# Idalia/Volume 1/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI.
FAIRY-GOLD.
In the full noon heat of the next day—heat that brooded on the hills and glistened on the sea, in which the leaves and the flowers drooped, and the sails of the feluccas hung stirless—Idalia moved slowly and thoughtfully up and down her reception-room, the sunlight straying in chequered rays through the chinks of the shutters, and falling fitfully across her. The wolf-hound followed her step for step; there was not a sound except the falling of the fountains and the buzzing of a little hummingbird tangled among the flowers. There was a certain shadow on her, but it was not that of grief, still less was it that of any tremulous effeminate sorrow; it was haughty, unrestful, with much of doubt, much of rebellion, much of disdain in it—the shadow that was on the Reine Blanche in the fetters of Fotheringay, on Marie Antoinette in the presence of Mirabeau. There was an intense scorn in the dark ​soft lustre o{ her eyes—the eyes of a Georgian or a Greek. She was netted closely in, in a net of partially her own past weaving: self-reproach was not the least keen of many regrets that were heavy upon her, and the world was against her; but she was not vanquished nor intimidated.
She came and paused before an open cabinet, on whose writing-stand lay a pile of letters. Her eyes rested on the one that lay uppermost, and read its lines for the second time with disdain, revulsion, pity, impatience, and loathing all mingled in her glance.
"He always wants money! He would give his soul for money; and yet he throws it away as idly as the winds!" she thought, while her hand absently caressed the great head of the hound. "Well! he can have it. I will always give him that. I would give it him all—down to the very diamonds—if he would leave me free, if he would cut away every link of the past, if he would go and never let me see his face again."
Yet stall, though there was much of profound dejection and heart-sickness at her life upon her, there was no fear in it, and no sadness that had not as much disdain. She laid both hands on the dog's broad forehead, and looked down into his eyes.
​"Oh, Sulla! when one life is chosen, is there no escape into another? If we accept error in blindness once, is there no laying it down? Plutarch has written, 'When we see the dishonour of a thing, then is it time to renounce it.' But what can we if we cannot—if it stay with us, and will not forsake us? How can I be free from it?"
But bondage was not submission; and she was like the Palmyran or Icenian queens—made a slave, but all a sovereign atill.
A humming-bird flew against her, and, frightened, tangled itself among her lace. She put her hand over it, and caught it, stroked smooth the little ruffled wings, laid her lips gently on its bright head, and, opening one of the lattices, loosed it, and let it fly into the sunny air.
"Liberty! Liberty! It is worth any sacrifice," she said, half aloud, as she watched the bird's flight through the gardens and outward to the sea.
At that moment a Nubian slave threw open the broad double doors of jasper at the end of the chamber, the hangings before it were flung aside, and Erceldoune entered her presence.
She had said it would be best that he should remain absent; yet he was not in error when he thought that the smile she had given him last night ​was scarcely so sweet as that she gave him now. He seemed half her own by title of that death-hour in which she had felt for the faint beatings of his heart, and had watched beside him in the loneliness of the Carpathians. She could not forget that this man's strong life would have perished but for her.
He owed her a debt—the debt of faith, at the least. Whatever she might be to others, to him she had been as the angel of life. Moreover, there was in Idalia, overlying the proud earnestness that was in her nature, a certain nonchalance—a certain lauguid carelessness—that made her look little beyond the present hour, and change her temperament as immediate influences prevailed. The tradition of birth gave her some blood of the Commneni in her veins; and the insouciance of an epicurean, with the hanghty power of imperial pride, were blent in her as they had been in Manuel. Therefore, since he had chosen to put aside her first warning, she allowed him now to come as he would.
As for him, life was a paradise—a delirium; and he gave himself up to it. The earth had eternal summer for him, and wore an eternal smile. He sat near her in the shaded light and sweet incense of the chamber, while they spoke of things that ​served to veil the thoughts burning beneath his commonest words; they strolled through the cedar aisles, and through the fields of roses, as the heat of the day faded, and the breeze began to stir among the splendours of the flower-wilderness; they passed the sunset hour on the sea, watching the day die out in glory, and the fire from the west glow over the Marmora waves, and tinge the distant snowcrests of Mount Ida and Olympus.
When the little caïque floated slowly homeward down the waters, the evening star—the star of Astarte—had risen. Through the opened windows of her villa the lights of the banqueting-room glittered, and the table stood ready served, with the Albanians and Nubians waiting about it. She bade him stay, if he would, and he was her only guest. Had her wines been opium-drugged, they could not have brought him dreams more fatally fair—a lulled delight more sure to wake in bitterness—than they gave him now. The charms for every sense, the beauty of the chamber, the odours of the flowers, the oriental languor pervading the very air—all that he had felt the night before he felt tenfold now: then a passionate jealousy, a restless doubt, had haunted him; now he was alone, and on him only did her smile glance, did her eyes fall.
​There was on her this night an infinite gentleness, a gracious sweetness, often tinged with sadness, though often bright, brilliant, and illumined with all the grace of talent. But at the same time there was the sovereignty which, in her solitude, guarded her as an empress is guarded in a Court, which made her as secure from words of warmer tinge than what she chose to hear, as she was carelessly disdainful of the precise customs of the world. He felt that she forbade him to approach her with any whisper of love; he knew that to take advantage of his admission to her solitude, to give any utterance to the passion in him, would be to be banished from it then and for ever. He felt this though she never spoke, never hinted it; and even while the restriction galled and stung him most, he most revered her for it, he most honoured and adored in her the holiness of his ideal.
There was a difference in her from the evening before; while her gaiety was less, the darker shadow was also far less upon her. She had scarcely touched the wines, and of play she did not speak; it might be but the "hope which out of its own self creates the thing it longs for," but he could have believed that for the few hours of the present she had resigned herself to happiness—happiness in ​his presence. The thought seemed wild to him, baseless and vain even to madness; he told himself that it was a presumptuous folly, and he felt that her gentleness to him, her smile upon him, were only such feeling as a woman might well testify, in mere pity's sake, to one whom she had found in deadly peril, and whom she had restored to life on the very brink of the grave. And, indeed, there was a weary, royal grace always in her, which would have made a man, far vainer than Erceldoune could ever become, long doubt his own power ever to move her heart.
He asked nothing, heeded nothing, doubted nothing. He moved, acted, spoke, almost as mechanically as one in the unconsciousness of fever. It was love of which men have died before now; not of broken hearts, as poets say, but of its intoxication and its reaction, as in a death-draught of opium or digitalis.
She divined well enough all that was unuttered on his lips. She let his idolatry be fostered by all of scene, time, place, and the spells of her own loveliness that a studied coquette could have devised, yet she repressed any expression of that worship as a woman of the world alone can do, without any word that was cold, any glance ​that was rebuke, yet proudly, distinctly, and beyond resistance.
She followed the impulse, the caprice perhaps, of the moment without definite purpose or thought at all. For the last eight years men had never approached her save to love; it was a thousand-time told tale to her. If her heart had lost its freshness, or its pity, there could be little marvel in it, even though there were much blame.
The ohant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep-and sonorous; calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.
"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers, the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn before sleep, or before the sun;—you have none of those in your chill islands? Yon have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the 'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if that was not the best—the only—temple!"
She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and ​on her face was that graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.
"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, "lying awake at night among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there are still his own—the forests and the mountains. But do not call my country cold; we are not cold; there are bold lives among us; and we can love—too well for our own peace."
His voice had a rich melody in it, and was unsteady over the last words; in his eyes, as they burned in the shadows of the night, she saw a passion as intense as ever glowed under the suns of Asia, the stronger for the rein in which it was still held.
She was silent a moment, then she laughed a little; very softly.
"Do not repudiate coldness; it is the most precious gift the fates give, if it be not the most poetic Remember what your namesake of Erceldoune found when the Elf-Queen granted him his prayer; where he thought he held an angel he saw a loathsome shadow. The legend covers a wise warning."
"Ay!—but even while the horror of the shadow and the treachery were on him he had faith in her; ​and his faith was justified; it gave him, in reward, his bright, immortal love."
She turned her head and looked at him, gently, pityingly, almost tenderly.
"Ah! you are too loyal for this world, far too loyal to spend your heart on any woman's love. It is only fairy gold, believe me, which, if yon took it, would turn to ashes in your hand. And now,—a safe ride homeward to you, and good night."
She held her hand out to him with a sweet and gracious gesture, the more marked in her because she never gave her hand in familiar salutation; he bent over it, and touched it with his lips, a lingering kiss in which all his silenced heart spent itself.
She did not rebuke him; she had not power to speak coldly or chidingly to the man whose life was owed her, whose head had rested in his dying hour on her bosom. As he rode slowly out down the cedar avenue that passed in front of the terrace he looked up; she was leaning still over the marble parapet, her form distinct against the dark masses of myrtle foliage, the brilliance of the moonlight shining full upon her from the sea. She gave him a farewell sign of her hand as he bowed to his saddle, such as from her palace-prison Queen Ysonde might have given to her lover; and ​Erceldoune went on through the fragrant night, his horse's feet beating out rich odours from the trailing leavess, dizzy with that riot of hope, joy, belief, and desire, which is too tumultuous and impatient for happiness, but yet is happy beyond all that the world holds. She remained long in her solitude upon the terrace, gazing down into the shelving slopes of leaf and blossom, where the fire-flies made the woodland as star-studded as the skies.
"It is too late now—he would never forget now," she murmured. "I tried to save him, and he would not be saved!"
Saved from what? Saved from her.
A little while before, and in her own gardens at Naples, a brave boy, in the brightness of his youth, had been run through the heart in a rapier duel for her sake; and she had not felt a tithe so much pain as lay on her now, so much weary, passionate, and vain regret. Then many had called her heartless, and the mother of the dead boy had cursed her with pitiless curses; none would have called her heartless now.
For seven or eight days time came and passed away, spent thus. He sought her in the warm amber noons, stayed with her amidst the wilderness of roses, and drifted with her down the sunny sea ​along the Bosphorus shore, and left her only when the midnight stars rose over the minarets of the city of Constantine. He met no one in her Turkish villa, and she let him come in this familiar unbroken intercourse as though it were welcome to her; as though, indeed, their friendship had been the long-accustomed growth of years. He asked nothing, heeded nothing; he never paused to recall that there was any defiance of custom in the intercourse between them, or to note that she, with her wealth and her splendour, was as utterly alone as though she were a recluse of Mount AthoB ; he never observed that she kept silence on all that could have explained her presence in Moldavia, or given him account of the position and the character of her life; he never noticed, he never recollected;—he was lost in a day-dream of such magic that it lulled him to oblivion of everything save itself, and all criticism, all reason, all doubt, were as impossible in him as insult and outrage to her. His own nature was one too boldly free, too accustomed to the liberty of both action and thought, too little tolerant of the ceremonials and conventionalities of the world, to be awake to the singularity of her reception of him as others might have been. Moreover, while she allowed him this unrestrained communion with her, ​he would have been a vainer man far than Exceldoune who could have flattered himself that this was done because her heart was touched; or who should have brought on him his exile for ever by warmer entreaties for a softer joy than friendship. While untrammeled by any of the bonds of conventionality, while accustomed to a liberty of thought, of speech, of act that brooked no dictator, while distinguished by a careless negligence of custom and of opinion that was patrician even whilst it was bohemian, Idalia still kept the light but inexorable rein upon his passion, which forbade him to pass the bounds that she tacitly prescribed to him. He was a bold and daring man enough; in his early days he had been steeped in vice, though he had learned to loathe it; he was impassioned in his pursuit of her as any lover that the Asian suns had ever nurtured to their own heat. But he loved her as William Craven loved the Winter Queen, as George Douglas the White Queen.
One who should not have cared for her—if such there could have been—would have found an infinite variety, an endless charm in her companionship. She had travelled in most countries, she was familiar with most nations, she had knowledge of the classic and the oriental literatures, deep to a scholar's scope ​and warmed with the picturesque hue of an imagination naturally luxuriant, though the world had joined with it an ironic and contemptuous scepticism that gave the keenness of wit, side by side with the colour of a poet, to her thoughts and to her words; she understood men pitilessly, human nature unerringly, none could have palmed off on her a false mask or a glossed action; she had seen and known the world in all its intricacies; the variety of her acquirements was scarcely so singular as the variety of her experience; and the swift change of her mood, now grave to melancholy, now careless to caprice, now thoughtful with a profound and philosophic insight into the labyrinths of human life, now gay with the nonchalant and glittering gaiety of bohemian levity, gave her much of inconstancy, it is true, but gave her infinitely more of charm and enchantment.
Evening fell once more, closing in the eighth day that their intercourse had thus passed on since the night when he had found her as he had hunted the Greek to his death; they had lingered without moving in the banqueting-room; the wines, and flowers, and fruits still standing on the table; no light stronger than the clear vivid moonlight shining on the freshly-cut flowers that strewed the ground, ​the frescoes of the pomegranates that wreathed the hall, the scarlet hues melting away in the shadow, and the tall slender column of the fountain flinging its foam aloft. Idulia leant back among the cushions, the dazzling play of her words ceasing for a while; the moon's rays touching the proud arch of her brows, the clusters of her hair bound with a narrow gold band of antique workmanship, the voluptuous softness of her lips, and the dark, unfathomable lustre of her eyes that met his own—burning with the eloquence he felt forbidden to put into words,—but were not moved by them; they did not droop, as women's often do, beneath the fire in his, they passed on from him to rest dreamily on the distance, where the domes of Santa Sophia rose against the stars, and the lighted minarets glittered among the: cypess groves of the Moslem city.
"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity—that beautiful Constantinople," she said musingly. "The East and the West. What an empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at—what might not have been done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong- enough to weld all these together, what a world there might have been!"
​"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible?" he answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise these antagonisms?"
She gave a sign of dissent.
The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the nearest after him was Belisarius—the fool of a courtesan!—and he was but a good soldier, he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert before he can convert others. Zoroaster, Christ, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon, believed intensely in their own missions; hence their influence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium might have become under one mighty hand?—it was torn in pieces among courtesans, and parasites, and Christian fanatics, and Houmousians and Houmoiousians! I haye the blood of the Commneni in me. I thinly of it with shame when I remember what they might have been."
"Yon come from the Roman Emperors?"
​"The Roman Emperors!" she repeated. "When the name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach! When Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol! Yes; I descend—they say—from the Commneni; but I am far prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athenians. I belong to two buried worlds. But the stone throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one of Manuel."
"You are the daughter of Emperors? you are worthy an empire."
His were the words of no flattery of the hour, but of a homage as idolatrous as was ever offered in the fair shadows of the Sacred Groves of Antioch to the goddess from whom she took her name. And there was a great pang at his heart as he spoke them; he thought of the only thing on earth he called his own, those crumbling ruins to the far westward, by the Cheviot range, where the scarlet creepers hid the jagged rents in the walls, and owls roosted where princes once had banqueted.
"An empire! I thought so once," she answered, with a low, slight laugh. "I had dreams—of the sceptre of my ancestors, of the crown of the Violet City, of an Utopia here, where east and west meet one ​another, and nature would give us a paradise if men did not make us a hell. Dreams—dreams—youth is all a dream, and life too, some metaphysicians say. Where shall we wake, I wonder, and how—for the better? It is to be hoped so, if we ever wake at all, which is more than doubtful!"
There was an accent of sadness in the opening words, but the rest were spoken with that irony which, while it was never bitter, was more contemptuous than bitterness in its half languid levity. He looked at her with a vague and troubled pain—there was so much in the complexity of her nature that was veiled from him; seeing her life but dimly, there was so much of splendour, so much of melancholy in it, that exiled him from her, and that oppressed him; the more magnificent her lineage or her fortunes, the farther she was from him.
"You have one empire already," he said, almost abruptly, in the tumult of the suppressed thoughts in him—"a wider one than the Byzantine! You can do what you will with men's lives. I have nothing, I can lose nothing, except the life you give me back; but if I had all the kingdoms of the earth I would throw them away for——"
The eagerness in his voice dropped suddenly, leaving the words unfinished; he crashed them into ​silence with a fierce effort She glanced at him with thai graceful negligence with which she silenced all she would not hear.
"No kingdom would be a tithe so peaceful as your manhood and your honour. Never peril those for any woman; there is not one worth the loss."
The flash of a giddy, exultant, incredulous rapture ran like lightning throngh his veins for a moment, She had softly repulsed, but she had not rebuked him; she had known at what his words paused, and the smile she had given him had a light in it that was almost tenderness. He did not ask, he did not think, where his hope began or ended; he did not weigh its meaning, he dared not have drawn it to the light, lest close seen it should have faded; he only felt—
So my eyes hold her! What is worth
The best of heaven, the best of earth?
"There it lies!" she pursued, dreamily, resting her eyes on the distant minarets and roofs of Constantinople, rising clear and dark in the lustre of the moon, undimmed by even a floating cloud. "And all its glories are dead. The Porphyry-chamber and the Tyrian dyes, the Pandects and the Labarum, the thunder of Chrysostom and the violets of chiid-Protus—they could not make the city live ​that had dared to dethrone Rome! The hordes of the Forest and the Desert avenged the wrongs of the Scipii and the Julii. It was but just?"
As the soldiers of Islam avenged the gods of Greece. Aphrodite perished that Arians might rage«  and the beautiful mythus was swept away, that hell and the devil might be believed in instead! When the Crescent glittered there, it half redressed the wrongs of your Olympus."
"And we reign still!"
She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love.
"Greece cannot die! No matter what the land be now, Greece—our Greece—must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from her schools. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken fragments of her statues, and throws aside his Calliope in despair before those matchless wrecks. From her, soldiers learn how to die, and nations how to conquer and to ​their liberties. No deed of heroism is done but, to crown it, it is named parallel to hers. They write of love, and who forgets the Lesbian? They dream of freedom, and to reach it they remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while they talk, they sigh for all that they ha^ lost in Academus. They seek truth, and while they seek, wearily long, as little children, to hear the golden speech of Socrates, that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and stonemason, and date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance, Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead!—she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every god-like life and god-like death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, would be barbarian now."
Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the far-off snows of Cithæron and Meant Ida, and the shores which the bronze spear of Pallas Athene once guarded through the night and day, the dark light in her eyes deepened, and the flush ​o£ a superb pride was on her brow—it seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pender
He looked on her, with the glow of passion on his face, made nobler by the poet's thoughts that were awaking in him. He was silent, for his heart was lulled with the oppression of his love, as the great forests are silenced before the storm.
She had forgotten his presence, standing there in the hush of the midnight, with the Byzantine city to the eastward, and to the west the land that had heard Plato—her thoughts were far away among the shadows of the past, the great past, when the Io Triumphe had been echoed up to the dim majesty of the Acropolis, and the roses had drooped their fragrant heads on the gracious gold of Alcibiades' love-locks.
He knew that he was forgotten, yet his heart did not reproach her; she was far above him in his sight, far as the stars that shone now above Athens, and his love was one that would take neglect and anguish silently, without swerving once from its loyalty. He would have laid his life down to be pressed out in agony, so that it should have given her one passing moment of pleasure, as a rose is thrown under a woman's foot to be crushed as she ​steps, that dying it may lend a breath of fragrance to the air she breathes.
"You are born with genius, you are made for sovereignty, and I have nothing that is worthy to bring you;" he said long afier, while his voice sank very low. "Only—only—remember, if ever you need it^ one man's life wiU be yours to be lost for you."
She started slightly where she leaned, with her musing eyes resting on the west; she had forgotten his presence, and his words, though they told her no more than she knew, startled her still with their suddenness. The look of disdainful pain that he had seen before come on her face—the disdain was not for him—but the smile that already to him was the only sun the world held, lingered on her lips a moment.
"A year's pain to a true life—a day's pain, an hour's!—were far more than mine were worth. The daughter of Emperors you called me?—the daughter of men who gamed away their birthright, and played with diadems as idiot children play with olive-stones! Is there much greatness there? Genius!—if I have it, I have sold it, shamed it, polluted it. As for you—I have had so many die for me, I am tired of the shadow of the cypress!"
​Strange though the words were, no vanity of power spoke in them, but a fatal truth, a mournful earnestness, tinged by, deepened to, remorse; the shadow of the cypress seemed to fall across, the brilliancy of her face as she uttered them.
"Then,—will you let me live for you?"
The words escaped him before he knew they were uttered, before he realised all they meant, before he was conscious what he offered and pledged to a stranger who, for aught he knew or could tell, might be the head of an illustrious race, the wife of one of the royal chiefs of the Levant or of the East, or—might be anything that Europe held of what was most evil, most fatal, most dangerous in her sex,
She looked at him with a long, earnest, unwavering look,
"It is well for you that I will not take you at your word. No!—your life is a noble, gallant thing; treasure its liberty, and never risk it in a woman's hands."
The calmness with which she put aside words that had been nothiug less than a declaration of the love he bore her, the serenity with which her gaze had dwelt on him, were not those of a woman who did or who would give him answering tenderness; yet the tone, the glance with which she had spoken, ​had not been those of one to whom he was wholly indifferent, or to whom his words had been repugnant. It seemed as though she would never let him come to her as a lover, yet as though she would never let him free himself from the sway of her fascination; she refused his homage with easy and delicate grace, but she refused so that she showed that the man who had been saved by her in the depths of the Carpathian Pass had her interest and had her pity.
Noting—and for once having compassion for the deadly pain that she had dealt, she smiled on him ; she talked to him of a thousand things with her rich, and graphic eloquence, that charmed the ear like the flowing of music, and often sank to silence that only lent it rarer charm; she sang the chants of Bach, of Pergolesi, of Mozart; she let him stay with her till night had closed over the distant mosques and courts of Constantinople, and she bade him good night, leaning again over the marble, parapet of the terrace, with the moonlight full upon her, as she gave him such a sign of adieu, just so proud, just so gentle, as Mary Stuart might have given to her Warden of the Marches while yet she knew his love and would not yield him hers.
Yet—ere many moments passed—another ​succeeded him; a head cooler than his felt the charm of the scene and the hour,—a pulse slower than his beat time fast, under the challenge of Idalia's eyes.
His rival was alone with her.
Erceldoune set no store on any single quality he possessed; was ignorant indeed of much of his own value; acted greatly not seldom, but never thought so by any hazard; did straightly, instinctively, and without preface or ornament that which seemed to him the need of the hour, the due of his manhood; held his course boldly and carelessly amongst men, caring nothing for their praise, as little for their censure; had quick, fiery blood in him that took flame rapidly; had, on the other hand, much earnestness, much tenacity, much tenderness, more far than he knew; had kept through his wandering life a heart singularly unworn, a mind singularly without guile; was naturally prone to good faith in men and incapable of base suspicion, and was certain whenever he did love to love to his own destruction, as such natures not seldom do. His rival was his reverse in every quality,—cool, wary, impenetrable under an airy semblance of nonchalance, vain, with the pardonable if overweening vanity of ​unusual powers, firmly conscious of themselves, inordinately ambitious, but even that in a keen, critical and studiously systematic manner, the Anglo-Venetian thought Erceldoune nothing more than a fine animal physically, and half a fool mentally, underrating what was dissimilar to himself with an error not uncommon with minds of his stamp, when their disdainful egotistic measurement has not been corrected by the experiences of a long life. Yet, widely diverse though they were, and utterly contrasted in every iota, the one who never resisted his passion, and never thought of her save with such chivalrous trust and absolute self-abandonment as were instinctive to his temperament, was scarcely more a prey to it than the other, who, with his love, blended a thousand threads of policy, design, and covetous intrigue, and hated it for having stolen on him, hated it for halting on his lips, hated it for levelling him with the herd he had so contemptuously despised; hated it because, for the first time, he had found a talent stronger, a logic surer, and a perception keener and subtler, and courage more daring and careless than his own; because, in fine, he had found his master, and found it in a woman.
This, a knowledge not easily to be pardoned by ​one like him, made a certain acrid jealousy, a certain smartened bitterness, tinge even the passion into which she had surprised him when the dark eyes of Idalia glanced over him and read thoughts he had fancied unbetrayed by speech or sign, or when her careless ironies smote him back with the polished, piercing weapons of his own sceptic indifference, his own unyielding philosophies, which were as real in her as they had been till late in him.
For many years this woman had been but a name to him; only a name, through a succession of hazards, that had time after time kept, their meeting deferred; but a name that had given a personality to him, and had been interwoven with many of the more critical essays and enterprises of his career.
Moving through the gore-stained, artillery-trodden maze of Lombardic fields, where in some unrewarded skirmish, young, eager, patriotic lives had been shot down by the troops of Austria, gasping to their latest breath "Italia fara da se!" he had stood beside some shattered wreck of brightest manhood that had fallen there, down head-first into the yellowing wheat, and when he had thought all life was dead in that broken mass, above which the tangled corn-stalks nodded and met in summer ​winds, he had caught a last sigh, a last breath in which, the name of Idalia was blent with the name of Italy, and died together with it down the Lombard breeze. Travelling once through Russian steppes of snow in the decline of the year, when all nature was perishing, and the great bleak yersts of whitened plain stretched out uubroken to Siberian desolation, he had found a prisoner working in fetters,—a haggard, blear-eyed, scarcely human thing livid with the hue of the lead-mines, disfigured with the ravages of frost- bite, idiotic, with a strange dull stupor, that made him utter incessantly as he toiled in a gang, one word alone; and, he had known that in this wretched creature was the wreck of what once had been the finest, the most fiery, the most glittering of all the aristocratic soldiery of Poland; and that the word he muttered ever as he laboured was that which had been his ignis fatuus, his idol, his ruin,—Idalia. In his own Venice, he had once seen a terrible struggle: it was when a mere lad of Venetia, a child of seventeen years, with the clear wild noble eyes of a young eastern colt, had been brought in amongst others who were "rebels", and was given over to the rods that he might tell who his chiefs and his comrades were; the boy was frail of make, and ​weakened with gunshot wounds, and he reeled and fell thrice under the rain of Austrian blows, but his teeth clenched on his tongue, and bit it through, so that no speech should pass it, and when the strokes told at last more mortally than those who lashed him knew, he smiled as he murmured, though his mouth was fall of blood, "Tell her I died silent!"—and he who had heard had sent the farewell message to Idalia, at whose bidding that silence was kept. Once on the brow of a steep hill, looking over the Moravian highlands, with the wide wastes of barren grasslands, mingled with jagged piles of bare rock or stunted larches, with here and there the sharp peaks of a pine belt to break the outline, and the angry lustre of a red evening fading out in the hot autumn skies, be had seen a Monarch, the centre of a little knot of Cuirassier officers, draw near, and look hardly and eagerly across to the westward, where, far as the eye could reach, a dark shadow, like a hovering bird above the stony plains, marked the place where the Uhlans rode down on a fugitive's wake; and when reeking and breathless and spent, the troopers dragged their weary horses backward without the prize they had pursued, he had heard the Kaiser mutter in the gloaming of the night, "I would give a province for that one woman!" and ​that woman had been Idalia. She had been long thus a name on his ear, and in his schemes, and when at last she had become known to him, he had learned to wonder no more at the name's magic.
To tell her this he had never nentured, really audacious as his temper was: circumstances united them closely in some things, but with all his tact and all his daring, he had never been able to seduce himself into the self-flattery of deeming that she would heed his love-words. She heard so many, the story had no attraction for her; and apart from his own sense of how contemptuously careless she was of how men suffered for her, was the reluctance of chafing pride to acknowledge that he also paid the life-coin of his surrender to one who could tempt like Calypso, and remain cold as Casta Diva, while her spells worked.
Yet he could not restrain one mask of the passion—jealousy—as he sat that night beside her, in the dining-hall of the Turkish villa, and stretched himself from his pile of cushions to lift from the carpet a white riding glove, that caught his eye where it lay.
"A stray waif of our beggared laird's, is it not, madame? He has been here to-day?"
"If you mean Sir Fulke Erceldoune, he only left ​an hour or so ago. I wonder you did not meet him."
"No; I saw nothing of him. The Moldavian bullet did him good service, since it has won him so much of your interest. He should be vastly indebted to it!"
She laughed a little.
"Surely, a shot in the lungs is not so very pleasant a matter that a man need be grateful for it."
"Are there not many who risked shots far more mortal than this in the mere hope to win what they never did, but he does—your pity?"
She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
"Why should you imagine I pity him? Have you not seen him here?"
The emphasis spoke more than volumes could have done. Her companion bowed his head.
"True! The real mercy would have been—exclusion! Yet pity him you do, miladi, since you bade me 'harm him at my peril!'"
She looked at him such a curiously fixed regard, that had a hundred meanings in it.
"Let us make an end of this fencing," she said, quietly. "There are none here to dupe. We can speak frankly. We have done this man ​quite evil enough without bringing more upon him."
"We! I fail to apprehend you—"
She gave a little gesture of impatience.
"Monsieur, you have not known me very long, or you would know me too well to attempt those tactics. Evasion answers nothing with me; and why should we attempt it? Our cause is the same, and we both are equally aware that this brave-hearted gentleman was the prey of its viler adherents."
"But——"
"Pardon me; I have said we both know it. I have grace enough to blush for it: and you——?"
For the moment a faint blush of shame kindled over his face; he was for the moment silenced, embarrassed, uncertain how to reply; he had never dreamed that his share in the Carpathian attack—which his intelligence had directed unseen, though his hand was not active, nor his complicity involved in it—had been suspected by her, and he was now almost, for the first time in his life, astray in the twilight of bewildered doubts, of intricate apprehensions.
She laughed slightly again,
"Ah! I told you you did not know me; you ​thought you had deceived me! Well, never seek that again. A man once did: a man of Leghorn; he was clever and vain; he said, to himself, "Altro, a woman! and they obey her? I, for one, I will not; I will blind her.' And he thought he was strong enough. He stole away, like the fool that he was, and carried his scheme with him—his scheme to treat with Austria unknown to us; unknown, he thought, to the very walls of the room he slumbered in, to the very river reeds he walked by, he thought himself so strong. Bat I learnt it."
"And then?"
"Then? Why then I taught him what such an error cost."
"And that cost was?"
"What he merited. It had been better for him that he had never been born."
A chill, of something that was almost fear, passed over her listener's cold, keen, courageous nature; he, too, held that which was concealed from her,—if she avenged treachery thus?
"Vengeance, Madame?" he said, scarcely caring what triviality of speech served to screen his thoughts. "Surely nothing so barbarous lingers amidst so much worldly wisdom, nothing so ferocious harbours amidst so much divine witchery?"
​"Revengeful? No. I do not think I am that; though one knows ill one's own errors. It is easy to forgive; we scorn where we pardon» but we pardon because we scorn."
She spoke musingly, with a grave and weary meditation as though memory, and not his words, usurped her: then, suddenly, she shook away any darker remembrance that dwelt with her, and turned full on him brilliant, penetrating eyes of half-contemptuous questioning.
"Some one of you it was who wrought that glorious piece of honest work in the Carpathians. You see, they were afraid that I should know their scheme: they stole out to do it in darkness; they thought that I should never learn it. But it all came to me; simply enough. I found their victim and saved him; and when Marc Lassla dragged himself half dying to my lodge in the mountains, and gasped us out a lame history of a bear-play, telling that young Vlistchnau lay dead in the woods from the brute's embrace, the whole was clear enough to me. The dying man's and the dead one's injuries were both no bear's wounds, but the fruit of pistol bullets; and though Lassla breathed his last in an hour or so, saying no more, I knew well enough that they had both been shot down by the Scot, and ​that the planned attack had been done by my people;—by mine!"
There was a deadly bitterness in the last words, an ominous meaning: such as might have run through Catherine of Russia's speech when she found a vassal faithless.
"Your people!" His surprise was admirably feigned, but it did nut deceive her.
"Never trouble yourself to assume ignorance!" she said, with a certain amusement at his discomfiture. You knew very well of the plan——"
"On my honour——"
"Have we any of that quality amongst us to swear by?"
"Nay! as a gentleman, as a man, I declare to you I knew nothing of it."
She bowed her head; courteously, as one too highly-bred to accuse him; carelessly, as one too worldly-wise to believe him.
"Nothing?" he averred, irritably mortified by that unspoken incredulity. "You may believe me, madame; from my policies, if not my virtues, I am totally opposed to every sort of violence; deem it ill-advised, uncivilised, barbaric: invariably give my veto against it Force is the weapon of savages; learning has done little for us if we cannot find a ​better, a surer, a more secret tool. To prevent the wild spirits that join us from following their brute instincts, and blundering headlong into unwise action would be impossible. You can do more than most; but I doubt very much if yon have not oftentimes roused tigers whom even you could not tame when once they had tasted of slaughter. The evil of every national movement is that the majority, once allowed to move at all, refuse to proceed by intellectual means, and loose themselves at once to physical violence, in which every good thing is lost, every temperate voice drowned. It is this sort of fatal misconception from which such criminal essays as that which attacked Sir Fulke Erceldoune proceed: it is impossible to avoid their appearing alike expedient and pardonable to a certain class of characters."
The explanation was given with graceful ease, with eloquent address: she heard it with courtesy, also with incredulity.
"Yes; and that 'class' serve as excellent weapons for brilliant intelligences which need to use them; excellent scapegoats for such intelligences when they do not care to appear in the intrigues they suggest."
He felt the thrust, yet he parried it with seeming tranquillity.
​"That is but too true, indeed, and the unscrupulousness is not, alas! on the side of the mere mauvais sujets. Apropos, madame, you know all things; who then was the leader of the Carpathian episode?"
A stern impatience passed for an instant over the splendour of her face, mingled with something of more wounded pain.
"You must know too well whom I supposed to be so."
The answer was very low; there was a thrill of passionate shame in it.
"Ah!" There was a whole world of gentle sympathy, of profound comprehension in the deep breath he drew. "Was he not then implicated?"
She lifted her head and looked at him long and steadily: there was more than contemplation in the look. "You can better tell that than I."
"No. Indeed you wrong me, madame. May I hear what you think yourself now we are on the subject."
A scorn that she repressed in utterance flashed with a weary darkness in her eyes.
"I would have sworn—Yes. He has sworn to me by the only name I ever knew him to bold sacred, No."
"Why doubt him, then?"
​"Why? Ask me rather why, even on his oath, believe him!"
The impetuous disdain that burned through the retort had scathing satire in it. He looked at her with an admiration that was the more vivid because he thought her intentionally deceiving him, and thought also the deception so magnificently wrought out.
"Ah, ma belle Comtesse," he murmured, in his liquid flowing French, that both habitually used. "That you should have to feel this; that you should have to give such passion of contempt, to one so near to you! It is 'Athene to a Satyr.' How is it that, with such an inspiration as you beside him, Conrad has never——"
She interrupted him; and with the ironical cold nonchalance of her common tone resumed,
"Count Phaulcon is at least your friend, monsieur; let that suffice to dismiss his name. I suspected him; I do still suspect him. Did I think that he had been on the Turkish shore last night, I should have certainty in lieu of suspicion; but in saying this to you I say no more than I have done, or shall do, to him himself."
"And to —— Monsieur Erceldoune?"
"No." The answer was rapid and peremptory. ​She turned her head to him with something of the goaded impatience of a stag at bay mingling with her careless dignity. "How can you ask? You have heard him say he will kill his assassin if they ever meet. And he would be justified."
"And his 'justification' would free you not a little. Ah, where is there any sophism that will curve round to its own point so deftly as a woman's!" thought her companion, while he bent forward with a gentle deference in his air, a hesitating sympathy in his tone:
"Count Phaulcon is my very good frend, it is true, madame; and yet I scarce think I deserved to be reminded of that by a rebuke, because I cannot choose but regret that ——"
"Regret nothing at my score, monsieur."
"What! not even that which you yourself regret?"
"When I tell you that there is such a thing, not before."
"You are very cruel——"
"Am I? Well, I have no great liking for sympathy, and not much need for it. If one cannot stand alone, one deserves, I fancy, to fall. Poets have made an idol and a martyr of the sensitive plant; their use of it is an unwise allegory: to shrink at every lunch, to droop at every stroke, to be at ​the mercy of every hand, strange or familiar—an odd virtue that! It would not commend itself to me."
"True. Is sensitiveness much after all except vanity quick to be wounded, as the sea-dianthus that dies of a finger thrust at it? Believe me, I meant not to offer the insult of pity, scarcely dared to intend the familiarity of sympathy; I merely felt—forgive me if I say it—I have long known Conrad, I have but of late known you; can you not guess that the old and the recent friendship alike tell me that you, despite all your pride, indeed because of all your pride, are bitterly galled, are shamefully companioned by a life unworthy you?"
He paused; he had doubted in how far he might venture even thus much, for she was of a nature to which compassion was unendurable, a thing to be shunned far more than pain itself. He knew that already; had he never known he would have seen it in the barely perceptible quiver with which she drew away as a high-hearted and fearless hound will take its mortal wound, and refuse a sign of suffering.
"You say a fact too plain for me to give it denial," she said, chilly; "but it is also one that I must decline to discuss with you. Let us talk of other matters."
​Even her companion's long-trained audacity was not bold enough to force her on a theme she thus refused.
"Forgive me," he murmured hurriedly, "it is hard sometimes not to speak out one's thoughts."
"I thought the hardship rather lay in being sometimes compelled to do so."
"Yo will jest!——"
"Well, jests are better than tragedies. Life is always jostling the two together."
"We are like enough to have one tragedy, madame, if that hotheaded courier's suspicions point the same way as yours do,"—he spoke irritably, inconsequently; for he was both checked and incensed.
"It is not likely they will ever do so."
"Why? Suppose—merely suppose—your fear aright, and that Conrad and your new friend ever meet under your root; what then?"
She did not reply for a moment, whilst a shadow of many memories, tinged with something of a smile passed over her features.
"What then? Why then I should know the truth of this matter, which Monsieur mon ami here refuses to tell me."
He felt the sting; and he knew that he had better provoke no more encounters with a woman's wit. ​And being piqued he wronged her, as pique commonly wrongs those who have provoked it; and thought that she knew far more of this thing than even he himself.