faith, which, blent with his liking of gold, served her better. He held her an inkhom and a slip of paper.
"It was a miracle to get these; I sent to the ​osteria for them. Write, and you shall see this stricken lion of yours; sure you have wounded him someway worse than ever we did."
She laid the paper on the stone window-sill, and wrote an order for the payment, in París, of ten thousand francs in her name to his. He read it with the hesitation of a bad scholar by the feeble oil light; then a laugh spread itself over all his features.
"So! I have a brother, a singer, in Paris who will serve for this work. It were as much as my life, Miladi, were worth for your name and mine to be seen together. Come! you shall go to your comrade; but, of a surety, rich lips like yours might add one another payment?"
The indignant blood flushed her face; but she restrained the haughty impulse that moved her.
"Brave men do not insult captives who cannot resent," she said, bríefly. "I have fulfilled my bond. Fulfil yours."
He hung his head ashamed, and motioned her to pass out before him. There was a short broad stone passage, with a door at the further end—the great barn-boor of another stone chamber. He drew the bars aside, and pushed it open, setting his lamp down within the entrance. "You shall be alone an ​hour," he said, aa he closed the door afresh, and the bolts rolled back into their places.
The oil-fed wick shed but a narrow circle of light beneath it; it did nothing to illumine the impenetrable darkness that lay beyond in the central and distant parts of the room; there was no more sound here than in her own prison-place, the same flitting of grey downy wings, the same gliding mummur of hidden night-awakened insect life. She thought that again the Italian had betrayed her; that she was still in solitude.
But though her eyes could not pierce that dense all of unlightened shadow that fronted her, such light as came from the lamp—for here the moon did not shine—was cast full about her, and on the dusky scarlet cloud of her draperies. And on the silence a cry rang that startled all the nightbirds in their restless flight, circling beneath the rafters. Unseen himself, he saw her, and deemed it a vision of the bitter dreams that swam, as shadows seem to swim on waters, through his aching brain.
He rose slowly from the straw in which he lay, reeling to and fro in his weakness, and came out from the gloom, and faced her—silent.
She looked at him a moment, then fell at his feet ​as she had fallen when he had been bound beneath his scourgers.
He did not move, nor touch her; his eyes were fastened senselessly upon her; he shivered as though hot iron seared him. "Can you not leave me in peace to suffer?" he muttered. "Off—off—off! What I loved is dead! Ay—you tempt me—you bring me her beauty—you would give me her kisses, her passion, her sweetness, her shame. I will not—I will not! What I loved is dead. I am faithful."
All through the hours of the night, dreams of her had mocked, and pursued, and tortured, and assailed him; he was drunk as with the fumes of wine with the burning of the love that still lived; his mind, weakened and delirious, had only been conscious of phantoms that seemed to throng on him, tempting him in a thousand shapes, binding him down the slave of his senses, forcing on him joys torn out from the hell of guilt. "What matter what you be—what matter what death come by you, so you are mine?" The old, old subtlety that has tempted all men from the first hour that they fell by woman, had besieged him through all the lonely watches of the night. Now he knew not her living presence from the visions of his temptress.
In horror she knelt before him. ​"Hush! hush! Ah! for Heaven's sake, believe my love at least, though it has cursed you!"
He thrust her from him, with the senseless blaze still in his eyes.
"Love! Ay, shared with a score. Love that is poison and infamy; love in my arms to-night, in another's to-morrow! Oh, I know, I know,—it is sweet, and cruel, and rich, and men fall by it and perish through it. But to me it were worse than nought. Can you not tell how I loved her?"
The words which had been at first raving and violent sank at last into an infinite weariness and pathos. Tears rained down her face as she heard them; never had she honoured him as she honoured him now, when he refused subjection to a vile passion, and held her dead to him because he held her base with the baseness of delibérate and self-chosen vice.
"I can tell!" she murmured. "You love as she merits not, nor any woman. Yet, love further still, and, if you can, forgive!"
He started as the voice thrilled through him, and roused his consciousness of some actual life near him.
"Forgive? forgive?" he answered her. "Do you not know that what men have to pray for, before ​women like you, is to have the power to hate? Forgive? That were sweet as the touch of your kisses! It is to shun, to abhor, to resist you, that strength is needed!"
He was not wholly conscious of her presence; the sense that whilst she had betrayed she yet had borne him a cruel, worthless, sensual passion had been forced on him even whilst he had found her sheltering his foe, had been borne out by her own words, even by her outbreak of remorse, as she had pleaded for his life on the seashore; that sense remained with him, and against the weakness in him that made such a love even as this look priceless, strove that nobler instinct which had governed him when he had said to her, "love that is faithless and guilty,—what is that to me?"
He had thought that, for her sake, he should shrink from no crime, that for the guerdon of her beauty there would be no guilt before which he would pause; but even now, in the semi-insanity brought on him by the torment through which he had passed, he was truer to himself than this, and the caress of a wanton could never have replaced to him the loss of the "one loyalty, one faith" of his life. He would have defended her and cleaved to her in her extremity; and endured in her stead for ​sake of the imperishable fidelity he had sworn to her; but it would have been only when the last thing was done and the last sacrifice rendered, to have put her from him for evermore, and never to have looked upon her face again.
She lay at his feet, and heard him thus abjure her power; thus entreat for force to be blind and dead to the allurement of what he deemed the voluptuous visions of his cheated passion; and she honoured him as never she had honoured any living man; honoured the slave, who, because his slavery was shame, broke from it, and became her king by virtue of the very majesty of that rebellion. Snakes had crawled and beasts had crouched in human likeness many a time before her; this man alone stood before her undebased, having rent the withies of base desire, having cleaved to the liberty of an unstained honour.
And her heart went out to him in supplication, remembering alone the wretchedness that through her had fallen on him.
"My God, yes! I have brought you only evil. But hear me once before we part for ever. Hear me but once,—you perish by me, but I have no guilt to you.
He breathed loud and hard; his eyes stared on ​her in the dusky light; he took but one sense from her words—that the infidelity of her life had been against others; that though she had lied to him and beguiled him and forsaken him, against his rival she had done deeper sin than against himself.
"You love me?" he muttered, as he strove to thrust her back. "Be silent, then—Go, go, go! I have no strength,—if once I pardon, never shall I resist you!"
Pardon! Its softened mercy took the shape of deadliest temptation. It looked sweet as life to forgive;—to forgive, and steep all wrong, all pain, all hate in one divine oblivion; to forgive, and heed not the pollution of the soul, so only the grace and graciousness of mortal form were his; to forgive, and call sin grace, shame honour, and treachery truth, if so alone the heaven he had lost were his.
She rose up, and faced him, silently awhile; the great slow tears swam before her sight; her tongue was stricken of its fluency; she knew that for her, through her, by her, this man was condemned to a living death; yet that it was not his lost life but her lost purity which was his despair now.
Then she went to him ere he could repulse her, ​and laid her hands upon his breast, and looked full upward to his eyes: and her voice was low, and had a strange sweetness in it.
"When to-night is over we shall never meet again. The truth may be told now. I have never betrayed you."
A marvellous change passed over his face; the suffering and the darkness, and the haggard desolation on it, were suddenly crossed as with a golden flash of light. He answered her nothing; but his gaze strained down into hers as though it read her soul.
Her hands still leant upon his breast, her eyes still were lifted up to his, her voice had still that sweetness which was so calm as with the calmness of those from whom all hope has passed, and yet had a yearning piteous passion in it that no words could give.
"We may speak now as the dying do—you and I—we die to-night. To-morrow the living world will have no place for us save a prison and a grave. You perish through me ; I have killed you! Your murderess— yes; but never your traitress."
He trembled through all his limbs under her touch and her words; the breath of her lips seemed to toss his life to and fro as the winds play with ​reeds. His brain reeled. They had said that her voice could steal reason itself from those whom it tempted; they had said that her lie brought a thousand times subtler charm of conviction than the truth of other women ever bare in it; at dawn she had abased herself in guilt before him, now, at midnight, she swore to him that no treachery to him was on her.
"Not mine!" he echoed. "When my foe is your paramour, my assassin your care! Silence! silence! They say that you tempt men till they lose all likeness of themselves—all power to see you as you are; but you died to me for ever when you owned yourself dishonoured!"
"Wait! At dawn you gave me your pity!"
"Pity—pity—pity! God! you know what a man's passion is! Can it yield that cold, merciful, sinless thing when it consumes itself in hell-fire? Pity!—what pity had you?"
It was the sole reproach he had cast at her.
"Ah! hear me, only hear me! To you I had no sin!——"
He gave but one meaning to her answer; a bitter moan broke from him; for an instant his arms touched her to draw her once more to his embrace, then they fell as though nerveless and useless.
​"Then—you had sin to another. I have not the strength I thought; I cannot pardon to the uttermost. I would not forsake you; I would not harm you. Vengeance! What would that give back to me? But the woman I loved is dead, I say; do not bring me in mockery of her,—a courtezan."
The words were incoherent and faint; but they had an exceeding pathos; the longing, aching melancholy of a life henceforth without one hope. Her very heart seemed to break as she heard them, as they strove after justice and tenderness to her, even amidst the havoc of his shattered faith, his unutterable desolation.
"Listen;" she answered him, passionately. "I bring you a woman who sinned, if ambition were sin; if too little mercy were sin; if imperious pride and cruel victory were sin; if evil fellowship and enforced sufferance of alien crime were sin; but of all other I am innocent."
His hands fell heavily on her shoulders, in the dim light that flickered on the paleness of her face, his own was wholly in darkness; but through the gloom his eyes burned down upon hers with the glow of wildly-wakening hope straining through the belief—by her own lips—of her guilt.
​"Innocent! When you are his mistress!"
"I am not his—nor any man's."
"Ah, God! Take care how you betray me afresh. I am mad, I think, to-night ! "
"I do not betray you. I have never betrayed. I left you to believe me dishonoured, lest worse should come unto you."
"What! when you harboured him, forsook me for him, of your own confession loved him!"
"I spared him for my truth's sake, I forsook you for your life's sake. I loved him in childhood—yes. Then only."
"In childhood! What are you to him?"
"Wait—wait! It sickens me to tell! Out of the greatness of your own heart you judged my life—you judged it rightly——"
"What are you to him?"
"To my eternal shame—his daughter!"
Her head was sunk down on the stone floor of the prison-chamber as the words left her, slowly, unwillingly, as though her existence itself were torn and dragged out with them; to the woman who had the pride of an imperial blood, with all the superb insolence of beauty, genius, and power, without their peer, it was humiliation, as deep as to lay bare a felon's brand, to own her kinship with crime ​and with cowardice, to yield up the secret disgrace of her mighty race.
He,—dead to all else—heard but the answer that gave her back to him; doubted not, questioned not, paused not for proof or for dread, but witb a great cry—the cry of a heart that was breaking with rapture—stretched out his lacerated arms, and drew her up to his embrace, and crushed her close against his bruised and aching breast.
"God forgive me that ever I believed even your own voice against you! God forgive me that I wronged you!"
His words rung clear and loud, and sweet as clariones ring in his unutterable joy. Then his head sank, his wounded limbs failed him, ecstacy vanquished his strength as never wretchedness had done; for the first time in all his years of manhood he bowed himself down and wept as women weep, with the agony of passion, with the abandonment of childhood.
Not until long after were other words uttered between them. The first that were spoken were hers, while the pulse of her heart beat on his, and the low flame of the lamp sunk out slowly.
"What use! what use that you know the truth!"
​she moaned. "You have been martyred for me. Through me you will perish!"
He smiled, as men smile in some sweet fancy of dreaming sleep.
"Though I may die with the dawn, I can thank God now I have lived."
"Lived to be cursed by me!"
"Lived to be loved by you;—it is enough."
"Loved by a love that destroys you! Can you ever forgive?"
"Forgive ? What is left to forgive, since you are mine?"
"Yours—for your ruin, your torture, your slaughter! These are the love-gifts I bring you!"
"Think not of them! Lift your lips to mine, and they are forgotten "
His thoughts held no other thing, his consciousness grasped no other reality, than this one living priceless surety of her, that came home to his heart, beyond doubt, beyond suspicion, with all the divine force of a resistless truth. Memories of evil and of crime floated, shapeless, amidst the sudden glory that seemed to fill the gloom of his midnight prison with the glow of a southern dawn: he let them pass,—he could not hold them. She unloosed herself from his arms, and knelt once more beside him, so that, in ​the dim shadowy rays of the lamp he could only see the paleness of her upturned brow. She longed to be sheltered even from his sight, in that hour. She had no fear but that the greatness of his nature would reach to mercy and to pardon. She knew that justice to the uttermost, and an infinite tenderness, would ever be hers at his hands. But none the less she knew that through her he would perish; and none the less were the shame that she must reveal against her race, the taint of cowardly crime that must rest on her by implication, the degradation of her name that she must lay bare before him, bitter beyond all bitterness to the pride that was born at once of royalty and freedom, to the courage that would have faced a thousand deaths rather than have bent down to one act of baseness.
"Forgotten!" she echoed, where she bowed herself at his feet. "You are wronged so deeply, that no love but yours could ever outlive such wrong. Listen! I have spoken but truth to you. I have striven to save you with all the might that was in me. I have never been false to you by deed, or word, or thought But—all the same—your life is lost through me; and in me you see the daughter of your vilest foe, of the man who shot you down with a brigand's murder ​and a coward's secrecy. Yes! I!—I!—I!—who believed no empress never had wider reign, who have treated men as dogs beneath my feet, who have told you the legends that gave me heroes' and sovereigns' blood in my veins; I have greater shame upon me than the poorest serf that ever crawled to take bread at my gates. I am the associate and the accomplice of an assassin. I am the daughter of Conrad Phaulcon."
He heard; and the words carried their way to his mind, that had been delirious with the weight, and now was giddy with the release, of pain. He heard; and the violence of the hatred he had borne this man shook him afresh, as tempests shake strong trees. He breathed slowly and heavily. With the rich liberty of his arisen joy came a deadly and heartsick oppression; with the sweet daylight of his renewed faith came the poison-mists of a dead crime.
"My God!—how you must have suffered!"
The suffering that such a tie as this had cost her was his first thought, before all other.
"You think of me, and for me still—still!"
"When I shall have ceased to think of you, I shall have ceased to live."
Burning tears fell from her eyes upon his hands. She would not let him raise her nearer him, but ​knelt there, where the faint and gold-hued light of the dying lamp strayed softly to her, and fell upon her head like a halo of martyrdom in the pictures of old masters. He stooped to her.
"Tell me all."
"All my shame!"
"Not yours; you had no share in it, or you would not kneel there to-night." "Yes, mine; for the shame of one man is the shame of his race, and the evil that is shielded is shared."
She felt him shudder for one moment from her.
"Stay! You were never leagued with that infamy?"
"Against your life ? No. I suspected—I feared—but they dreaded me, and hid it from me. Once I brought it against him, and he swore by the memory of my mother that he was innocent. This one oath he had used to hold sacred. By it he duped me—that once."
A hate, unforgiving and deadly, ran through the thrill of the words. In the sight of her fearless eyes the one unpardonable guilt was the dastardly guilt of a lie.
"Tell you all?" she pursued, while her voice rose swifter, and gathered the fluent eloquence which ​was natural to her as its warmth to the sun. "In years I could not! Tell the torture of that companionship I have endured so long? Ah! you must paint it to yourself; no words of mine could give it. Look! I am brave, I was born linked with a coward; I am proud, I have been bound to a man who never knew what it was to wince under the lash of dishonour; I am ambitious, and I have been leashed with an adventurer whom the whole continent brands as a knave; I have loved truth and the people's rights—it is all that has redeemed me—and I have been fastened hand and foot to the baseness of intrigue, the venality of mock patriotism, the criminal craft of secret societies. Look! That man could hear what you called me and deemed me a few hours ago; and he could hold his peace, and laugh, and never breathe one word, or strike one blow, to defend my honour, to redeem my name. That will tell you what his life has been."
A bitter curse moved his lips as he heard.
"Why did you stay me when my hand was on his throat?"
"Could his guilt annul his tie to me? By that one bond he has claimed his immunity, and enforced my forbearance, through all the evil of his years."
"Yet,—why not have told me?"
​"Because I was bound to silence by my oath. Look! I told you how my early life was spent, but I could not tell you the influence Conrad Phaulcon had on it. My mother died whilst I was in infancy. She was the love of his youth, and she had passed away from him ere she had worn that love out. There are green places which never wither in the hearts that are searest: such was her memory to him. But her race he hated with a reckless hatred; he had looked to share their dominion when he wedded her; but there was feud between him and Julian. And Julian read him aright, and held him in distrust, and none of their wealth came to him, and he hated their greatness with a bitter envy. I have heard him curse my face because it was like the Byzantine line; yet, on the whole, he loved, and was gentle to me. And I—I thought him a god, a hero, a patriot. He was a communist, an agitator, an adventurer; but I knew none of those names. I thought mankind was divided into the oppressors and the oppressed, into the hatesa and the lovers of liberty, and I revered him as a Gracchus, a Drusus, an Aristogiton, stoned by the nation's ingratitude! Once he was proscribed, and I knew where he lay hid, though I was but a few summers old, and they took and starved me to make me speak. ​Because the food would not tempt me, they tried blows; and when I still kept silent, they wondered, and at last let me go, because one of their patriarchs reproved them, saying I was more faithful to man than they were to God."
"And he knew that you— his young child—suffered that for him?"
"Surely he knew it, later, in Athens."
"And it failed to make you sacred in his sight?"
"Nay, it only showed him that I was perhaps of the steel that would furnish him forth a choice weapon! I was proud to suffer for him; I adored him; and chiefly of all because I believed him sworn to the people's good, and a martyr for the sake of freedom. Whilst I was still so young those things were still so close at my heart! And he loved me in answer then, though I saw him seldom, and might have lived on charity but for Julian Vassalis;—then and until the time came when, there being no male of the great Byzantine race left, I succeeded to the whole of its splendour, and by the will of the dead chief, bore its name. From that moment the hate his foiled ambition and his cheated avarice bore against the Vassalis line, blent against me with the old tenderness that he bore me, and from that moment he saw in me only—his prey."
​She felt his hands clench; she heard his breath catch on passionate words of imprecation.
"Ah, peace, peace!" she murmured to him.
"Aid me rather to forgive—if I can. My own wrongs I might, but yours——"
"Nay, mine are but of the hour, yours are lifelong. Tell me all—all."
"I could not if I spoke for years! A brave nature bound to a coward, a proud one leashed with dishonour—that is an agony that lies beyond words. When he saw me thus, so young, given this wealth and this power he had so vainly desired, a desire of vengeance entered him against me; and also, with the craft of his school, he saw in me a fitting instrument for his many schemes! Well he knew his sway over me; Julian dead, there remained none to counteract it. A revolutionist ere I could reason, and ambitious with an ambition far out-leaping all the goals of the modern world, a child still in my ignorance of actual things and my belief in the omnipotence of truth, yet already mistress of what seemed to me the magnificence and the dominion of a Cleopatra, I came to his snare as a bird to the fowler's. I would have gone to martyrdom to have liberated the nations; I would have sold my soul to have reached the sovereignty of a Semiramis. ​By these twain—my strength and my weakness—he ruled me. And through them, in all that glorious faith of my youth, he bound me by oath to himself and his cause. That oath I have never broken."
There was silence for many moments. Then she spoke again, while the dying lamp sunk lower and lower, and the halo ceased to fall upon her brow.
"Many besides me, unseen of men, wear those secret fetters of political vows, sworn in the rashness of their youth and faith to what they believed the cause of freedom—to what too late they know an inexorable and extortionate tyranny that through all their after-lives will never spare. While I thought myself an empress they were fastened round me, and made me a slave. Ah! I cannot travel back over that waste of years! It is enough that I swore fealty to his cause and obedience to his order—that I swore, moreover, adhesion with him in all things, and secrecy upon the tie he bore me. This last thing I promised because he willed it—it was easy to maintain. His marriage had long been concealed from fear of the Vassalis' wrath; and when the world knew me, I bore another title than his. Too late I learned what this fatal exaction cost me. Had I been known as his daughter, the evil notoriety he had gained would have sufficed to blemish my own ​repute. As it was, I might as well have come forth from a lazar-house or a felon's cell. None knew his tie to me, except, of late years, the traitor who taught you to see in him my lover, my accomplice. True, my riches, my youth, my ancient name, my brilliancy and extravagance of life—other gifts that men saw in me—all brought me celebrity, notoriety, triumphs, such as they were. But from the first to the last—companioned by him—they were darkened by slander and falsehood. And he—ah! you may well ask if a man's heart ever beat,if a man's blood ever glowed in him!—knew it, knew it long ere ever I dreamt it, and let the shadow of his own evil fame lie upon me, because, through it, his schemes were best served; because by it, he could best secure what no other should ever share with him—the wealth that I held and he coveted. He feared that I might one day break from him, that I might one day give the love I give you. So he desired men to think me worthless as they would, and his presence beside me sufficed to fulfil his desire! No, no! do not pour on me those noble words, I am not worthy of them. Though sinned against, I am not sinless. When too late I saw what my fatal promise had wrought for me. I was in love with the dangers, the victories, the sway, the excitation I had plunged into; I ​had drunk so deeply and so freshly of the draught of Power, I could not have laid down the cup though I had known there was death in it. And under scorn and hate, and all the unutterable misery that came to me when I saw myself betrayed by him, my very nature changed. I grew hardened, reckless, pitiless. My loyalty to liberty, to truth, to the peoples, never altered; but that was all the better thing left in me. I remained faithful, even to a traitor. But the world and I were for ever at war. I cared not how I struck, so that I only struck home. Evil had been spoken against me falsely, and I lived in such fashion that they should know one woman at least breathed whose neck could not be bent, nor whose spirit bowed by calumny. Men came about me, mad for the smile of my lips, but not true enough in themselves, as you were true, to pierce to the truth ín me, and I gave them a bitter chastisement for their blindness: I slew them with their own steel. But—Oh God! what avail to tell you this? I can tell you how that which was spoken against me has, in part, been truth deserved, and, in part, the malignant coinage of envy. I can tell you that at dawn to-day I had no choice but to leave myself a traitress in your sight, or see you slaughtered by him as the issue of my love. I can tell you ​this—but what avail? You perish through me, for me, by me! What use that you should hold me faithful to you? I am none the less your murderess because I would give my life for yours, my love, my love, my love!"
Her voice, that had been sustained and eloquent with the vital strength of remembered wrongs, failed her over the last words. The memory of the martyrdom which he had borne for her; the memory of the destruction of all his future, which through her befell him; the memory of the only existence that could ever now be his dragged out beneath the galley-chains, and companioned by the worst of criminals, alone remained with her. Guilty or guiltless, faithless or faithful, having cleaved to him or having forsaken him,—what mattered it? Wherein could it serve him? He was lost through her.
But this thought never came to him. His eyes looked down on her through the heavy shadow with a light in them that had the sweetness of release, the glory of victory, through all the infinite pain and hopelessness of their fated love.
"What avail?" he answered her. "Do you know me yet so little? Do you not know that I could lie down and die content, since I have heard that you are sinless?"
​"I know, I know! You would have died for me when you thought me vile with the vice that I cherished, branded with the kisses of shame. And yet—is there no doubt with you now?"
"Doubt? Did ever I harbour it save at your own bidding?"
"Yet—what have you but my word, the word which that Iscariot told you was only a dulcet lie, soft and false on every ear?"
She felt the tremor of his passion run through all his limbs.
"Were I free but for one hour——"
"Be at peace. I have given him to vengeance. Have you not heard how traitors end even in these days, even in European capitals? So will be his end, for his sin against us."
Her voice had in it that strong immutable merciless vengeance that came to her with her eastern blood; that smote rarely, but when it smote, never wavered and never failed. Then once more she shrank from his hand as though unworthy of its touch.
"Vengeance!" she moaned, "what use is it to us? You are lost through me—lost for ever! You pity, honour, love me still! I could better bear your curse!"
​In the darkness that was about them, she rather felt than saw the infinite tenderness of his eyes as they gazed down on her:
"Hush! Would you wrong me still? Can you not think one hour that lays your heart bare to me thus, and brings me thus the surety of your innocence, is worth to me a lifetime of common joy and soulless pleasure? Let its cost be what it will—it is well bought."
She knew he held it so; and for this, that he loved her with this exceeding holiness of love; for this, that the restoration of her nobility and honour in his sight was priceless to him, as no paradise purchased by her crime could ever have been; for this, the woe that she had wrought him, eat like iron into her soul.
"Well bought!" she echoed. "It will be bought by a living agony of endless years! Manhood, pride, peace, joy, all killed in you; your very name lost, your very fate forgotten, till your hair is white with sorrow and your eyes are blind with age! Ah, my beloved, what matter what I be! It is I who have condemned you to this! It is I who have been your ruin!"
His arms drew her upward, close against the heart that only beat for her; his hot lips quivered on her ​own; in the night-silence and the darkness that was on them his voice thrilled through her "sweet as remembered kisses after death."
"Do you think they shall ever part us now? Death shall unite us, if Life would divorce us."
The hours passed, and they were left in solitude. As they had forgot all other life save their own, so by it they seemed forgotten. Through the heavy masonry of the iron-bound walls, no echo of the world without came to them; on the hush and the gloom of the chamber there was no sound, save only the soft gliding of a night-bird's restless wing. Whatever fate rose for them with the dawn, this night at least was theirs: there is no love like that which lives victorious even beneath the shadow of death; there is no joy like that which finds its paradise even amidst the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of despair.
Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so rich, as when its last excess of light burns above the purple edge of the tempest-cloud that soars upward to cover and devour it.
The hours passed, and the rays of the morning slowly stole inward through the narrow casement, ​bedded high above in the granite-blocks, whilst with the coming of the day the birds of the night returned from their outward flight, and nestled in their dark haunts with their eyes hid beneath their wings. As the first light touched her brow,—and the dawn came not there till it was full-risen for the earth without,—she smiled in his eyes, and loosened from her bosom the slender steel blade, scarce broader than a needle's width, that had rested there so long.
"Take it. You have said—they shall not part us now."
His hand closed on it while his smile answered hers.
"I will find strength enough for that;—it shall give us eternal liberty, eternal union."
Once before he had pledged this promise to her. And as she had known then, so she knew now, that he would find strength to deliver her from dishonour and himself from captivity; strength to be true to her, even to this last thing of all.
Having reached the supreme ecstasy and the supreme anguish of life, death was to them, as to the races of the young world, the god of deep benignant eyes, whose touch was release, and whose kingdom was freedom, on whose face was light, and in whose hands was balm.
​As the words left his lips, on the quiet of the air a single shot rang.
The first sunbeam had slanted through the slender chink above; the stillness was intense; far below the measured step of the sentinel fell muffled on the turf, and the liquid stealing music of water, that fell down through thick acanthus foliage without, alone was dimly heard. At that moment, as the brightness of the day reached high enough to enter the vaulted chamber of the upper story of the granary, the stillness was thus broken. There was a stifled cry; then silence reigned again; and on that silence there was heard no more the monotonous tread to and fro of the soldier on guard.
He started to his feet, his hand on the Venetian steel he had just grasped.
"The man is shot!"
His voice was low and rapid, his eyes turnd on hers with the same thought that came to both ahke. There were those in that world they had lost who would have done all that courage and true friendship could in his service had they known of his extremity; there were those also by the score who would have let their lives be mowed down like the millett sheaves around them in her cause, had they had power to reach her from the grip of priest and king. ​Hope had been dead in them.
In the lowest depths of woe the oblivion of passion had made them senseless to all else—senseless even to the fate that must await them with the awakening of the dawn. But no thought of deliverance had ever come to them. It had seemed meet that their lives should end, once havíng reached the deepest joy that life could hold;—joy taken from the very jaws of the grave;—joy burning through the frozen chillness of despair.
Yet now, when hope, vague as remembered dreams, once touched them, they felt drunk with it as with the fumes of wine.
They listened, as none ever listen save those on whose straining ear the first sound that falls will bring the message of death or life.
For a moment that hushed stillness lasted, unbroken now by even the treading of the soldier's feet. Then there broke forth the loud rejoicing bay of a hound loosed on to his quarry: shot answered shot, steel clashed on steel: the din of tumult fílled the soft peace of the early day; the old-remembered rallying words that had so often floated to her ear above the din of conflict, vibrated on it now—"Italia!" "Idalia!"—the two names blent in one.
As she heard, she rose erect; her whole frame ​seemed to strain upward to the sun that glanced through the high bars of their prison-room; there was fire in her eyes, light on her lips, the glow of liberty on all her face and form. She was the living symbol of Italy unchained.
"Do you hear? Do you hear?" she cried to him. "She is free!"
Before her own freedom—even before his—the liberation of the nation, so long enslaved, came to her heart first; then, while the great tears coursed down her cheeks, she clung to him, trembling with a terror that had never touched her—the terror less for him, as for the land for which she had so long endured and suffered, this hope only dawned again to die out in endless night.
"Ah, God! give them strength—courage—victory!" she prayed, as she lifted her face to the sun. "My love—my love! listen for me, listen! I cannot hear. Hope kills me—hope for you!"
They stood there, barred in, in the shadows which that ray of wandering sunlight on high alone parted, whilst beneath them unseen raged the struggle on which their lives hung. Confused, broken, indistinct, the echoes of the contest came strangely through the hushed prison-chamber. The bitter riot of war tossed to and fro the fate of their ​coming years; the balance of chance swung, holding their destiny, and they could not tell to which side the scale was swaying; the measure of blood would be the purchase-coin of their ransom, or the price of their bondage, and they could not know whether foe or friend now claimed it. They stood, locked in, in solitude, with but a hand's-breadth of the morning sky through the grating above their heads the only thing visible of all the living world without, and heard the tumult striving far beneath upon whose issue all their future hung.
The time was very brief; a little bird upon an ivy-coil outside the window-bars, had lifted its voice in daylight-song as the fírst shots were fired, and still was singing softly and joyously, untired; but to them the moments seemed as years. Then, loud and rejoicing on the summer air, wild vivas broke the bitter noise of conflict, and crossed the moans of fallen men; the dropping shots grew fewer and fewer. Upon the stone stairway the rapid upward rush of feet carne near; the bolts were drawn back, the door was flung aside, with his flanks white with foam, and his mighty jaws crimson with gore, the great dog sprang on her with a single bound; behind him, upon the threshold, stood Conrad Phaulcon.
​His eyes met theirs one instant; then headlong at her feet he fell, a deep slow stream of blood staining the grey stone of the floor.
Thus at last he met liis foe. Thus at last his foe looked on him after the weary search of baffled vengeance, long and hot as tiger's thirst.
As he fell his hands caught the hem of her dress.
"Idalia! Idalia——"
The word died as his head smote the granite, and the broken sword which he had pressed into his side to lend him strength for a moment, pierced further, driven in by the weight of the fall.
Erceldoune staggered forward and raised him.
"He is dying!" he said, as he looked at her.
There came upon him a strange awe as he saw the death that at dawn he had so nearly dealt, smite thus, as another day broke on the world, the man from whom he had fled, as David from the sight of Saul, lest murder should be upon his head if longer he lingered where his enemy lay.
She never spoke, but sank on her knees beside her father where he had fallen, held up in the arms that a score of hours before had flung him upward like some worthless driftwood to be cast into the flames. Her eyes were fastened on his flushed and ​haggard face, that still had so much left of the old bright classic beauty.
"You have saved us! You!"
She doubted her own senses; she thought she dreamt as madly as though she were dreaming that the heavens opened and the angels and archangels of mediæval story descended with the sword of Michael, with the spear of Ithuriel, to their rescue.
He drew his breath with a great sigh, and his voice came in broken whispers.
"You said right—there are things gods would not pardon,—your wrongs are of them. You stung me at last!"
She did not answer; she gazed at him with blind tearless eyes that saw his face, but only saw it as in the mists of dreams.
He pressed the sword that bad broken off in his loins closer and harder to staunch the blood, while his voice rose ringing and resonant.
"Our day has come! They have Palermo; Naples must follow. The king has enough to do to think of his capital. They fear the news should get to the populace. We have done a bold stroke to-day; they have been hunting us down like wolves, but we have turned and torn them. The sentinel killed, the rest was easy. Ah! look you,—there is ​vengeance for you too. That white-faced Northemer betrayed you to Guilio Villaflor. Well, the boy Berto caught him in his own toils. They hold him safe; they will kill him like a cur at your word. Ah, Chiist! how the steel pierces! I would not die if I could help it. Not just now—not till I have seen that traitors face. It is hard—hard—hard. He has cut and galled me so often; it is hard to die just when I could pay him all!"
The ferocious words gave way as his breath caught them; he moved restlessly, driving the blade in still, so that by this means he might yet gain a moment's force. As his wandering glazing eyes glanced upward he saw whose arms supported him; and the old relentless hate glowed in them—dark and deathless.
"So! you have your vengeance, and I am baulked of mine. Lay me down, signore. I would sooner die a minute easier than gain the minute by your help."
The old savage tiger lust was in the words. Erceldoune never heeded them, he rested the Greek's head on his own breast, and held him upward with gentleness and in silence.
Idalia hung over him.
"Tell him—tell him! If you would atone for ​your sin—if you would redeem your infamy—if you have ever known remorse—bear me witness what you are to me!"
The evil faded off his face; a softer look came back there.
"Late—late—late!" he sighed: yet he lifted his head and made the sign of the cross with that latent superstition which lingered in him even whilst he made reckiess jest of Deity, and denied with flippant laughter man's dreaming hope of God.
"By her mother's memory I swear,—Idalia Vassalis is my daughter. To her most bitter calamity. Those who have spoken evil against her have lied. I have been a coward, a traitor, a shame, and a darkness for ever on her path ; but—she has ever been loyal to me. She never feared, and she was never faithless; I loved her for that; but,—for that too,—I hated her."
As the words, more vivid in the southern tongue he used, left his lips firmly and distinctly, her eyes filled slowly with tears, and across the stricken form of the wounded man, met those which had seen her aright through all the mists of calumny, which had looked down through the shadows of doubt, and read, despite them, the veiled truth of ​her life. The faith in him had been sore tried; but at length, after many days, his reward came.
Neither spoke. That one look uttered all between them.
Conrad Phaulcon pressed his hand closer yet upon the jagged steel that for a few brief moments still could thus hold life in him. Something of his old laugh hovered on his lips.
"Look! I make a fair ending. Pity there is no priest to crow above me. Death-bed repentance!—there is no coin like it; you sell the game you have lost already, and you buy such a fine aroma for nothing——"
She shivered at the awful mirth as she stooped to him, and passed her hand over his forehead.
"Silence! Live rather to repent! He will forgive; and I—you have tried my mercy long, you need not fear it now."
​His sight, that was beginning to fail him, sought her face with a wondering, baffled glance; through her whole life this loyalty to her pledged honour had bewildered him, even whilst by it he had found so merciless a power to bind and to drive one whom fear could never have swayed, nor force have moved. As she heard she lost remembrance of the deadly wrongs done against her by the man who should have been her foremost guard, her surest friend; all the long years through which he had persecuted and poisoned her freedom and her fame fell from her; lying, in his last hour, at her feet, having thus at last, however late, however slightly redeemed the cruelty of his past against her, he brought to her but one memory;—that of a long perished time, when on her childish ear his voice had come like music, breathing the poetry and the heroism of the world's dead youth.
"Be more just to us both!" she murmured, while the salt drops fell from her eyes upon his brow. "What I remembered always was what you at last remember too —the love you bore my mother, the love she gave to you. Let it bring peace at last between us."
He shuddered as she spoke.
"God! if priests' and women's tales be true, ​and she lives in another life! I would go to hell, if a hell there were, sooner than see her face,—sooner than hear her ask of you at my hands."
"Hush! Have I not said I forgive?"
The soft and solemn cadence of the mournful words seemed to fall upon his ear with a deep calm he dared not, or cared not to break; he lay silent some moments, breathing heavily, while his drooped lids hung as though in sleep; then with a sudden upleaping of the vivid life within him, he raised himself once more, while the careless melody of his sweet laugh echoed with its old chime through the air.
​The incoherent fragments of speech were panted rapidly out; scarce pausing for breath, he looked once more upward at Erceldoune; with the old unquenched hatred still burning dark in his glance.
"You will have the Vassalis' fief! Ah! that cuts harder than the sabre. I would give twenty lives now to keep you asunder from her. But—she stung my memory; conscience, fools call it; I could not free her without freeing you, or I would have done. You hate me?"
"I pity you—beyond all words."
"Because I lie here like a shot cur?"
"No. Because you wronged her."
There was a meaning in the grave and weary answer that checked the fretting and galled passions of the dying man.
"Yes, I wronged her. It was for Julian's wealth that I hated her. Sir—you swore to deal me my mortal stroke. Keep your oath. Pluck that broken steel out of my loins; I shall not live a minute. You will not? Why, you break your vow! Christ!—how the pain burns! Look here, then!"
With a sudden movement he drew the blade out from the wound in which it was bedded; the pent-up blood, let loose, poured from it: he smiled. It ​seemed as though in that hour the courage of his Achæan fathers flowed into the veins that were fast changing to ice beneath the throes of dissolution.
"My life has disgraced you: my death will not," he said, as his heavy eyes were lifted to hers. "Can you forgive all?"
"God is my witness,—all."
"Ah, you were ever generous! Idalia——"
And with her name thus latest upon his utterance, as it had been the latest utterance of so many, his head fell back upon her bosom, and through his parted lips the lingering breath came in one long deep-drawn sigh.
When that sigh ceased to quiver in the silence, he lay dead in the morning light.
The low dark entrance had filled in that moment with armed men; their weapons dropped blood, their faces were hot with the heat of war and of victory, their passions were at white heat with the madness of joy; they were of that nature which long before showed its southern grandeur in the midnight charge of the Aurelian trench, and made the five hundred of the Legion pierce their way through the dense and hostile host at Mazzarene. At their head was the young boy Berto; all his slender limbs qiüvering with the glory of triumph, and his ​fair face, with the yellow hair flung back, transfigured like the face of some angel of vengeance. He came eagerly through the gloom of the porchway, followed by the Italians, who obeyed him as though he were a god; he had received the baptism of blood when his mother had been shot down by the Papal troops; he was the son of a great patriot who had fallen at the gates of Rome; and whilst yet in the first years of his infancy he had stood at the knee of the Liberator, and laughed to see the balls pour down upon the Savarelli roof around them, while the hands of Ugo Bassi had been laid in benediction upon the golden curls of the young child of liberty. His word was the law, his sword was the sceptre, of the men who came with him now.
Breathless, covered with dust, bruised, wounded, but with a marvellous luminance beaming through the calm unchanged repose of his colourless face, he came to her in the flush of his triumph.
"Eccellenza, we bring you the best gifts of life!—we bring you liberty. We bring you vengeance."
Then as he saw the dead man lying there his proud and glad voice dropped, he made a soft backward movement of his hand, signing his followers to pause upon the threshold, he bent his delicate head in reverence.
​"He has won higher guerdon than we," he said gravely; "he has died for you."
For he had no knowledge that this one hour of remorse had been the single narrow thread of gold unravelled from the long, twisted, tangled, poisoned web of a lifetime of wrong.