# Idalia/Volume 2/Chapter 10

Under the pen name “Ouida”
CHAPTER X.
"rien que toi."
In the warm light of the summer morning the yacht steamed her way once more into the harbour of Capri. The Venetians were safe, and Erceldoune returned—to suffer, as he knew, and suffer hopelessly, yet no more able to hold himself back from it than the mariners were able to turn their prows from the magic music of yonder Siren Isles. Groups of fisher-folk were talking together gravely, and with an unwonted sadness on their ruddy, sunburnt faces; as he waded through the knee-deep surf he noticed it—his thoughts leapt to her in an instant—he asked the sailor nearest him what ailed them. The sailor was the man whose brother he had once rescued from the churning seas below Tiberio.
"It is the Comtessa Idalia, Signore."
"What of her?"
"They have arrested her!"
​"Arrested her?"
He staggered against the brown timbers of a boat resting on the sands, and clenched them hard to keep himself from reeling like a drunken man. For the moment, old usage in many countries gave the word no meaning on his ear save in its criminal sense.
"So they say, Signore," answered the sailor, while his strong teeth set. "If I had been there, they should not have touched the hem of her skirts! It was done at the Villa Antina, in the interior; the soldiers shot many, I've been told."
"Many! Who?"
"Conspirators, Signore—so they say," replied the Capriote, who scarcely knew the meaning of the phrase, and thought the world governed to perfection if it proved a good fishing-season, and many visitors came to the coast. "Some tell that his Highness of Viana was killed. I don't know about that; but Miladi Idalia is a prisoner of the King's."
With an oath, mighty as ever rang over the marches from the fierce lips of Bothwell, Erceldoune strode from him well-nigh ere the words were ended, and plunged down into the thicket of vegetation that led to the beetling cliff on which her ​villa stood. The sun was scorching, the ascent on the slope that faced the sea perilous to life and limb; there was no more than a perpendicular granite slab towering many feet above the water, covered with foliage and rock-flowers. But he was a trained moontaineer; he knew the ice-slope of the Alps as well as he knew the Border-land; he was up it with the swiftness of thought, swinging himself in mid-air from the tough coils of the tangled creepers till he reached the summit, and forced his way, without pause or ceremonial, into the court of the forsaken dwelling.
"No one passes!"
A soldier on guard stood within the arched entrance. Then he knew that it was true, and that she was lost to him, lost to the fangs of the Church, to the dungeons of the Bourbons.
"By whose order are you here?"
The words were hoarse and faint; he felt his lips parched with a dry white heat.
"The order of the King."
"The King's! Stand off!" cried Erceldoune, as though the very name of her tyrant maddened him. "What right have you, for all the despots who curse Europe, to invade her privacy, to violate her home?"
​The sentinel said nothing, but lowered his bayonet till the blade was levelled against the intruder's breast. At that instant the deep howl of the hound moaned down the silence. Erceldoune shook with rage as he heard it. Was not her dumb beast even spared! He wrenched the weapon by the gun-barrel from the soldier's hand, flung himself on the slight frail form of the Neapolitan, and, tossing him aside lightly as a broken bough, dashed across the court to where the dog was chained. It was the work of a second to unloose and free him. Ere even that was wholly done, however, the three soldiers left on guard of the villa, which had been rifled by governmental order of all papers, plate, jewels, and articles of value, roused by their comrade's cry, poured into the square court, and levelled their bayonets at him.
"Stir, and you are a dead man!" said the corporal in command.
A laugh was the only answer Erceldoune gave. His blood was up, and in his misery and his fiery rage he cared nothing, and almost knew nothing of what he did or said.
"At them, Sulla!" he cried in Servian, lifting his hand.
With a bound the giant hound sprang on the ​soldier of Francis, and hurled him down as if he had been a dead boar. Erceldoune, with the single blow of his left hand, levelled another to the ground, and before the last sentinel could take aim or raise his fallen fellows, he sprang through the gateway, and, with the dog at his side, dashed headlong through the gardens and down the mountain road, without pause, without heed, well-nigh without sense.
The glow and colour of the world of summer blossom, the fragrant stillness of the morning, the swinging of matin-bells from a chapel far above, the golden fruit that he tossed aside or trampled out as he rushed down the steep incline, all seemed dizzy, unreal, intangible; only one remembrance stood out clear before him—she needed him. He felt giddy and blind, a sickening oppression was on him, the intense odours of the myrtle and orange-flowers were intolerable to him; he felt maddened and senseless with pain; but he was not a man to yield to misery or dread while action was possible, while daring and skill could avail aught. Fire burned in his eyes, his lips shook, his teeth clenched like a vice; he grasped the wolf-hound's mighty mane in a gesture that Sulla understood as though volumes had been said in it.
"We will save her—or kill them."
​The dog seemed instinctively to know that in his liberator was the avenger of his mistress. He accepted the lead, and followed passively.
Repeated peril and dangerous emergencies, often met and vanquished by himself alone, had given Erceldoune the energetic vigilance, the knowledge and the patience of a soldier; his own nature was rash, impulsive, and hotly impetuous, but the habit of long and arduous service had taught him the value of coolness and of self-restraint. His passions and his fiery chivalry of temper could have led him now to any madness, could have led him to seek out Francis in his own palace, and strike him down before all his nobles and all his guards, as her tyrant and her abductor. He had the blood in him of Border chiefs who had fought for Mary Stuart, and Scottish soldiers who had served with Gordon's archers, of haughty Castilians who had died for a point of honour, and steel-clad Spaniards who had conquered with the Great Captain; and a vein of the old dauntless, reckless, fearless, romantic knight-errantry of a dead day was in him, little as he had known it. His rival had not erred when he said that the "Border Eagle" should have lived in the Crusades. But not the less did he know now that discretion and ​self-control, were needed to serve her; not the less did he bend to their curb the violent longings of his own wretchedness.
He paused a moment where a deep leafy nest of rock and foliage screened him from all sight, and tried to still the throbbing misery of his thoughts, and search out the nearest clue to find her. She was in the power of her foes; royal soldiers held her villa; that she was deeply compromised in political matters was evident; where she might now be taken the gaolers who held her alone knew. He shuddered as he remembered all the histories he had heard of the vengeance of the monarchists on those who had defied them! Her dog was with him; the sentinels would tell the story of his onslaught on them; if noticed, he would be suspected and watched, possibly even arrested. To go to Naples was to risk arousing suspicions that might render every effort to eave her useless. He must be unknown, untracked, or he could do nothing; yet he must keep the hound with him, for no aid could be so sure to track her as Sulla’s scent and unerring instincts of fidelity. The dog stood now beside him, the fine nostrils quivering, the ears pointed, every nerve on the stretch, and every now and then a piteous anguish in the brown ​lustrous eyes as they were turned on him with a low heartbroken moan.
He stood and thought some moments, then rapidly, and keeping ever under the deep shelter of the leaves, he made his way by winding paths to the hut of the sailor whose life he had saved long before on San Constanza’s-day. It stood near the beach, hid under a great ledge of rock, like a seagull’s nest. As it chanced, the fisherman sat without in the sun, singing and mending his nets; he was only just back from a long sail to Calabria. Erceldoune went up to him and held out his hand.
“Nicolò, do you remember the night under Tiberio?”
The nets fell on the sand in a heap, all sea-stained and clogged with weed. The marinaro, with tears of delight in his bright black eyes, and a thousand cries to the Madonna dell’ Mare, thanked him and blessed him and worshipped him, and would have knelt down at his feet had he been allowed. Life surely was no great matter there in the Piccolo Marina, getting scant bread from the depths of the waters, spreading the nets on the low flat shingle-hut roof to dry, and going out in peril of storms for sake of a piece of dry fish for hungry mouths to eat; yet it must have had its pleasures ​too, for the fisher Nicolò was as grateful for the saving of it as though he had been crowned with gold.
"You will do a thing for me, Colò?" asked Erceldoune, as he arrested the torrent of gratitude.
"I will risk body and soul for you, Signor!"
"I believe you would. I only want you to sell me a fishing-suit such as you wear, and some of your fishing-nets and lines."
"I will sell you nothing, 'Lustrissimo," said the sailor, doggedly, and with a certain wounded pride. "I will give you everything my poor hut holds."
"And I will take it as willingly. Forgive me for using the word of barter!"
The Capriote's eyes beamed with delight at the concession and the comprehension.
"Come within, Eccellenza."
Erceldoune bent his lofty head, and entered the low, square, sea-scented hut, with the half-naked children, handsome as young seraphs running wild, and the yellow gourds, and dried herbs, and onion-ropes hanging from the rafters. As it chanced, there was a suit, unworn except on saints' days, and of full size, for the marinaro was of high stature and powerfully built. In a few moments bis own white yachting-dress was changed for it; he set the scarlet ​tasseled cap on his head, wore nothing over the loose striped shirt that left his arms so free, and flung some nets over his shoulders. With the bronze hue of his skin and the sweeping darkness of his beard, no casual glance would have detected him to be other than a Capriote.
"Shall I pass as a marinaro?" he asked the sailor.
Nicolò smiled.
"You look more like a king in disguise."
"I am sorry for it. Now, while I wait here, will you pull out to the yacht, give the captain this ring from me as credentials, and bid him send me, by you, all the gold and circular-notes I have on board, my pistol-case, powder-flask, cartridge-case and shot-belt, and a pocket-flask of brandy? Say nothing of my disguise, and be as quick as you can, for God's sake."
The Capriote obeyed, got his little boat out rapidly, and pushed off from the shore with hearty good will. Erceldoune sat at the hut door with the hound crouched at his feet, and his eyes fixed on the waste of waters. All the glories of the bay were spread before him, but it might have been a sand-desert for aught that he knew or saw; the fishing-skiff flew light and swift as a bird over the sea, but to ​him it seemed scarcely to move; every moment was a pang, every minute appeared eternity. While he waited here in the noontide glare, how might she not be tortured!—while the hours flew on, how might not her foes be wringing her proud heart! Time was passing so fast: three days, they said, had gone by since the arrest at Antina; Heaven only knew how many leagues she might have been borne since then, to what remote inaccessible recesses of Alps or Apennines, monastic prison, or mountain-shut morass, she might have been taken ere now! The fever of an intolerable agony possessed him. While he was in action he could bear it; it was something at least to be in search for her, to be in her service, to be on her track; but to sit here while those eternal matins tolled the passing seconds away, and the fishing-boat seemed to glide snail-like over the width of the sea! The swinging monotone of the chapel bell, the measured dips of the oars, seemed to beat into his brain and drive him senseless. What was it to him that she had told him his passion was hopeless? If he could give her back her freedom and her happiness, he felt that he could die in peace.
Nicolò returned very rapidly, laggard as the time ​had appeared, bringing all for which he had been sent. The money was the whole, or very nearly, of his three months' pay just drawn—some two hundred pounds or less of circular-notes in a chamois-leather pouch. He left, unseen, several gold pieces of it in a wooden bowl from which the fisherman was used to drink his onion-soup, then slipped the pistols in his sash and the pouch in his shirt, and turned again to Nicolò.
"Now take me across, some way off Naples if you can, and let me land unnoticed in the nearest route for Antina."
The marinaro, with all the alacrity of his craft, had ready his sailing-boat, a small lugger, awkward but seaworthy, in very little time, and, with his eldest son at the helm, pushed off once more into deep water. Erceldoune sat silent and deep in thought, the hound at his feet, couched on the bottom of the vessel, watching him ever with deep, keen, mournful eyes. The day was beautifully still; the bay alive with innumerable craft, and gay with sails of tawny stripes and flags of all nations' hues. Naples lay white and matchless in her sunlit grace; he saw no more of the glory about him than though he were blind. He thought they sailed slowly as a death-barge; in truth, the lugger danced over the light ​curled waves and through the snowy surf as brightly as a monacco on the wing.
Nicolò knew every inch of the coast, and landed at length in a small lonely creek, hidden in profuse vegetation, where there was just depth enough to steer the vessel in, and let the beach be reached by wading.
"Yonder lies Antina, Signor," said the fisherman; "a league to the left by that road where the cypresses are. You see?"
Erceldoune took the man*s brown hand in his and wrung it hard.
"I see! I cannot thank you now, Nicolò. Later on, if I live——"
The Capriote fixed his large black eyes tenderly and wistfully on him.
"Eccellenza, you go into some danger. Let me be with you."
Erceldoune shook his head.
"Why not, Signor?" pleaded Nicoló, entreatingly. "When I was in peril you came to me, down into the churning seas, at risk of your own life. The boy can take the boat back. Let me come!"
Erceldoune put him gently back.
"Not now. Colò, though I could wish for no ​better comrade. But what I do, I must do alone."
He broke from the man's entreaties and conjurations, and went up through the tangled thickets of arbutus and through the fields of millet rapidly, and never looking back; every moment was so precious.
The físherman stood watching him sadly.
"It is she," he said. "It is so with them all! She is a sorceress. I am glad I crossed myself whenever I met her, though old Bice calls her an angel, because she promised Fanciulla a dower. I am glad I crossed myself!"
A league brought him to Antina—a league that lay through olive-grounds, and green fields of maize, and vineyards. and sunburnt grass-land, which his slashing stride, that was the walk of the mountaineer, covered rapidly. To anything like fatigue he was insensible. Since the hour when she had found him in the pine-woods his life had been spent in one vain pursuit—the search for Idalia; yet never had he sought her as he sought her now.
He passed into the villa grounds: nearer the building he dared not venture; it would be occupied, in all likelihood, also by soldiers, and the sight of a fisherman loitering so far inland would of itself excite suspicion. But towards the entrance ​the hound paused, tore the earih np in mad haste, snuffed the ground, ran round and round again, threw his head in the air, then gave a deep-mouthed bay of joy, and looked back for a sign to Erceldoune. He stooped and laid his hand on the dog's mane; his own heart was beating so thickly that he felt sick and reeling; here his one hope had centred—that Sulla would find her trail.
"Seek her," he said, simply.
The hound needed no other command; with his muzzle to the earth he tore it up by handfuls, searching hither and thither; then settled to his work as the pack settle to line-hunting, and dashed off—not inward towards the gardens, but out to the open country. Stooping an instant ere he followed him, Erceldoune, whose eye and ear were well-nigh as trained as an Indian's, for they were those of one of the first deer-stalkers of Scotland, saw the mark of wheels, very faint on the parched arid turf that was dry and bare as bone, but still there. Hope rose in him;—if he were not too late!
Onward he went in the burning sun-glare, with the weight of the nets on his shoulder, and the heat pouring down into the scarlet wool of the fishing-cap; onward, where the dog led through the long beat of the day, through the shades of evening, ​through the stilly starlight, as one succeeded the other. It was tedious, arduous, wearying work; bringing so little recompense, needing such endless patience. Often the hound lost scent, and had to try back to where he had lost the sign of the wheels, as though it were the slot of a stag; often the dry crisp grasses or the baked white dust of the roads
bore no scent at all, or the crossing and recrossing of other tracks blurred the marks and confused the trail; often the impress of a mule's hoofs or the heavy footprint of a contadina had struck out or overlaid the faint traces which only guided the dog. Often, also, for a priest, or a peasant party going to an infiorata, or, worse yet, for a set of soldiers scouring the country, he had to seek shelter in some dank dell of woodland, on some sandy pine-knoll, under the grey twisted olives, or beneath a tumble-down shed, and hide, as though he were himself the prisoner hunted, forcing Sulla to lie still beside him. But he had spent many a long day in the patient toil of deer-stalking in the Highlands at home, and he brought the same wariness and the same long endurance here. If he had once abandoned himself to the misery of thought, to the fierceness of vengeance, he could never have borne the intolerable slow-dragging bitterness of this ​endless search; but he would not give way to them, and he would not let them urge him into the madness which could have made him dash down into Naples and demand her at the hands of the Bourbon. He knew that if it were possible to save her, thus only could it be done; and he gave himself to the toil without pause, and with a self-restraint that cost him more than all.
Three days and three nights were spent thus ; he began to think in his agony that he should only find her—if ever he found her—dead. His search was chiefly made after the sun was down; the day, when he had not to secrete himself and the hound from those who might have thought their aspect suspicious, and from village authorities who might have challenged his appearance away from a seaport, he spent in questioning the country people, as far as he could, without exciting wonder or counter-inquiry. Happily he could speak the Neapolitan patois to a miracle, and he supported his character of a fisherman well enough with most; some thought, like Nicolò, that he looked more like a prince in disguise, but he was frank and comrade-like with them, drank with them, ate their own coarse food, could give them a hand in mending their roof after a storm, in digging a trench round their ​olives, or in reaping their maize, and lived so like one of themselves, that he soon conciliated them, and persuaded them that he was a paid-off maríner who had sailed to far distant places, and liked now to wander at will over the country.
From them he gleaned various news; nothing that told him, however, the one great thing—where Idalia had been taken. When the sun set each day, and he was free from observation, he put Sulla on the track again from the spot where they had last left it, and worked on the line unwearyingly through the nights. The hound had been perfectly trained, and understood what was needed of him to a marvel; he had attached himself to Erceldoune with a strange sagacity of instinct, seeming to lay aside the jealousy he had hitherto shown him for sake of their mutual love and service to the one both had lost. Such sleep as he was obliged to take he took in the hottest hours of the day under the screen of millet-sheaves, or in the cool shade of deep ravines filled with chestnuts or cypresses; with the fall of evening he resumed the search, and through the clear lambent light of the Italian moon, or in the gloom of frowning hills and woods, the two shadows of the man and dog glided unceasingly, bending down and seeking hither and ​thither. Some who saw them crossed themselves, and took them for the shades of some ghastly huntsman and his phantom hound; others, more practical, took them for truffle-seekers, despite the gigantic size of the animal. Not one ever ventured to stop them; a rough muleteer once tried a parley in the midnight on a lonely hill-side path, and said something, with a menace, of his fancy for the brandy-flask, whose silver head he saw under the folds of the waist-sash; but a blow with the butt-end of one of the pistols soon silenced him by levelling him with the brown-burnt moss, and Erceldoune was molested no more. Slowly—very slowly—and with an infinite toil and patience, he worked his way by the guidance of the hound's lead, till the dawn of the fourth day brought him into the rugged, desolate, morass-intersected country, where, dark and sullen above the miasma-haunted lake at its foot, the square castellated building of the isolated monastery stood among its stunted trees, with the bare grey cliff towering at its back. It was a red, stormy, misty, oppressive morning, very hot and poisonous in its heat as the steam rose up from the black still waters and the wastes of swamp, while beyond stretched the grey of the monotonous olive and the still more distant ​black peaks of cypress-topped hills, as the hollow booming matin-bell of the monks swung wearily through the heavy air. "There is no fortress here; is the dog in error?" he thought, as he entered on the dreary desert of the level marshy land, with no sound in it except the echo of the tolling bell and the noise of the moor-fowls startled from their rest among the reeds and sedges. But the hound held on, growing keener and hotter as the scent grew stronger and the wheel marks plainer in the damp sodden ground than they had been on the dusty roads and the traversed highways. With his muzzle to the ground, he dashed onward mile on mile across the country at a speed that taxed the Border fleetness of his companion. There were quagmires, morasses, hidden pools, sponges of mud, small lagunes hidden under treacherous grasses or rushes, unseen pools where the water-birds brooded by hundreds, swamps where a single false step would be death for any sinker under the yielding, soaking, nauseous mass; but the hound never missed his footing or erred in his going, and Erceldoune followed him through the grey of the morning; his heart beat to suffocation, the brown lonely waste reeled before his eyes, the hot noxious air seemed to weigh down his breath ​and stifle him, but a delirium of hope came on him;—the dog must be near at last! Straight in his level chase, straight as though he were running down a stag across an open plateau, fleet as the wind, and with his mighty crest bristling and his eyeballs red with flame, Sulla led on, across the marshes, across the shallow ponds, over the trembling mass of water-sodden earth, through the steaming vapour rising from the lakes—led on till he stood under the broken granite crags on which the monastery was raised above the still, black, reedy surface of the lake.
Then, with one rolling bay like thunder, he woke all the echoes of the lonely silent dawn. Afar from on high, through the gloom of an arched casement, through the swaying flicker of dank leaves, through the transverse lines of iron bars, eyes dark as night, weary as pain, looked down on him;—they were the eyes of Idalia.
She sat in the monastic cell which was her prison-chamber, with the bare hot glare of the sunlight, that burnt all nature black and barren, and made the disease-laden vapours rise up from the swamps below, scarcely entering through the narrow lancet-chink that was the sole casement of this cold stone ​cage, in which they had shut their brilliant-plumaged bird. Her hands rested on the slab of granite that was her only table; links of steel held the wrists together: they had allowed her no change of raiment, and the lustrous colours and gold broideries of the masque dress still swept the damp flags of the floor, though all jewels had been taken from her. She had been here six days and six nights a captive of the Bourbons; what was yet worse, a captive of the Church.
Food of the coarsest and the scantiest was all that had been allotted her, and once—"for contumacy,"—her priestly gaolers' hands had been stretched to tear down the silks and lace from her. shoulders, and bruise and lacerate them with the scourge,—once, when the dignity that they were about to outrage so foully had made the monk, who was bidden to the office, drop the lash, aghast and trembling, and his superior, who had directed the infamy, feel too much shame in the moment to hound him on to his work. They had desisted for twenty-four hours more. "By then," they had muttered, "the rebellious subject might have broken her silence, and become less obdurate to the due demands of Church and King."
The twenty-four hours had well nigh gone by, but ​Idalia had given no sign of yielding; she had scarcely spoken since the day that Giulio Villaflor had quitted her presence. She knew that the lightest word might be construed into confession, or used as evidence against those whom they wanted her to betray; and she had strength in her to endure torture unflinchingly, without breathing one syllable that should sound as an entreaty for mercy, or be translated into a hint against her comrades in adversity. She knew well what she had to anticipate; she did not seek to palliate to her own thoughts the horror of the doom that awaited her; she knew that only by death, self-dealt, could she escape the passion of the libertine who held her in his gripe; she knew that when that had had its way, and grown sated of its own violence, she would, if she lived, drag out existence in agony, in shame, in felon companionship, in hopeless bondage; she never veiled from herself the depth and the despair of the wretchedness that awaited her, and she knew that not even her sex would shelter her from the barbarity of physical torture, till that torture should kill her bodily strength, or her persecutors learn that it was powerless to destroy her resolve and break her silence. She knew the fate that awaited her, but never for one instant did the thought glance ​by her that she could purchase freedom from it all by betraying those whose lives she held in her keeping, or by going willingly to the loathed love of her ecclesiastical captor. Such weakness as that was not possible to her nature; she had a virile courage, a masculine reading of all bonds of honour; this woman, bred in luxury, in self-indulgence, in power, in patrician tastes, and epicurean habits, had the nerve in her to endure all things, rather than to purchase her redemption by a traitor's recreancy.
She had been successful hitherto in concealing from her gaoler the slender shaft of the stiletto, and she was prepared in extremity to use it; she had too much of the old Greek heroism to fear such a death, and had too many of the old, dauntless, pagan creeds not to hold its resource far nobler than a long dishonoured life of endless misery.
Where she leaned now, with her chained hands lying on the stone, and the darkness and the silence of the stone cell about her, her face was colourless, but it had on it no fear, no weakness: it was only grave, and very weary. Her thoughts had gone to many scenes and memories of her past—the past which, in eight brief years of sovereignty, had been fuller and more richly coloured than a thousand drawn-out lives that never change their grey still ​calm from the cradle to the grave. Endless hours of those dead years rose before her to haunt her in this black solitude, in these chill iron-bound walls, in which the magnificence of her life had ended—hours in the lustrous glare of Eastern suns, under the curled leaves of palm, and the marble domes of ruined temples; in the laughing riot of Florentine nights, when the carnival-folly reeled flower-crowned adown the banks of Arno; in the gaslit radiance of Paris, when the fêtes of the Regency revived for her; in summer evenings in Sicilian air, when the low chants echoed softly over Mediterranean waters, and the felucca, flower-laden, glided through the star-light to music and to laughter; in palaces of Rome, of Vienna, of Prague, of Venice, where the dawn found the banqueters still at their revels, and no wines that flushed purple and gold in the blaze of the lights and the odours of perfume intoxicated the drinkers like the glance of her eyes, like the spell of her smile—all these scenes rose up above her, and filled with the hues of their life and their splendour the barren, bitter, stone-locked loneliness in which she was immured. She had loved her reign; she had loved her sceptre; she had loved those years so crowded with triumphs, with pleasures, with mirth, with wit, with radiance, with ​homage, with peril that only lent them keener zest, richer flavour; she had loved them, though beneath the purple, fetters had held her, and amidst her insouciance remorse had pursued her; she had loved them—and they were dead for ever. She was chained here a prisoner of captors who never spared until their brother-tyrant, Death, claimed their spoil and their prey at their hands.
"It is just—only just," she thought, while her head leaned on the cold steel clasping her wrist, and the black moisture-dripping blocks of the cell enclosed her as though already she were in her grave. "I sent them to their graves; it is only just that I should have a felon's doom."
A shiver ran through her like a shiver of intense cold, though the close air of the cell was oppressive and scorching! It was not for her own life, but for the lives that had fallen around her, like wheat beneath the sickle in the banqueting-halls of Antina.
The silence was unbroken; one burning ray of the outer sun stole though the loophole and flashed on the gyves enclosing the hand, whose lightest touch had thrilled men's veins like fire and impelled them where it would; the dank, noiseless, grey gloom was like the gloom of a charnel-house. ​Suddenly on that stillness broke the challenge of the hound's bay.
Idalia started; she knew the familiar sound that rolled out like the roll of a clarion. The colour flushed her face, she moved rapidly to the casement; through the glare of the sun, beneath the shelving precipice of rock, she saw the dog, and saw who was his comrade.
She knew him in the first moment that his longing eyes looked upward, and knew his errand there—knew that he had come to save her, or to die with her.
"O God!—he,too!"
The words escaped her involuntarily where she stood alone, leaning against her prison bars, as the hound shook all the echoes from the rocks around with the impatience of his summons; she had seen so many perish, she would fain have saved this man.
Through the space of the sultry white sun-glare that severed them his eyes met hers, and spoke in that one look all the force of the ardour, all the fidelity of the devotion, that had brought him once more to the woman who, for good or evil, had become the ruler of his life. At that gaze her own eyes filled, her lips trembled; such love had been ​oftentimes lavished on her, yet never had it moved her as it moved her now. She had told him that no other thing save misery could come to him through her; she had forbidden him even the baseless solace of hope; she had bade him fear, scorn, hate, flee from her; and nothing had killed his loyalty, nothing had burnt out his passion.
A glow of warmth passed over her; an infinite tenderness made the tears gather in her eyes as she saw this faith against all trial borne to her, this chivalry through every ordeal staunch to her.
"If a straight stroke and a lion heart could deliver me, how soon I should be free!" she thought.
"He comes too late—too late!"
Too late; not alone to unloose her bonds and rend her from her gaolers, but too late to wake her heart to his, to find her life unusurped, to be sufficient for her in the lotus-dream of love.
The step of a monk was heard without as one of the brethren passed to fetch water from a well that was built under the shadow of a few cypress-trees some score yards from the convent. She left the barred casement, signing her lover towards the deep shade where the blackness of overhanging rocks made a refuge into which not even the noon-rays could penetrate.
​He comprehended and obeyed the gesture to secresy and silence; his heart was beating to suffocation, his blood felt on fire, wretchedness and rapture rioted together in him. He had found her! So much was mercy; but she was in the gripe of those who never spared; she was in the power of those who never unloosed their prey; the battalions of an army could scarce avail to wrench her from the united hate of Bourbon and of Rome. He knew it; he knew that e was but one man against the whole force of a government and a hierarchy, but the Border boldness in him rose the higher for that; the reckless romance of the old Spanish Paladins that slept in his blood awakened as wildly as it ever awakened in the comrades of Campeador or the knights of Ponce de Leon.
"I will deliver her, or die for her!" he swore in bis throat: and he had never yet broken an oath.
Forcing the dog to quietude, he drew back from the monastery into the shade of the stunted cypresses, and threw his lines into a lake-like pool that lay at the foot of the rocks; an angler's pursuit went well enough with bis barcarolo's dress. The water was reedy, yellow, stagnant in places, with islets of river grasses, in which water-fowl herded by ​thousands; but the care of the monks, who made their sole repasts from its treasuries, kept it well stocked with fish, and in a brief time he landed both dace and roach, though his strong wrists trembled as they had never done when a Highland salmon had dragged him miles down the length of a moorland river in a wrestling duel that lasted from noon till evening.
The monk, returning with bis buckets from the well, saw the sacrilegious raid upon the heaven-dedicated food, and as the angler had relied on, drew near him in wrath and in rebuke.
"Nay, good father," said Erceldoune, lifting the fish to him, "I am an idle fellow; grudge me not a chance of doing a trifle for Holy Church. I am more used, maybe, than your brethren to filling a creel quickly."
"My son, yon are welcome to our charity," replied the monk, a little confused at finding a robber offer him so willingly the spoils. "All I meant was, that, of a truth, such varlets and ruffians poach on the waters that we are obliged to guard them something strictly. You have a supple wrist and a marvellous strength; we," added the friar, with a sigh of envy, "angle all day sometimes, and catch nothing."
​"Let me fish for you, father," said Erceldoune. His heart throbbed with hope and dread as he preferred a request on which all his future fate would hang; but he had control enough to speak carelessly, and his Neapolitan accent was so perfect that the monk never doubted his country. "Let me fish for you; and give me in recompense a night or two's lodging. I shall be well paíd."
"You are poor, my son?"
"Poor enough."
"And a wanderer?"
"I have been a wanderer all my life."
"In truth? You are a fine fellow, and if you really want the Church's alms——"
The Cistercian hesitated; a monastery could scarce refuse its charity, yet the orders of the superior were strict to treat all strangers with circumspection, and, if possible, to admit none.
"See, here, father," said Erceldoune, rapidly. "I want no man's alms, lay or clerical; but if you like to strike a bargain, here is one. You are not much of sportsmen, I fancy; now I have all that lore by heart. I am a wild barcarola, but I know none could beat me in river-craft or in shooting. You have ospreys and cormorants in these sedges that eat half the fish in the lake; you have wild ​swans that would make yon savoury messes to sicken yon for ever of maize and of lentils; you have shoals of small fresh-water fish that I will snare by thousands in my nets, and, salted, they will last yon the whole winter through;—let me work for you on the water, and give me in payment a lodging for myself and my dog. I will warrant you you shall have the best of the bargain."
His voice shook a little with an eagerness he could not repress; the monk, a comely, good-humoured, elderly man from the Umbrian marshes, a poor brother who did servile offices, and was at once porter and angler and hewer of wood and drawer of water for the monastery, felt his eyes glisten and his lips taste savoury things as he thought of the wild swans in a potage, and his own labours lightened by the stalwart arm and the fearless skill of this adventurer. He looked a moment curiously in Erceldoune's face; its frank, bold proud features won his trust instantly, as they won the trust of all who looked on them; he glanced longingly at the fowl-filled sedges.
"Wait a moment, my son. I have no power to grant your request myself, but I will go speak with the almoner, and see what we can do. If the Father Superior will listen to your wish, I shall be glad ​enough for one, for Holy Mary knows it is hard work and thankless to find food for seventy hungry months and lean stomachs in these barren lands. Wait a second, and I will be back."
He heaved up the water-buckets, and went his way with bent shoulders and plodding steps. Erceldoune stood by the lake-side, with his eyes fastened on the barred loophole whence the eyes of the mistress of his life had looked down on him. He thought he saw the gleam of her hair in the shadow on high; he thought she gazed on him, though for both their sakes she dared not do so openly; he felt his cheek change colour like a woman's; he felt his limbs tremble as with a woman's tremor;—all chance of aid to her, of deliverance for her, rested on this one hazard he had tried of obtaining entrance to the convent that was her prison-house.
It seemed to him an eternity while the monk was absent; anxiety made his eyes blind and his head swim as he saw the brother at last returning;—if his request were denied! if his disguise were penetrated! The first words he heard made him feel giddy with their joy.
"My son, be it as you will," said the monk; "and I pray you kill a swan quickly. The Father ​Superior is pleased to grant your prayer; and we will lodge you and give you food, if you will shoot and fish and labour in the marshes, as you have said till our buttery be stocked and our waters be well netted."
Erceldoune bent his head, so that the rush of vivid joy that flushed bis face should not betray him.
I will labour for you, father, night and day if you will," he said, briefly.
Would he not have laboured like a galley-slave through summer drought and winter chills if, by his labour, he could have bought one smile from her or spared her a moment's pang! Then, without more words, he loaded, fired, and brought down a wild swan on the wing. "Fetch it," he said to Sulla; the hound had been bred to retrieve, and the bird in ten seconds was laid at his feet.
"Chee-e-e!" murmured the Benedictine, ruffling the snowy plumage and thinking longingly of the savoury stew that would vary their refectory fare that night, while he stared at the barcarolo as at a stranger from some unknown world. "You are a wonderful shot, my friend. If you go on like that, we shall have the best of the bargain, as you said, for you will find but sorry lodgment ​with us. Can yon sleep on a shake-down of dry grass?"
"I have slept on bare earth and bare decks many a time before now."
"Truly? Yet you look of noble blood?"
"Good blood is scant use if our fortunes be low."
"Ah! You have fallen on evil days?"
"Very evil."
"And you were of proud stock once?"
"Good father, I thought in the eyes of the Church all men were equal."
He spoke curtly, to rid himself of the Cistercian's restless curiosity, and flinging his fishing-shirt open at the breast, he set himself to fixing the stakes and the nets at the head of the great pool. Every sort of wood and water lore had been familiar to him from his earliest boyhood; every secret of the loch and heather he had learnt from the days of childhood. With all the skill and strength that were in him he went to the toil of working for the monastery fare, of reaping such a harvest from the marshes and the sedges and the lakes as should make the brethren give him lodging with favouring cordiality and without questions. He worked like a slave, in the scorch of the Italian sky, conscious ​of no fatigue, sensible of no pain; he worked for her, and on him her eyes might rest from her prison-chamber. It gave him a Samson's force, an Indian's patience. Wading knee deep through the pools, he stretched his nets across the head of the water, as he had known the poachers to do many a night across the weir of Highland rivers. Afraid of wasting such powder and shot as he had with him, he made a sling from a strip of his sash, and slew with unerring aim the wild teal that flocked among the osiers, till they were flung in scores to the arid banks. He mowed down the reeds where the fish-destroying birds were sheltered, so that they should haunt the monastery waters no more, and bore the rushes in great sheaves to land. He laboured without rest, and doing the work of twenty men, in the full downpour of the vertical heat, and all through the length of the day, while his friend the Umbrian brother sat luxuriously, with folded hands, staring at him like an owl lazily blinking in the sunlight.
He laboured without ceasing, and with a hot joy at his heart; afar, where the grey walls towered, the eyes of Idalia watched him, and with sunset he would have earned the right to sleep under the roof that made her prison. It sufficed, with his high ​hope and his high courage, to give him almost happiness. He could not believe that love like his his would ever be powerless to defend and to release her.
All through the long day he worked unweariedly among the reedy waters, under the frowning shadow of the monastery-crowned rocks. And from her cell she gazed on him—on the bold heroic cast of the head, and the sun-warmed brow from which the waves of hair were dashed; gazed on him where, under the cypress shadows, through the sere rushes, through the sullen waters, he toiled as peasants toil, for her—for her, though she had bidden him forsake even her memory for ever, though she had told him that suffering alone could be his portion through her.
Out of the gloom and silence of her stone-locked cage she gazed down at his labour though the long hot hours of the southern summer days and her eyes were heavy with a regretful languor, her lips parted with a sigh of weariness.
"Too late!" she thought—"Too late!"
The sun sank down, a globe of red flame in an angry sky; the day was done, and with it the day's travail. More had been gathered in it out of the wastes around than the laggard tempers of the ​slothful Brethren gathered in a month. Erceldoune stooped eagerly, and drank long draughts of thin crimson wine out of a half gourd-rind that the Umbrian monk held to him, looking at him the while with a curious, compassionate, wondering, envying glance.
"You are tired, my son? Ah! what limbs, what strength! Come within; you shall sup with us, and have such a dormitory as we can give you. Bring the great beast too, if there be no danger in him; certes, he is a giant like you."
Erceldoune, as he lifted his head from the wine felt his face as flushed as the stormy sunset light that fell on it; a wild, senseless joy was on him—he should be within the walls that held her. He laid his hand on the hound's collar, with a gesture to silence well enough understood by the animal, and followed mutely the brother.
Jagged precipitous flights of steps, rough hewn in the rock itself, led up to the monastery. The entrance-door was a low-browed iron-studded arched barrier of oak, impregnable as granite. It yielded slowly, unwillingly, with a grating jar as the monk pushed it open.
"Enter, my son."
Erceldoune stooped, and passed through it into ​the vaulted stone passage-way within, dark as twilight; the door swung weightily back to its place, the great bolts rolled into their sockets, the dying day and the living world were alike shut out. Thus far one desire of his heart had fulfilled itself; he shared her prison-house with Idalia.
"This way, my son," said the Umbrian, as he turned down a tortuous vaulted passage which led to the monks' dormitories, small stone cells one in another, with dried grasses shaken down, as he had said, for pallets, and the moisture dripping from the naked walls. The Cistercians of this place were very poor; and Giulio Villaflor loved vicarious mortification, and was very stringent on his monks' asceticism and devotion, visiting the slightest laxity with a fearful rigour.
The poor brother, at whose girdle hung the huge keys of the ecclesiastical fortress, motioned to one of the little chambers.
"This is yours, my son. I will come to you in half-an-hour. We sup then in the refectory."
Erceldoune, left in solitude, closed his door and drew its massive bolt; then stripping off his clothes, dashed the cold water that stood in a pitcher over him, re-arranged his fisher-dress as best he could, slung the pistols again in his sash, ​dropped beside the dog on the hay, and let his head sink on his hands. He was beneath the same roof with her; the knowledge made his heart beat thickly, and his temples throb. But—how to save her? It would be as dangerous to wrench her from the jaws of the Church as to rend an antelope from a panther's jaws and talons. Yet his teeth ground together under the sweeping darkness of his beard, his hand felt for the butts of his belt-pistols. "I can die with her at least." he thought, "and send some of her foes to damnation first"
His love was too fervent and too true not to be pagan in its longing and his vengeance.
The half-hour soon passed as he sat lost in thought, feverish, tempestuous, conflicting; the Umbrian brother came to him.
"Our supper is ready, my brother; it is richer than common, thanks to your woodcraft and your angling."
Erceldoune followed him, leaving the hound at guard.
A long arched stone corridor led to the refectory, a desolate, dimly-lit hall of the same rough-hewn stone, with a few feeble oil-lamps flickering in the great sea of gloom. The board was simply spread with fried fish and a simmering soup, in which the ​wild swan and some of the water-fowls were stewed with lentils and capsicums. Some seventy monks sat round it, breaking black bread, and scenting longingly though with downcast eyes and immutable lips the unwonted savour of the fare. As his ringing step sounded on the stone floor, the recluses looked with a dreary, dull wonder at this man with his superb manhood, with his luxuriant beard, and his stalwart build, and his mountain freedom of glance and of movement, who seemed to bring a draught of wild, strong, fresh, forest-breeze into the darkness and solitude of their prison.
He made his reverence gravely to the white-haired elder whom they pointed out as the Superior, then seated himself at the lower end of the board, and took the food proffered him. Many eyes studied him inquisitively, but no questions were asked; an unbroken silence prevailed as the meal went on. The Order was sternly ruled—sternly in especial when any wayfarer or stranger was present; it had a great fame for sanctity, and that odorous reputation went far to cover any whispers that might steal abroad of other and less holy uses to which its highest director might turn it. "Great Heaven!" thought Erceldoune, as he glanced down the long table at the close-shaven, silent guests that surrounded it, while ​his hand went instinctively to the abundant falling masses of the silken hair that covered his chest, "can living, breathing men—men in their youth and their strength—exist like that?" His thoughts swept over the many varying years of bis own life, so full of colour, of peril, of adventure, of change; of wandering in divers lands, of danger in deserts and on seas, of pleasure in countless cities, of world-wide range of travel, of communion with every nation, of gay nights in western palaces, of wild rides through eastern heats;—and then men lived like this, while all the earth was free to them!
He spoke to none of them; he bore them a fiery hate because they were her priestly gaolers, and even so much needful reticence as lay in breaking the bread of these men under a false semblance, while the intent to deliver their captive was hidden in his heart, savoured too much of a taint like treachery not to be bitter to him, imperative as it was in her service, and just as it was in its employ and errand.
To Erceldoune it were far easier to deal a straight swift stroke, such as that with which men of his race had felled Paynim foe or Southern invader, than to carry through anything that involved a ​touch of what looked to him like deception. His life had brought him into many critical moments when silence, acuteness, and caution had been as compulsory as hot action and reckless daring; and he had never been found wanting in them. But the rush of a lion, the swoop of an eagle, were more his instinct and his warfare; and he chafed feverishly under this part that he played for her sake in the Italian monastery.
The supper was brief; he had hoped the monks might be, as he had known many, laughter-loving riotous brethren, gossips in their cups, and not averse to heavy libations, from whom he might have gleaned some hint or knowledge of her. They were not; a cold, still, harsh asceticism brooded over them; they were chiefly saturnine, worn, impassive men, whose faces were chill and unreadable as masks of stone; there was nothing to give a suspicion that anything, save the severest form of religious devotion and abstinence, reigned there—nothing to hint that there was a prisoner within their keeping. There was not one from whom he could expect to extract any hope, except the poor porter and water-carrier, on whose round jocund face not even the silence and the hard labour of his life could impress either spirituality or resignation.
​The monks filed slowly out of the dark, narrow, vaulted hall; the Umbrian and one other remained to clear away the remnants of the meal.
"Will you take this to your dog?" said the priest, as he heaped up the remnants. "You did well not to bring him here; the Superior would not have loved so big a brute."
"Thanks," said Erceldoune, as he took some broken food; "and do you come to my cell, good father, I have something more cheering in my flask than your water and goat's milk."
The Umbrian's eyes glistened with delight, though a shadow of grievous disappointment stole quickly over his features.
"Another night, my son,—to-morrow night I shall be free," he whispered. "This evening I must attend the offices. Yon know your way back, and you can undress by moonlight? We have no other light, save in the chapel."
Erceldoune, wearily enough, nodded assent, and with a brief word of thanks paced through the long passages to his dormitory. He could do no more; he must wait and watch, and be content that he was near her. He could not tell in what part of the building she was lodged; he must await time to learn that, and learn the means to reach her. With the ​morrow he might bribe, or stupify the Umbrian with drink, till he reached his confidence; for the present there was nothing for it, without exciting suspicion, except to remain in the sleeping-place allotted him, and labour afresh for them with the dawn.
The little slit, unglazed and narrow as a hand's breadth, through which the luminous silver moon poured down, was high above his head; he swung himself upward and looked out; the waters and marshy plains, with the dark belt of cypress afar off, slept calmly in the white and glistening night; all was very still, only broken by the cry of a waterbird, the rush of an aziola, or the hoot of an owl. As he gazed, the outer bolt of the stone door of his cell was drawn sharply and swiftly; he dropped to his feet with an oath.
"Do not blaspheme, my son," said the Umbrian's voice through a chink. "It is only our custom with strangers."
He was a prisoner for the whole length of the summer night.
Well—the prison was hers; it was something to share it.
He undressed, laid bis pistols ready loaded by his side, drank thirstily of the cool water with which the pitcher bad been re-filled, and threw himself on ​the dry grasses, with his arm flung round the hound's neck; they were comrades—they were both here to save her.
He lay long gazing at the glimpse of starry sky that gleamed above, while the chimes tolled slowly from the bell-tower of the Benedictine monastery, and the moonlight poured down on to his mighty limbs stretched there in rest, and the gladiator breadth of the vast uncovered chest; only to know that he was beneath the same roof with her through the long silent hours, made his brain giddy, his heart on fire.
It was very long before at length a fitful, restless, dreamy sleep came to him.