# Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 3

Under the pen name “Ouida”
CHAPTER III.
"BY PRIDE ANGELS HAVE FALLEN ERE THY TIME."
When the morning rose higher, and its light shone full on both their faces, his was warm, brilliant, eager with incredulous delight; hers was grave, weary, very colourless. To him a very Eden opened; on her a thousand memories weighed. The one saw but the future; the other was pursued with the past. He knew that he had gained the only life that made his worth the living; she knew that she had drawn in with her own the only one that she had ever cared to save.
"Ah! I bring you already only ill," she murmured, as the rays of the risen day, half shadowed still beneath the oak leafage, recalled to them that they were fugitives—fugitives from pursuers never yet known to spare. "You are wounded—you suffer now?"
He looked at her with the smile whose sweetness had more tenderness than lies in any words.
​"If I do, I have no knowledge of it A bruise!—a hatchet-stroke! Do you think I could remember those?"
"I do, at least. They were enough to stretch you as one dead but very lately——"
"A passing faíntness, nothing more. Believe me, a thousand wounds like these would never harm me. I have been half a soldier all my days."
"So have I."
And as she spoke she rent off some of the delicate white laces of her masque dress, and steeped them in the little spring that bubbled under the oak stems till they were cool and soft as lint, and tore asunder a broad strip of the scarlet silk of her Venetian domino and laid the wet laces on it.
"Stoop down," she said to him—a singular softness, so gentle that in itself it was a caress, had come upon her.
He stooped to her as she bade him, but his hands drew the gold-broidered ribbons away.
"Not so. You shall not serve me."
"Why not? You have earned your right to service, if man ever earned it."
The breath of her lips was on his brow, her eyes looked into his with the dew of unshed tears glistening heavily in them, her hands touched him, making ​the pulses of his heart throb faster and the current of the blood glow in his veins, while, with a gentleness that seemed to him balm enough to heal mortal wounds themselves, she wound the silken bands over the gash that the blunted axe had hacked, and the width of his chest that the rain of blows had covered with livid marks like the marks where a scourge has fallen.
"God grant that these be the last things you suffer through me."
The words escaped ber almost unconsciously, while for the first time since her eyes had gazed in their set anguisb on the dead men lying round ber in the banqueting-ball of Antina, the tears gathered in tbem like the gathering drops of a storm, and fell one by one slowly on his hair and on his breast. She had made many endure danger and wretchedness, risk and despair, without pity; it was but fitting retribution that she had no power to ward them off from the only life for whicb she had ever cared.
He held her hands close against his heart.
"I can never suffer now!"
It seemed so to him. Keeping this, her love, be thought that no vicissitude or bitterness of life could have an hour's power to move him; that no fate ​could approach him which had any shadow on it; that nothing men or fortune could deal unto him could ever move him to an instant's pang. He did not dream that there are gífts, breathlessly, burningly coveted, which are more dísastrous reached than lost. like Faustus, he would have said to the íuture and its fate, "take
My soul for ever to inherit,
To suffer punishment and pine,
So this woman may be mine!"
And his noble reckless, senseless belief in her had alike the sublimity and the blindness which lie at the core of every chivalrous idealism; blent, too, wíth something grander and something loftier still—a love that cleaved to her through all and in the teeth of all—a love that could fínd her human and darkened by human stains, yet never lose its fídelity, but reach high, even high as pardon, if need there were of any pardon's tenderness.
The day was waking; the sun had risen; even here, through the darkness of the oak boughs, the radiance was coming. He started to his feet, made as strong to save her now, as though the force of a score of lives was poured into his own; of pain, of weakness, of the aching fever that thrilled through his bruised limbs, he knew nothing. He seemed to ​have the strength of Titans, to have lost every sense of existence save those of its deep delight, its wild joys, its dreamy ecstasy.
"My love, my love, forgive me," he murmured. "In the heaven you have brought me I forgot your danger."
"Was it not best forgot?" she asked, with that carelessness and that sadness which mingled intricately in her nature. "In a race for life and death, few would pause to speak as we have done; but it is the surest wisdom to defy fate while we can."
"Fate? There is no fate, save such as a strong hand carves, or a weak hand spoils, in Life."
"Nay, am I not yours?"
She stooped to him with her oíd half-mocking sorcery, her loosened hair brushing bis breast, her rich lips near his own, her eyes, deep with thought, humid with tears, yet luminous with that victorious challenge which was without pity, and which had so often defíed men to have strength or power to deny her as their destiny. The oíd evil passed over her for a moment—the oíd evil of triumph in the unmerciful, unsparing knowledge that a human soul was hers to do with as she would, as a crown of roses lies in a child's wanton hands tq be treasured or trodden down at will.
​He looked at her with a long wistful gaze, earnest as an unspoken prayer, and once more the darker and the more callous tyranny that had for one instant returned on her was softened and banished and dríven back by the pure strength of an undivided loyalty, by the undivided trust of a brave man'a heart.
"You know it," he answered her. "Why play with me in speech when you hold my life in your power?"
The patience and gentleness of the rebuke touched her as had never done those florid vows, those ornate protestations, such as she had heard so often until she was as wearied by them as eyes that dwell long on the dazzling hues of jewels ache with their glitter and their profusion. Others had loved her as well as he, even with this depth, thís might, this absolute submission of all existence to her, yet in him these had a dignity and a simplicity that claimed a reverence no other had done—these in him made her worthloss of them in her own sight.
"Ah, forgive me!" she said, with that passionato contrition which in a woman thus proud, and of old thus unyielding as she was, had at once so much of poignancy, so much of self-reproach, "I wish only it were otherwise! I wish only that your fate were ​safely anchored in some pure and peaceful life mine could not touch. Why will men ever love where love is fatal?"
He looked at her with eamest thought, grave and infinitely tender.
"Fatal? What is it that you fear for me?"
"All things."
"All! That is to place but little trust in my strength to endure or to resist. What is it you dread most?"
"Myself."
She gaye him back his look, intent as his own, fathomless, and filled with a pain that was half remorse, half prescience.
His face grew very pale.
"You mean—you will desert me?"
"No. Not that."
She spoke slowly, as if each word were a pang, then leaned towards him once more with the light of the risen day full on her face, and the splendour of her eyes troubled beyond grief.
"No. I never broke a trust; and yours is the noblest ever placed in me. But—cleaving to me—you will have bitter trials for your faith; you will have, most likely, cruel suffering that I shall be powerless to spare you; you will lose me, perhaps, by captivity, ​by shot, or by steel: you will pay for me, it may be, if ever I be yours, no less price yourself than death. Now do you not know why, though it rent my heart in twain, I would surrender you up, and never look upon your face again, my love—my love!—would you but take my warning?"
The first words had been almost cold from their enforced control; with the last a yearning, aching desire trembled in her voice, which would have told him, had no other moment told him, that what she felt for him was not pity nor gratitude, but passion itself. He heard in silence to the end, as one who has his own resolve set immutably, and listens to the utterance of counsel that has no more likelihood to make him swerve from it than the beating of the winds to move the rocks that they pass over. Not that he heard her lightly, or believed that undue fear made her count the peril for him with needless exaggeration; he knew this was not in her nature, but he was wholly careless of what price might be exacted from him for allegiance to her, and he was as firm to cleave it, whatever that price might be, as a soldier to cleave to his standard while there is sight enough left in his dying eyes to watch one gleam of the silken folds above his head that shall never droop through him till men have killed, not conquered, ​him. Then, holding her hands against his heart, be looked down on her with that graver and more chastened tenderness which, mingled with the vivid ardour of his love, born from the darkness of danger that was still around them, and from the defence that through it she, so brilliant, so fearless, and so negligent, had come to need from his strength and from his fealty. In her intellect, in her ambitions, in her carelessness and her magníficence, he was content that she should reign far beyond him, content to know that she reached many realms which he had barely dreamed of; but in her necessity, in her peril, in her desolation, he took up his title as a man to guard her, his right as a man to shield her, and to save her, if it should need be, even from herself.
"We will speak no more of that; our fates, whatever they be, will be the same," he answered her.
"It may be that I shall suffer through you, as you say; if so, it will be without complaint while I can still be dear to you. If death come—well; it had little terror for us last night—it will have none for me, if it be only merciful enough to spare me life without you. As for faith—believe enough in me to know that no trial will exhaust it. If silence be bound on you, I will wait till you can break it with ​honour. I have no fear of what it guards from me. Love were of little worth that could not yield so slight a thing as trust"
"A slight thing? It is a greater gift than the gift of crowns or kingdoms—and still more rare."
She had heard him, moved deeply by the brave simplicity of the generous words; her face was very pale, her head bowed; in her own sight she was unworthy of this sublime unquestioning belief, and the knowledge entered like iron into her soul.
"Is it?" he answeréd her. "Then all love is a lie. However that be, take it as my gift to you, then; I have nothing else in the world to bring."
She looked at him with that long, grave, weary look of which he could not wholly read the meaning.
"You could bring me none I could prize more, or—could deserve less."
"That cannot be. If you did not merit it, you would see no treasure in it. It is not those who value trust that betray it."
"Betray it! No; I never betrayed yet."
Her face wore for a moment the fearless look of royal courage and strength that had ever been most natural to it; then, swiftly, it changed, and a darkness fell over it—the darkness of remorse.
​"That is not true," she said, bitterly. "Betrayal—in men's sense of betrayal of comrade to comrade, of friend to friend, of honour to honour—never yet did touch me. But I betrayed as women mostly do—all those who loved me."
He watched her wistfully, but silently; his heart ached that there should be this shadow of unrevealed remorse between them; his knowledge of her told him that Idalia was not a woman to let slight regrets weigh on her, or slight errors stir her conscience into pain; he knew that among the wild-olive crown of her genius and jer power some poisoned leaf of the belladonna must be wound, brilliant but life-destroying. It was acute suffering to him; she was to him as luminous, glorious, divine, and far above him as the sun itself; that across this sun of his life there should lie these black and marring shadows, gave bim pain deep as his love. But loyalty was with him before all; and beyond the reckless resolve of a blind passion, that would possess what it adored, though the possession should be accursed, there was the noble fealty he had sworn to her—the brave, patient, chivalrous trust which left unasked whatever she wished untold, and was contented to believe and wait.
​He stooped to her, tenderly passing over her latest words.
"Weary yourself no more with the past," he said, gently; a gentleness that was sweet to her, like the lulling murmur of calm waters after the blaze and riot of the voluptuous colour of tropic forests. "We have to think of the present and the futuro. Every moment is precious; I have been too forgetful of your safety. You know better than I where your enemies lie, and how best they may be baffled. There is one who will not spare——"
"There are hundreds who will not. The land is as a net for me."
"Then we must leave it——"
"Is it so easy to leave such close-woven meshes?"
"Easy, no. Possible, yes."
"And how?"
"That we will speak of later; for the present moment you must have food and rest. There will surely be some charcoal-burner's or contadina's hut here somewhere; there is nothing hardly to fear from the peasantry in the forests or open country, and we must wait till nightfall for further flight. Stay an instant while I look around us——"
"But you are not fit for any exertion! Your wound, your faintness——"
​He smiled on her; and the light of the smile had a strange, sad beauty, that touched her with a pang, keen in pain and yet not without its sweetness.
"Those were nothing. Such as they were, you cured them. I think I nave the strength of lions now."
He left her, and, going up where the earth rose precipitously, looked down the great dim aisles of forest that stretched away on every side, with the far unerring sight of a man who had known what it was to go through the heart of Persia with his life hanging on the sureness of his eye and aim, and who had ridden over the grass seas of Mexico and steered down the lonely windings of the Amazons, when with every moment a spear thrown from behind him, or an arrow launched from the dense screen of foliage, might have ended his years there and then for ever. He stood motionless some instants, not a sign of bird, or beast, or vegetable life in the woodlands round escaping him; he had learned all such forest lore of Indians and Guachos, and he had a traveller's swift sweep of vision, with a soldier's rapid tactic and decision; the horses were grazing quietíiy near, too tired to stray, and watched; moreover, by Sulla, who had, unbidden, taken their guardianship. In a few moments longer he returned to her.
​"There is some one living a score yards onward, or I am much mistaken. Wait here while I reconnoitre, and if you need me, fire; I will be with you at the first echo of the shot."
He loaded the pistol that had fallen on the grass by her, and put it back into her hand, then thrust the boughs aside, and made his way to where, at some slight distance, the hut of some woodland dweller stood; a faint low flicker of smoke, curling among the thickness of the leaves, had told him rightly there was some human habitation, and though it was but a poor cabin, rudely built of loose stones and woven branches, it was more welcome to him than a palace would have been. He knew the Italian people as well as he knew the Border peasantry at home, and knew that they were gentle, kindly, and generous in the main. The hut stood in a very wilderness of beauty, wild vine, and the sweet fig beloved of Horace, gigantic pines, and the wood-strawberry that nestled in the grass, in their profuso and vivid contrast, making a paradise around it, while in its rear the high slope of pine-covered hills rose dark and massive, with falling waters tumbling down their steep incline into a broad still pool beneath, that was never stirred unless by the plunge of some diving water-bird. A young female child, with a rich Guido ​face and the step of a princess in her rags, was the only living thing found there; she answered him readily, balancing her water-jar as Bhe came from the torrent like some Pompeian Naiad; her father had gone to his work at dawn; he was a charcoal-burner, and he would not return till evening; the stranger was welcome to shelter; and food—well, there was no food except some millet-cakes, and a bit of dried fish from the fresh water; he could have that, if he wanted. Any one near? Oh no, there was no one for ten miles or more round, except one or two huts like hers. She was a picturesque, handsome little forester, bare-legged and scarce clothed, yet with a wild freedom of movement, and a certain pensive grace thoroughly national; very like the beautiful mournful models, Campagna-born, of Rome, who look like living poems, and who have but one thought—baiocchi.
"It is a miserable place for you, yet it will give us some sort of harbour," he said, as he brought Idalia to the woodland cabin.
She looked across a moment at the luxuriance of vine and blossom, and backward at the black pine-mass, through which the falling waters glanced like light, and smiled half wistfully as she looked.
"I think it is a paradise! To forget the world ​amídst such loveliness as this—what do you say? Would it be wise? And yet—power is a dangerous thing; once having drink of it, one has lost taste for every purer flavour. You do not know what that is? Ton do not know what ambition is, then? I can tell you; it is satiety with desire."
"A bitter thing?"
"Yes. But not so bitter that it is not sweeter than all sweetness—only the sweetness so soon goes, and the dregs are so soon all we hold!"
He did not answer; his heart ached that be was not able to bring dominion to this woman, who was so born for it; that he had no diadem such as that of her foregone Byzantine sires to crown her with; that be had nothing wherewith to achieve greatness—nothing wherewith to content that desire, half disdainful yet undying, which was in her for the sceptre and the sword, for all they ruled and all they gained.
He left ber in the inner chamber of the but, that was roughly partitioned in two by a wall of stakes and woven rushes, and brought the horses, under the shelter of a great cedar that shut out every ray of the sun; he could use bis left arm but little, owing to the shoulder-wound, but be loosened tbeir girths, watered them, gave tbem a feed of rye from some ​corn that the cotters kept for bread, then bathed, and shook bis barcarolo dress into tbe best order that it would assume, and thought what food in this wild waste he could find for her. That he was anhungered and athirst himself, that there was fever on him still from his injuries, and that, despite the plunge into the water's refreshing coldness, his bruised frame ached and his breath was hard to draw, he scarcely felt; Idalia was his only memory. For her, be could have not alone the lion's strength that he had said, but a woman's gentleness, an Indian's patience, an Arab's keenness; and nothing was too slight for him to heed, as nothing too great for him to brave, that could be offered in her service and her cause. That he had had no sleep, no rest, no food, weighed nothing with him; in the heat of the early day he sought with unwearying diligence for such things as he thought could tempt her. Wild strawberries on their own mosses; beccaficos that haunted the place, and that he slew with a sling and baked in clay; dainyy fish that he speared with the knife from his sash, wading waist-deep in the pool—these were all the woods would yield him. But love for her had made him an artist and a poet; he served them in such graceful fashion, covering the rude table of the cabin with a cloth of greenest ​moss, and screening the coarse-hewn wooden trenchers with vine-leaves and flowers, that it was rather like such a forest banquet as Theocritus or Ben Jonson loved to cast in verse, than like the meal, in a wretched refuge, of fugitives for whom every moment might bring tiie worst terrors of captivity and death.
When it was done—that travail of willing, tender service—he could have swept it down again with a stroke of his hand.
"I am a fool," be thought, with a smile that had a sigh in it "A child might thank me for those trifles; but she—wild strawberry-leaves for one who wants the laurels of fame, the gold foliage of a diadem!"
Yet he stooped down again, and changed the garniture a little, so that the snow-white arums might lie nearer the scarlet of the £ruit. He had a paínter's heart, and instinct told him that beauty in the lowliest things has ever a sweet psalm of consolation in it; he loved, and his love unconsciously told him that a coil of forest flowers is a better utterance of it than all the gold of Ophir.
It was not wasted on ber, this which be deemed so idle a trifle that she would not even note it. As her glance fell on the woodland treasures that the hands, which a few hours before, had been clenched in a ​mortal gripe at her foe's throat, had gathered to cover the poverty of their refuge, Idalia's eyes filled with soft sudden light aod gratitude—eyes that had so often looked down with cold, amused, careless scorn on those who wooed her with every courtly subtlety, with every potent magnificence of bribe.
"What depths of exhaustless tenderness there are in his heart!" she thought. "I might gaze there for ever and find no base thing! O if he could say that of mine!"
The day went on its way deepening to the full heat of noon, cloudless, sultry, lustrous, as such days of summer-length in southern lands alone can be; to him it was like one long unbroken dream, divine, voluptuous, intense as the radiance around them. They were safe here in the heart of the untrodden forest—safe, until with the fall of night their flight could be resumed. Within, the darkness of the hut, the moss and foliage he had strewn everywhere made couches yielding as velvet, and filled the air with their fresh fragrance, with the gleam of the white flowers flashing in the gloom; without, stretched the vivid light and endless growth of the woodland, the glow of colour, the foam of water, the play of sun-rays upon a thousand hills, and, above all, the deep blue of an Italian sky. Beyond, under the ​great cedar, the horses browsed and rested, with broad shadows flung upon them cool and dark; all the fantastic foliage ran riot like a forest of the tropics; here and there an oriole flashed, like gold in the sun; here and there the rich green of a lizard gianced among the grasses; all else was still and motionless, steeped in the sensuous lull of southern heat.
In such a day, in such a scene, danger and pain were forgot, as though they had no place on earth; they were alone; the young peasant-child went hillwards after her single goat; there was not a sound or a sign of other life than theirs, and the oblivion of passion was upon them both; they ceased to remember that they were fugitives—they only knew that they were together.
They spoke very rarely; she let the past, with all its mystery and all its bitterness, drift away forgotten. To the future neither looked; it might lead to the dungeon or the scaffold. They lived in the present hour alone, as those who love do ever live, in the first abandonment and usurpation of their passion.
Once she looked down at him where he lay at her feet, and passed her hand among his hair.
"Does the earth hold another man capable of such ​sublime folly as yours? You give me your life; yet never ask me once of mine."
"What marvel in that? You have said, you wish silence on it."
"And how many would heed such a wish?"
"I know not how many would But it is law to me."
"Ah! you are rash as Tannhauser. I told you so long ago."
"And I said then as now, Tannhauser was a cur. She was his; knowing that, what wanted he? If he had had faith aright, and love enough, he would have wrested her out from the powers of darkness. He would not have yielded her up—not even to herself. Evil is black in us all; love, that is love in my reading, does not surrender us to it, or for it."
The deep glow of his eyes gazed into hers, speaking a thousand-fold more than his words. He knew that the chains of some remorse bound her; to fear this for himself never dawned on the careless courage of that which she had well termed his "sublime folly," but to free her from its dominion was a resolve with him not less resolute than had been his resolve to deliver her beauty from her captor's fetters.
Her face was softened to a marvellous richness, ​sadness, and pathos as he looked up át her—the gloom of the low-shelving roof above and behind them, the light of the day falling on her and about her, through the hanging leaves, from the burning sun without.
"You like better the passion of the 'Gott und die Bajadere' poem? Well, so do I. It is nobler far. The god had faith in her, and, because he believed in her, saved her. Brave natures, defying scorn, may grow to merit scorn; but no brave nature ever yet was steeled and false to trust."
"And yours is brave to the death; wherefore, till death, I trust it."
His words were low, and sweet, and earnest grave with that depth of meaning and of feeling which made reverence, not less than pity, move her towards the only man who had ever stirred her either to compassion or to veneration, and which gave grandeur, force, and nobility to the love which, withont it, might have been but a madness of the heart, and a desire of the senses.
"False women vow, as well as true—I vow you nothing," she murmured to him; "but—I thank you beyond all words."
She did so thank him from her soul; she to whom this faith was precious as no other thing ​could have been, since she knew at once that she had forfeited all title to claim, all likelihood to gain it, yet knew that very often calumny had wronged and envy stained her with many a charge of which she had been as guiltless as the white arums that lay unsullied at her feet. That strong, imdoubting, imperishable trust was the one jewel of life that she had of her own will renounced her title to, yet which she could value as no other, perhaps, who had not lost it, ever could have done so welL
"Listen," she said, stooping over him where he was stretched on the foliage at her feet, while her hand strayed still with a caress among his hair and over his lips. "So much of my life as I can tell you I will—it is not a thousandth part, still it may make some things clearer to you. I am of Greek birth, as you know; and I doubt if there be in the world a descent that can claim greater names than mine. My race—nay, both races that were blent in me—stretched far back into the earliest Athenian times on one hand, and to the records of Byzantium on the other. A myth moreover blends in me Halicarnassian descent from Artemisia;—that is doubtless legend. But I was the last to represent the pure Greek stock, and it was the one of which I was the prouder, though it had fallen into evil fortunes and ​much poverty. Of the Byzantine, there was but one besides myself, the brother of my dead mother, a strange man; a rich, wayward, luxurious recluse; a feudal prínce, where he held his chieftainship in Roumelia; leading an existence more like an eastern story than aught else; magnificent, voluptuous, barbaric, solitary, with all the glitter of Oriental pomp and all the loneliness of a mountain fief. A terrible tragedy that had occurred in his youth—I can tell it you some other time—begot his love of solitude; his passions and his tastes led him to make that solitude, at once a palace and a prison, a harem and a fortress. I have little doubt that his life was evil enough; but I did not know it, and he loved me with a lavish tenderness that left me fearless of him, though he had a great terror for all others. So the life I led from my birth to my sixteenth year was this: sometimes I passed long months in Greece, in a great, desolate, poverty-stricken palace, with vast deserted gardens, in which I wandered looking at the bright ocean, while dreaming of the dead glories of my people, with an Armenian monk, old, and stern, and learned, for my only guide, who taught me all I would—more, perhaps, of abstruse lore, and strange scenes, and deep knowledge than was well for me while so young. Ere I had seen the ​world I was steeped in it, from the telling of Roman cynics, and Athenian sages, and Persian magi, and Byzantine wits. I believed with all the credulous innocence of my own childhood, and I disbelieved with all the scornful scepticism of my dead masters. I had studied more deeply while I was yet a child than many men do in their whole lifetime. From that lonely meditative life in Greece I was often changed, as by magic, to the unbridled luxury and indulgence of the Roumelian castle. Slaves forestalled my every wish; splendour, the most enervating that could be dreamt of, surrounded me within, while the grandest natural beauty was everywhere without; if vice there were, I never saw it, but the most gorgeous pleasures amused me, and my bidding was done like the commands of an empress, for I was the adopted heir of the great Julian, Count VassaJis. Now can you not imagine how two such phases of life, alternating in their broadest and most dangerous contrasts from my earliest memory upward, made me fatal indeed to others, but to none so fatal as to myself?"
She laid her hands on his lips to arrest the words he would have spoken, and passed on in her narrative.
"No. No deniai God grant I be not fatal at ​the last to you. Well, it was these two dissimilar lives that made me what I am. I was happy then in both; happy, dreaming in poverty in Greece; happy, dreaming in magnificence in Roumelia; ambitious already, ambitious as any Cæsar in both. In Athens I had the poetry and the purity of glory in me; in Turkey its power and its pomp allured me. Both, combined with the knowledge of my past heritage in Hellenic fame, and of my future heritage in the Vassalis dominion, gave me the pride of an emperor and the vision of an empire wide as the world. Ah Heaven! yet the dreams were pure, too—purer and loftier than anything that life can realise. For I did not dream for myself alone. I dreamed of peoples liberated, of dynasties bound together by love of the common good, of the Free Republics revived by my hand, and shedding light in all dark places where creeds reigned and superstitions crouched, of misery banished, of age revered, of every slavery of custom broken, of every nobler instinct followed, of men made brethren, and not beasts of prey who hunt down and devour the young, the weak, the guiltless. Ah Heaven! what dreams they were."
Her head sunk, her eyes were fixed on the flood of light without, her thoughts were far from him, ​far beyond him, in that moment, as the thoughts of genius ever are far from those who love the thinker best, and are best loved in answer.
They were with the dreams of her youth; such dreams as lighted the youth of Vergniaud and found their fruition on the scaffold.
"Well," he asked gently, "with you they never perished?"
"No, not utterly. But they were tainted, how deeply tainted! So, thus I lived, a fairy story and a pageantry filling one half my years, monastic reclusion and heroic memories holding the rest. As I grew older, Julian Vassalis often spoke with me of many things; he was a bold, magnificent, kingly, reckless man, a chief who answered to none, a voluptuary who laughed at the world he had quitted, a genius who might have ruled widely and wisely with a Sulla's iron hand, a Sulla's careless laughter. He found me like him, and he made me yet more like. It might be—but it is not for my lips to blame him: he loved me well in life, and strove, so far as prescience could, to guard me when his life ended. That was in my sixteenth year. He bequeathed me all his vast properties, with the fief in Roumelia and other estates, requiring only that I took his name, and, wherever I wedded, never ​changed it. It is through him that I became one of the richest women in Europe; much is gone, but great weaJth still remains with me. Can you not fancy what I was nine years ago, with the world before me, untried, unknown, with passion untouched, with ambition still but in its sweet vague ideals, with innocence as soilless as those lilies, and courage fearless as the courage of the young eagles? Can you marvel that I believed I should have the sovereignty of Semiramis? Can you not understand how easily I credited those who for their own ends deluded me to the belief?"
Her face darkened as she spoke, and her voice sank with a thrill of hate in it. He caught it, and his own voice took her tone.
"Tell me who they were. If they be living "
The menace recalled her from the past to the present.
"No. That is one of many things I cannot tell you yet, if ever. From no love of mystery—I abhor it—but from a brutal inexorable necessity, as little to be escaped from as the destiny of the ancients. We know that there is no such thing as destiny, but we make as hard a task-master for ourselves out of our own deeds. Of my childhood I can speak freely, but from Julian Vassalis' death dates the ​time that T must in so much leave a blank to you. Those were with me who knew how to touch every chord in my nature, and they used their power ably. I was ambitious; they tempted my ambition. I loved, sovereignty; they pointed to such realms as might have dazzled wiser heads than mine when I first stood on that giddy eminence of command, and riches, and splendour, and was told that I had the beauty of a Helen, while I knew that I had the courage of men, and felt even stir in me men's genius and men's force. Do not deem me vain that I say this. God knows all vanity is dead in me, if I ever had it, and I think that I was at all times too proud to be guilty of that foible. And it was by higher things than such frailty that they lured me. I loved freedom; I loved the peoples; I rebelled against the despotism of mediocrities, the narrow bonds of priesthoods; I had the old libertíes of Greece in my veins, and I had the passionate longing for an immortal fame that all youth, which has any ideal desires at all, longs for with the longing 'of the moth for the star.' Well, through these, by these, I fell into the snares of those who draped their own selfish greeds and intrigues in the colours of the freedom that I adored; who knew how to tempt me with the pure laurels of a liberator, ​while in truth they bound me with the fetters of a slave."
He did not speak, but looked at her, with his lips breathless, with his eyes passionate as fire, through the mist that dimmed them as he heard. Hearing no more than this, her life seemed known in its every hour to him; he understood her more nearly, more deeply, than any man had ever done; more truly far than those whose genins and whose aspiratíons had far more closely been akin with hers.
She looked at him and sighed.
"Wait. Do not think me blameless because in the outset I was wronged. I tell you that I have great sins at my score. True, at the time I speak of now, I was sinned against, not sinning. I was led to ally myself in earliest youth with those whom later years have shown me were desperate, insatiate unscrupulous, guilt-stained gamesters, who staked a nation's peace to win a gambler's throw, and played at patriotism as keenly and as greedily as men play for gold. I was dazzled, intoxicated, beguiled, misled at once by all that was best and all that was worst in me; and, too late, I found the truth, found every avenue of retreat closed, found myself bound beyond escape, found that——"
She paused abruptly, shutting in the words, but ​the hand that lay in his contracted as though it grasped a weapon wherewith to requite a deadly, endless wrong.
"So far I was sinned against," she went on, with effort, as though the memoríes which arose stifled her with poisonous fumes. "But in all else the evil is mine. The sway was guilty that had been put into my hands, but I grew to love it as we grow to love the opium that we hate at first. All power had irresistible fascination for me, and I learned to use mine pitilessly; and I should use it so tomorrow to all save you. The political career into which I had been plunged had its sorcery for me; I delighted in it even whilst I abhorred it. I soon learnt how to play on men's passions until from them I gained what I would. If my instruments were broken under my hands, I never heeded it; they had served my end, and the end was great still, though its means were accursed; the end was still the liberties of the nations. The truth did not come to me till I had gone too far to draw back, too far not to be enamoured of the merciless dominion that I found I could command. When I knew it, I grew wholly reckless. I had been foully, basely wronged, and all that was dangerous in me rose and hardened. I had been stabbed in ​the dark by hands that were sworn to shield me. I cared littíe what I did, nothing for what was said of me, after that. I am not justifying myself; I merely show you what fires they were which burned me heartless. I have been associated with every movement of the advanced parties of Europe through the years that have gone by since I first became the Countess Yassalis; I have been the inspirer of more efforts, the guide of more intrigues; than I could tell you in a score of hours, even were I free to tell you them; I have held in my time, indirectly, more power than many a minister whose name is among the rulers; the world does not know how it is governed, and it does not dream how kings have dreaded and statesmen sought to bribe me. One thing alone I remained true to, heart and soul—my cause. For the freedom of the peoples, for the breaking of their chains, I have laboured with all such strength and brain and force as nature gave me. In that I have been true, and without taint of selfish desires. God knows that to raise my own land among the nations, and to gain Italy for the Italians, and to do—were it ever so little—to crush the tyrannies of creeds, to bring nearer the daylight of fearless and unfettered truth, I would let Giulio Villaflor and his creatures kill me as they ​would. In that I have been loyal to the core, but in all else I have been very guilty. I have tempted, blinded, seduced men into the love that gave them as wax into my hands. I have roused their darkest passions, that of those passions I might make the firebrands or the swords my purpose needed. I have taken their peace and crushed it to powder; I have taken their hearts and broken them without a pause of pity; I have sent them out to the slaughter careless how they fell, so that my will was done; I have sent them out to perish, far and wide, north and south, east and west, and never asked the cost of all that gold of human life wherewith I pláayed my pitiless gambling. I smiled at those for whom I cared no more than for the stones of that torrent; I let them hope I loved them, so long as that hope was needed to make them ready instruments to my using: I was stirred no more by despair than I was for compassion. So long as I had my slaves, I heeded nothing what they suffered, how they were captured. I only smiled át the fools who thought women had no share in the making of history, no power to penetrate the arcana of life That was all."
He listened, and a heavy sigh answered her as she paused; it was involuntary, unconscious. He had ​believed in Idalia, as with a woman's absolute unquestioning belief; it struck him hardly, deeply, to know by her own tellíng that she had these ruined broken lives, these Circean cruelties in her past; that the witching splendour of her sorcery had been thus steeped in tears of blood, thus bartered for the gain of triumph and dominion. No fear for himself even now crossed him; his courage was too bold, his passion too ardent. It was the knowledge that she should thus have stained the beauty and the genius of her life, which came on him, not unlooked for, since he had ere this known that there were error and remorse upon her, yet bitter as the fall of what is treasured and is reverenced must ever be, however love remain faithful and unshaken to that fall's lowest depth.
"One question only," he said to her, while his voice was low and tremulous. "Through this, was there never one whom you loved?"
She met his gaze fully, thoughtfully, truly he could have sworn, or never eyes spoke truth.
"Not one!"
"Is it possible?"
She smiled a little, with her oíd weary irony.
"Very possible. Poets have written much about the love of women; I do not think it a tithe so ​warm and strong as the love of men. Many women are cold sensualists, many are inordinately vain; sensualism and vanity make up nine-tenths of my sex's passions, though sentímentality has so long refused to think so."
"But you must have been surrounded by so many—by all that was most brilliant and most seductive?"
"Yes; yet a tinsel brilliancy, for the most part. Besides, I did not come into the world ignorant of it, as most youth comes. Julian Vassalis, and my own tastes, and others who influenced me then, had given me the surest shield against the follies of love in studies deeper far than most women, if they had driven away my faith in life too early, with the sneers of Persius, with the scourge of Juvenal, with their own cynic wit and their own manifold knowledge. Ambition was infínitely more the passion to tempt me than love ever was. I luxuriated in the sense of my own power, in the exercise of my own fatal gifts; but I scorned from the bottom of my heart the men who were fooled by such idle things as a girl's glance, as a woman's smile. If the gold gleam of my hair ensnared them, I could not but disdain what was so easily bound; if they were spaniels at my word, I knew they had been, or they ​would be, as weakly slaves of any other who succeeded me, and as easily subjugated by a courtesan as they were by me, when I chose to use the power, I thought very scornfully of love. I saw its baser side, and I held it a madness of men by which women could revenge a thousand-fold the penalties of sex that shut us out from public share in the world's government. A statesman is great, a woman can make him a wittol; a chíef is mighty, a woman can make him a byword of shame and reproach; a soldier has honour firm as steel, a woman can make him break it like a stalk of green flax; a poet has genius to gain him immortality, a woman can make him curse the world and its fame for her sake, and die like a dog, raving mad for the loss of scarlet lips that were false, of eyes divine that were lies. No power! We have the widest of all! Well, I but knew that better than most, and used it yet more unmercifully than most. And I think what gave that power tenfold into my hands was that one fact—that the weakness of love never for one instant touched me myself, that the temptations of love never tempted me for an instant, that my intellect alone dealt with them, and my heart remained ever cold."
"And it has wakened for me? How is it possible? ​What have I that those had not? I have nothing on earth whereby to be worthy of you—whereby to have won you?"
Hís life was so sweet with its rapture, his passion was so blind with its victory, he scarce remembered those who had so vainly suffered before him. Every happiness is selfish, more or less; and his was so in that moment. She half smiled, and let her head droop over him, till her lips touched his again:
"Who can answer for love? Others have done as much for me as you—others have loved me, even as well as you; but——"
"None had yours?"
He asked it eagerly, breathlessly, still; this was all that he doubted in her past—that some other life had reigned before him in that heart which beat so near to his.
"No! A thousand times 'No!' if you care for the denial. Love was my tool, he was never my master."
She spoke with her oíd imperial dignity of disdain for those follies of feeling and of the senses which sway mankind so widely and so idly. Then the scorn faded from her eyes, a weariness stole there instead; her voice sank, and lost its pride in the ​contrítion of self-accusing memoríes, of heart-sick confession.
"But do not honour me for that. It made my críme, I think, the deeper. Those senseless women, whom I have so often contemned, with all the contempt that was in me, for their maudlin romance, their emotional sentiment, which make them see a god in every common-place mortal, and give them idols as many as the roses in summer, are, after all, perhaps, truer and better—fools though they be—than I. Their emotions, at least, are real, however fleeting, vain, and shallow. But I—leave me when you know it, if you will, but know it you shall—never felt one faintest touch of tenderness for any one of those who loved me, yet I was merciless enough, sinful enough, shameful enough, if you will, never to let one amongst them know that, until he was deep enough in my toils to have no power to loose himself from them. I let them hope, I let them believe, I let them think their reward sure until such time as they were mine—courage and honour and body and soul all mine—to use as I would, for the ends and in the cause of my ambitions. I let them think I loved them, and then I used their minds or their hands, their names or their strength, whichever I needed to take; and I never asked once, ​I never once pitied, when I knew that their hearts were broken. Go—you must think me guilty enough now. Go—for if your trust be dead, rend me out of your life once and for ever at a blow, rather than pass your years with what you doubt."
She put him from her, as she spoke, and rose; her face was very pale, grave with a profound sadness, with a set resolution. The words cost her more than it would have cost her to have thrust the Venetian dagger into her bosom to escape the pursuit of Giulio Villaflor, but they were spoken without a pause to spare herself; she loved him better than herself, and she knew that unless this man's faith were perfect in her, the lives of both would be a hell. And Idalia was too proud a woman either to submit to live suspected, or to allow such faith to be given in error and in ignorance, unmerited.
His breath was sharply drawn, as under a keen physical pain; he stood and looked at her with a look that was revenge enough for all the unpitying cruelties of her past; it was so unconsciously a rebuke, so silently and terribly in its pain a condemnation passing words.
For the first time under his gaze her head drooped, her eyes filled with tears of shame, the paleness of her face flushed; before the integral truth of his ​every act and word, the bold simplicity of his creeds of honour, her own life looked to her very guilty, very far from the fair light of justicé and of loyalty.
"Leave me," she said to him, briefly, though her voice was very low. "But—do not you reproach me."
In answer his arms were stretched to her, and drew her to his breast; in that moment he had command over her, in that moment he was not her slave, but her judge. His face was grave and almost stern, for he suffered keenly, but his voice and his touch were infinitely gentle.
"Leave you? You think I know so little how to value a woman who has the noblest virtue on earth—truth?"
"Truth! when I have told you my whole life was, in one sense, a lie?"
"Truth—because you have so told me. Oh, my beloved I know me better than this. Can I not condemn your errors, and yet cherish you but the more because you need some pity and some pardon?"
She was silent, deeper smitten than by any rebuke or execration by the unutterable tenderness of this love that was too true to truth to hold her guiltless, yet too true to itself to forsake her ​because it condemned her. In that moment she knew how much greatness there was in this man's nature, how much dignity in his passion.
"But your trust, your faith?" she said at last, as she looked up at him.
"Will be with you ever, as my love will be."
He stooped, and leant his cheek on hers, while low in her ear a few words stole; he could not keep them back from the aching and the longing of his heart.
"Tell me but one thing. You say you wore the mask of passion to fool them;—did you ever let another before me tell you of his passion thus?"
His own lips lingered in their kisses upon hers. She drew herself from his embrace with something of her old smile, of her old scorn.
"No. Or no prayer of yours should make me your wife."
"And then you ask me if my faith be perfect still? There are scores of women—women who would censure you—who think it no shame to bring tainted lips to their husbands."
"Well," she said, wearily, "give me not too much praise for being prouder, and it may be colder, than many women are! If I never bent to the follies of love, I was but the more blameable, perhaps, for using ​them without mercy to my own ends. I tell you I never spared. If any ever doubted or resisted me, he had a terrible chastisement; he soon gave his very soul and conscience up into my hands. Sometimes I think that Mephistopheles himself never tempted more deftly and more brutally than I have done. That dead Viana! He would be living now were it not for me. He was half a Bourbon in his creeds; he worshipped pleasure, and pleasure alone; revolutions might have reeled around him, and Cario would never have laid down the wine-cup, never asked with what side the day went or the battle turned. But I brought him to give his very life to my moulding; I moved him to his own ruin by those very qualities of fearless chivalry and generous passion that should have been his shield from me. And—if you had seen him lying dead there as I saw him, with his brave face turned upward, that he might smile in my eyes to the last!——"
Her head sank, there was the mute anguish on her of a remorse that would never fade out while life remained. He stood beside her silent also; he knew that there were no words that could assuage this bitterness, he knew that to this self-condemnation justíce forbade any consolation that must have been at its best but a deceiving sophistry.
​"Yet you say your cause was noble?" he asked her, gently, at the last. "It was not to gain the cruel empty triumph of a woman's vanity that you beguiled them?"
"God knows! There was guilty triumph enough in me at times. In the main—yes—it was for the cause of freedom that I won them. That had been harmless; but my sin was that I made them stake their lives on me, yield their souls to me, surrender their consciences to me because I taught them love, and then, when they were my slaves, I used them to their own destruction, as these charcoal-makers thrust the fresh wood in to burn and feed their fires."
"Still—you believed that those fires were the sacrifice-fires of the peoples' altars of liberty?"
She shivered slightly in the ardent heat of the broad noonday.
"At first, with all the youth and passion of faith that were in me, I did believe it. And I clung to the belief long—long after I knew it had its root in quicksands. But after I had learned how hopeless the struggle for pure freedom is, after I had learned that the absolutisms of thrones and churches are masked batteries of iron and granite on to which the thinker and the poet and the patriot fling themselves ​in combat only to be crushed and perish, after I had learned that only one amongst ten thousand of those who had the welfare of the peoples on their lips had it also in their hearts, and that fraud, knavery, selfish greed, impatient discontent, corrupt ambitions, were the natures of the liberators not less than of the tyrants;—after I had read the bare truth to its last letter;—I lured them still. Partly because I was irrevocably bound to the work, partly because all my old belief would not die; chiefly of all, because I had grown to love the power possessed, and could not bring myself to lay it down and own my whole life a defeat. Nor was it one——"
The warmth flushed her face again, her eyes lit with the light of victory, something of the haughty defiance with which she had challenged Giulio Villaflor, returned then as she challenged the memories of her past.
"It has been a crime, it may be—but not a failure. No Vassalis ever failed, I have fed hope into action, when without me it would have died out in darkness. I have armed hands that but for my weapons could never have struck their oppressors down. I have breathed liberty into a thousand lives that but for me might never have drawn in its mountain air. I have loosened the bonds of many martyrs; ​I have broken the chains of many captives—men who suffered agonies, here in this Italy, simply because they dared to cling to her, and seek vengeance for her violation. No. It has been no failure. Are we not victorious at the last, if the least thing for freedom have been wrought by us?"
She spoke not to him but to her past, as though its remorse arraigned whilst yet its conquest crowned her. She pleaded with her own conscience; she raised her cause in justification against the witness of the years that were gone; she had been true—true to the death—to the peoples of the earth and to their liberties, true to truth through all.
It is a noble loyalty, one very rare amidst mankind—one that surely may avail to atone for much.
Those words were the last on her lips for many moments. From the gloom and stillness of the hut, where there was a depth of shadow only broken by the green mosses that strewed the floor and the grey flash of a tame pigeon*s wing guarding its brood in the farthest nook, she looked out at the luxuriance of colour and the blaze of sun, whilst her thoughts were sunk into the past.
He did not break her musings; his own thoughts were filled with her history, of which he still knew, in truth, but so little, yet which seemed to him told ​wholly in those few brief sentences. Memories also came to him, revived by her relation—memories vague and fugitive, as of things scarcely heard before, because without interest at the time of their hearing, of stories that had floated to him in clubs and cafés in the cities of Europe, long ere he had met Idalia, of some beautiful Greek or Roumelian, of whom men told marvels of loveliness and sorcery, and about whose reputation had gathered many spléndid idle romances, fabulous as they were contradictory—romances that gave a thousand magnificent impossible legends to the records of her life, but stole from her, as such romances ever will, all "the white flower of a blameless life," and made her pleasures as guilty, and her charms as resistless, as those of Lucrezia or Theodora. He had never heeded them in their telling; he had cared little for women, still less for the babble of slanders, and they had passed him without interest enough to linger on his remembrance an hour. But now—with the words of her story—they recurred to him as such forgotten things will. Not to sting him with doubts of her, with fear for himself—suspicion of her was a thing impossible to him—but to madden him with impatient longing to reach her calumniators and strike them down. His nature was too bold for slander to ​do more than rouse his passion against the slanderer, his chivalry for the slandered.
"They were all lies!" he muttered in his beard, his face flushing as those distant memoríes stole on him. "All lies!—where are the tellers of them?"
She started slightly, and her eyes carne back from their dreaming speculation and dwelt on his.
"What were the lies?"
"Things that I heard of you—once. I remember now——"
"Ah!" A quick sigh escaped her—she would so gladly have kept her life fair and unshadowed in this man's sight at least. "Well, do not blame the tellers of them; my life laid me open to misconstruction; no one can complain, if their lives do so, of any calumny that may befall them."
Her voice was cold and careless; the evil of calumny had not possessed power to wound, but it had possessed power to chill and harden her, and the venom had left its trail thus for ever.
"But why——"
He paused, not willing even by a syllable to risk trenching on that silence which she thought it fittest to keep unbroken.
"Why did I so leave it open? For many things. First, ere I knew what calumny meant—when I was ​so young to the world that I yet believed I and Truth could avail to convince and to conquer it!—my name was stained too deeply, all undreamt of by me, for any future career, had it been pure as a child's, to wash the stain away. I was slandered—unjustly. Slandered, I say! It was a thousand times worse than that. A traitor took the blank page of my youth and wrote it over behind my back with infamous, indelible falsehood——"
A heavy curse broke asunder her words.
" Tell me who he was, and vengeance shall find him."
She passed her hand over his brow with a gentle caress.
"No. You shall have no darkness on you from my past of my bringing. But—you do not fear to take to your heart a woman whom the world has called evil thus?"
"The world! What terrors do you think that liar has for me?"
She smiled—a smile in which there was as much of weariness as of sweetness.
"It is not always a liar; it was not so always in what it said of me. But we will leave that! Today is our own; we will not poison it. You think we may make our way to the sea to-night?"
​"I do. There is little to be feared in the open country—almost nothing from the peasantry. The horses will be fresh, and if we can reach the little fishing village nearest to Antina, I could send some barcarolo to bring in my yacht. No suspicion falls on the vessel; the soldiers I saw at your villa did not know me, and no one will hear anything from Nicolò. We have only to fear the sbirri——"
"Wait; tell me all. How was it you heard of my arrest? How was it you found me?"
He told her; and she listened in the soft lull of the noon silence, in the leafy twilight of the forest hut, to the story of his search for her—listened with an exceeding tenderness on the face, whose careless pride so often had smiled contemptuously on all love and all despair. He told it in very few words, lessening as much as was possible all pain he had endured, all difficulty he had conquered, lest he should seem to press a debt upon her in the recital. But the very brevity, the very generosity, touched her as no eloquence would have done. By the very omissions she knew how staunch had been this endurance, how devoted this fidelity which through good and evil report had cleaved to her, and fought their way to her.
"Oh, noble heart!"—she murmured, as she stooped ​to him, staying his last words,—"that I might repay you in the future! If I were only sure that I should bring you no misery—if I could only know that no evil from me would fall on you—if I could only feel there were nothing untold between us, and that my life were worthier of your noble loyalty—I would lose every coin and rood of my inheritance, and come to you beggared of everything, yet rich—my God! how richer far than now!"
He had never seen her dignity so utterly abased, her pride so utterly swept away as now, when those broken and longing utterances escaped her; he saw that memories, which were in that moment an agony, shook down all the strength and all the calmness of her nature.
"Listen!" he said, softly and gravely, while he drew her hand in his. "Beggared or crowned, you would alike be my mistress, my empress, my idol. Slandered or honoured, you will alike be the one glory of my life, the one thought in my death. Why let us speak as if we should ever part? You must slay me, or forsake me, ere ever we shall be divided now."
Her eyes filled, as she heard him.
For some moments she answered him in no way; then, with one of the swift transitions of her changeful ​temperament, she looked down on him with a smile ín which all her most seductive sweetness gleamed as the gold rays of the southern day flashed in the dark lustrous langour of her regard.
"Anima mía," she murmured, caressingly, "we will believe so, at least while we can, even—even if you should live to curse me, and I should live for Monsignore Villaflor's vengeance! Let us dream of a Future, then. I have so long thought of the world's future only, and so long not dared to give a glance at my own. Let us dream while we can. Tell me of your old Border castle. We will raise it from its ashes once more if you will. And you shall come and be lord of my great Koumelian fief, all its hills and its plains, and its rívers, and its vast solitudes with their terrible beauty, and its fortress that is a palace, like some Persian vision of the night that we see when we have fallen asleep in reading Firdusi. Ah! there is a life there possible, if we could but reach it—a life fit for your bold chieftainship, a life that might redeem my past. We both know the world to weariness. There, eastward, you and I—we might find something at least of the oíd ideals of my early fancies; there are a people sunk in sloth and barbarism, there are the domains of a prince, there are grand woods and waters, and mountains to ​be piled between us and the world, there are human minds barren of every good thing, uncultured, useless, needing the commonest tillage. I should be free there, and you would be a king in your own right. It needs just such a sovereign as you would be, my dauntless, lion-hearted wanderer! We might be happy? We might reach still more yet than merely happiness?"
And they dreamed of the Future, while the brilliant day stole onward, and the stillness of intense heat brooded over the sun-lighted earth; the Future that to him was a treasury of joys so passionate, so measureless, so incredible, that they seemed passing all hope, escaping all reach; the Future that to her was in its fairest vision but as a mirage of that lost land of peace and liberty, which her own act had forfeited for ever.