# Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 6

Under the pen name “Ouida”
CHAPTER VI.
"THE SERPENT'S VOICE LESS SUBTLE."
The fishing hamlet lay under the shadow of a sea-worn, red-brown, sullen cliff, that had the mists of the dawn still on its rugged forehead, and the foam of the uprising tide now angrily splashing its feet; a mighty fortress of rock, that would break from its gloom to a wonderful beauty when the sun should come round to the west, and the glory spread over the waters. There were but four or five cabins, dropped in among the loose piles of stone and the pale plumes of the sand grasses; huts low nestled, and hidden like the nests on northern beaches of the sea-hovering tern. And these few were deserted; the men had been out two days with their boats and their nets, and their womankind were alone left, with children wild-haired and ruddy-cheeked, and with naked limbs of a marvellous mould and grace, ​who lived all day long waist-deep in water, and slept all night long on a wet sail, and not seldom crushed the seaweed between their bright hard teeth in the sheer desire of famine; and yet who, with all that, might have thanked God, had they known it, that they were born by the water's width and to the water's liberty, instead of in the stifling furnace of cities, where human lives breathe their first and their last, never having known what one breath of ocean wind blows like, or what the limitless delight of a horizon line can mean. They and their mothers said little, comprehended less. The shine of silver made their eyes glisten, but they could give nothing in return for it. Of the boats, there was not one left; not the craziest craft that ever was hauled high upon a beach to be broken up into firewood nor of the boys did one remain of years enough to handle a rope or hold a tiller.
He stood on the narrow strip of yellow sand, with the ripple of the foam rolling upward and over his feet, and looked over the sweet, fresh, tumultuous vastness of the waters as men, when camels and mules, and even the hardy sons of the soil, have perished one by one in their rear, look over the stretch of the desert where no aid is to be called, no ​change can come, except the aid and the change of the death that shall leave their flesh to the vulture, their bones to the bleach of the noon.
All he had done had been in vain.
Reaching the sea, they were as far from liberty as when the monastery's doors had closed them in; unless some vessel could be chartered to bear westward before the day should be at its meridian, they must turn back, and share the wolf's lair, the hare's terror, the stag's life of torture, when on every breeze may come the note of chase, when every curling moss and broken leaf may bear a mark to bring the hunters down.
There was not a sail in sight, as far as his eyes could reach over the water line; it might be two or three nights more yet, as the women told him, before the fishing-boats would come in; to leave her for the length of time needful to traverse the coast was impossible; he saw no course but to retrace his steps to her, and leave the choice of their retreat with her.
He stood there some moments, looking westward from the beach, his head sank, his thoughts were very weary; he was condemned to the torture of inaction, the deadliest trial that can be fastened on high courage and on eager energies. He turned swiftly ​as he heard steps passing along the loose stones that made a sort of stairway from the high ground, down between two steep and leaning sides of rock, and looked up in anxious hope of welcoming some boatman who could help him to a vessel. As he did so, the morning sun, shining from the east, that faced him as he turned, fell full upon his head and throat, and standing thus, catching the brightest gusten of the morning beams, the barcarolo dress served little to disguise him, and through the mist-wreaths that still hovered round all the upper border of the shore, his eyes, ere escape or avoidance was possible, met those of the man above upon the broken tiers of cliff.
They were the keen blue serene eyes of Victor Vane.
For a moment they looked in silence at each other, met thus face to face, in the coolness of the young day, in the solitude of the unfrequented shore. Then, with an easy supple grace, the man, in whom Erceldoune's instinct felt a foe, swung himself downward from ledge to ledge, and dropped upon the sands beside him, with the common courtesies of a carelessly astonished and complimentary greeting.
"I came to bathe; I am staying for a villeggiatura ​not far from this," he said, as his words of welcome closed. "You are yachting, I suppose?"
"No."
"No? I thought that fisher-costume was surely a sailor's dress. May I ask what brings you, then, to this world-forgotten nook?"
"I came to get a boat, and a boat's crew if I could."
"Ah! you have lost your way?"
"I know the coast well. I merely need a boat—of what kind matters little. Can you help me?"
"I grieve to say no. My friends' residence is some way from here; and, besides, they have not even a pleasure skiff; they care nothing for the water. But you would not put out to the open sea in a mere boat?"
"Why so?"
"Why! Because I fancy no man would who was not weary of his life—or whose life was not menaced on the land."
Erceldoune looked up; with a flash of his fiery impatience.
"Explain that phrase."
"Transíate it for yourself."
"Not I. I am in no mood for enigmas. You had your meaning; out with it!"
​Vane looked him steadily in the face; a serious, compassionate, candid gaze.
"I am sorry you trust me so little."
Ornamented protests would have forewarned and forearmed his listener, whom the simplicity and manliness of the reply put off his guard; they made the loyal, generous nature that they dealt with repent as of some sin of false suspicion; rebuke itself, as for some ignominy of cowardly injustice. Moreover, Erceldoune saw that he knew much—how much it was best to learn at once, let the learning cost what it should.
"He has eaten at her board; he has enrolled himself her friend: he cannot turn traitor to her; he cannot play false to a woman!" his thoughts ran swiftly, in the tumult of a thousand emotions. It seemed to him so vile a thing, that to suspect even his rival of it looked base to him.
"Let us waste no words," he said, rapidly, while he stood facing the new-comer with the challenge of his gallant regard testing the truth of that glance which met them. "Time is life to me, and more than life. You guess rightly so far. Answer me two things. What do you know?—and why should you be trusted?"
​"The latter question, I imagine, one gentleman should scarcely put to another!"
"That may be. I am in no temper for these subtleties. I know nothing of you except through rumour. Such rumour would not incline me to place confidence in you. You used strange language: you seem aware of my present peril. Simply, say what it is you know."
The other, with a dignity that had in it the compassionate forbearance of one who respects and pities another whose insolence he can afford to pass over and extenuate, answered him, without hesitation, in a grave and regretful accent.
"Well,—I forgive your inuendo on myself, since the extremity of your peril may serve to excuse it, and I believe that this peril has fallen on you through a rashly noble and generous action. We have met here singularly enough. I do not know—positively—anything of your actions or position; but I should be half a fool did I not divine much of both. Briefly, we are both acquainted with a fair revolutionist, who has been made a prisoner of the royal executive. I heard, late last night, that she had been rescued from her captivity—rescued by a man in a fisher dress, who displayed the most reckless chivalry in her defence, and even implicated ​himself so deeply as to use violence to Giulio Villaflor, whereby Monsignore lies now in danger at his monastery of Taverna. I heard this; such news soon spreads, specially to Court and Church; and I heard also that both soldiers and sbirri are on the track of the fugitivos, who are known to have made their way seaward. Now can you wonder that it needs no great exercise of intelligence to recognise in you the barcarolo who despoiled Church and State of their captive, and to conclude that the vessel you stand in need of is to be employed in the service of Miladi Idalia, for whom, living or dead, both Church and State would give as weighty a reward as the full coffers of the one and the lean treasures of the other could afford to yield? Scant penetration is requisite for such a discovery; every sailor on the coast will make it with me in a few hours' time. It is not a little thing to free a political prisoner, and to leave a mighty prelate half dead among his own monks."
He spoke perfectly quietly, his eyes, with an unusual melancholy, looking straight and calm into the eyes of the man before him—eyes that said without words, "You see, she and you are in my power. One word from me, and both are lost!"
​Erceldoune gazed at him, answering nothing; his chest and sides heaved like those of some magnificent animal caught in the toils of the trapper. He cared nothing for his own life; he would have sold it dearly, content enough, if he died worthily; but she—for her he had no strength; for her he had no courage; for her he could sue what he would never for himself have sought; for her the grave was horrible to him.
To parry facts with lies, to turn aside discovery with subtle feints, was not in him; to deny that which he knew to be a truth never even passed his thoughts. This was another calamity, another danger, the darkest, perhaps, that could have come on them; but his instinct was to brave and meet it, not to slink from it under a poltroon's mask of falsehood. He went with a single step close up to his companion's side, and stood above him.
"Grant your conclusions right—what then?"
"That is rather for you to answer. Your future is a very hazardous one."
"I did not speak of my future, but of your course. What will it be?"
"Do you insinuate that I should betray you?"
"I do not insinuate; I ask. If the world may be ​believed, you have not been always noted for your fealty."
"Coarse language, and not over-wise——"
"I cannot stop to refine, nor yet, perhaps, to reason. Tell me how I am to deal with you. As friend or foe?"
"Sir, that is scarcely the way to learn. Diplomacy would not díctate such rough-and-ready questions."
"Possibly. But I am no diplomatist."
"I imagine not. No one would suspect you of it."
"Spare your satire. Give me a plain answer."
"Not a popular thing, commonly."
Erceldoune shook with rage. This play of words was to him in his extremity as the irritation of the whip's light lash is to the caged tiger in its wrath. He flung himself away with an unconscious violence.
"Do your worst, if you choose to do it. Go and turn traitor against the woman at whose table you sat, and under whose roof you were welcome. Adventurers fitly end in renegades."
"Wait. You mistake."
Erceldoune paused.
"Show me my error, and I will confess it."
​Vane smiled a little, in compassion. This nature, so warm, so bold, so free from every suspicion, so willing to avoid every injustice, seemed to him so pitiable in its simplicity; its naked strength, that could so easily be pierced; its unselfish impulses, that could so easily be duped; its creed of truth, that was followed so blindly and so recklessly!
"You wrong me," he said, with that tranquil dignity which had again replaced the ironic fiivolity of his usual manner—"wrong me greatly. Think but a moment, and you will yourself see how. The cause for which Madame de Vassalis has been arraigned is mine; would it be likely that I should find favour with Court or Church, even were I base enough to seek it? She is the life, the soul, the inspiration, often the treasury, of our projects, the Manon Roland of our latter-day Girondists; is it not palpable that what strikes at her must strike at us? Besides, leaving every such reason aside, can you believe that, as a guest, I should harm my hostess; as a man, betray a woman? Rather do me some measure of justice. Believe, at least, that I can have some admiration, some sympathy for your magnificent daring; quixotic I may deem it, but reverence it I must"
Erceldoune heard him, swayed against his ​judgment, ínfluenced against his instincts. The tone of the appeal touched that temper of trust and of liberality always dominant in him; he hated this man, but to let his hate prejudice him to injustice seemed very vile in his sight; he thought that he owed a wider measure of justice, a more limitless extension of tolerance, to an enemy than a friend; where his impulses set him against, there he felt that his honour should more closely strive for fairness to a foe. A code that had in its results, perhaps, a folly unutterable, yet had in its root a magnanimity scarce less great, and such as men would do well to strive after in giving judgment.
"Trusted, even a scoundrel will quit his baseness. And, if he have ever loved her, he can hardly be a traitor to her," his thoughts ran as he paused there, and heard the measured sweetness of his rival's voice. And on those thoughts he spoke, making the error that costs so many dear—the error of gauging another character by the measure of his own.
"If I wronged you, I ask your pardon. Your jests fell sharply on a heart so sore as mine. You have our Uves in your power; for her sake, hold them sacredly. All the help you can give us is silence. I thank you for your promise of that. Farewell! And ​forget my words if they did you an injury. They were spoken in passion and haste."
For the moment the words touched his hearer—awoke something of shame, something of admiration, something of compassion, that had no scorn in it, but a dim instinct of honour for this noble madness that believed in him, for this self-rebuke that was spoken so generously, content to take blame rather than to hold to an unjustified suspicion. All the cruelty of jealousy, all the pitilessness of hatred, all the unmerciful heartlessness of craft, were in him against the man whom he instinctively knew that the woman he coveted loved. Yet they were for an instant stilled under the vague emotion that woke in him—that emotion of involuntary homage which even the shallowest and the basest natures will at times yield reluctantly to the greatness of a brave sincerity.
But it was very fleeting with him; too fleeting to change the hard set purpose that had possessed him from the moment when his knowledge of his rival's temper had made him at once divine who had been the deliverer of their mistress, and had sent him seaward to trust to hazard for the accident that should bring him across the fugitive's path.
He stretched his hand out with frank grace.
​"That was very nobly said. We may surely be friends?"
Erceldoune did not take his hand.
"Pardon me—my friendships are few, and I add to them rarely. Aid her, and no friend shall be so close to me as you."
"You speak strongly. Is the Countess Vassalis so dear to you, then?"
"Judge by the risk I have run for her."
"True! You are not the first——"
"The first for what?"
"Well—the first who thought his life well lost for her. And—forgive me the question, I have known her so long—what does she promise you for it?"
"I fail to apprehend you."
"You d ? I mean, what reward does that fairest and most fatal of sorceresses promise you if ever you escape the dangers you have incurred for the sake of her eloquent eyes?"
"Her insults are mine. By what right do you use such a tone?"
"By what right do you constitute yourself her champion? It will be a thankless office!"
"By the right of a man to defend his wife's honour."
In the deep shadow of the overhanging cliff he ​did not see the ashen colour to which the fairness of his listener's face fade ; in the tumult of his own thoughts and passions he did not hear the quick, sharp catch of his companion's breath. It was soon suppressed in a careless, soft, ironic laugh.
"Ah! Miladi must think her jeopardy very imminent. She never proffered so heavy a bribe before."
Erceldoune's hands fell on his shoulders, swaying him heavily to and fro.
"What do you dare to mean by that!"
"Simply what I say."
"Why? Am I so loathsome?"
"Certainly not. You are a magnificent man; the very man for a lover. But marriage——"
"Finish your sentence. Marriage——"
"May be a word on her lips, but will never be a chain upon her liberties."
"You dare to mean——"
"Release me, and I will tell you what I mean. I do not speak for any threats of forcé."
Erceldoune slowly let go his hold, and stood before him with the morning sun-gleam on his face that was stormily flushed. His rival's eyes met his serenely; in the calm transparent depths there was an unspoken pity that made his listener's blood glow like lava.
​"In a word—I mean this. She has bought you with syren words; do you dream how many she has bought likewise before you, and—destroyed?"
"I know that no man living shall insult her name to me unpunished."
"Ah! you will stop my lips with a blow? Honourable women do not need such tragical defence. Let me ask you one thing only"
"Ask it."
"Who fired at you in the Carpathians?"
In the warm glow of the summer dawn Erceldoune's limbs grew chilly with a sudden sickly cold. He did not answer. He divined the drift of the inquiry.
"You do not know! You should do so. Did you ever ask this woman who is to be your wife?"
His chest heaved heavily with hard-drawn breaths; his memories were with the evening just passed by, when the sunset had shed its ruddy hues on the face of the slumbering Greek, and she had bade him spare that worthless life with a passionate force of supplication to which she had never stooped when her own existence had been in jeopardy. But he was too loyal to her for his answer not to rise hot and instant to his lips.
"Ask her? Would I do her so much outrage?"
​"Yet no one could tell you so well."
"What ! you are vile enough to say——"
"The villany is not mine! I say that Idalia Vassalis can tell you better who is the man that sought to take your life than can any one else in Europe."
Erceldoune heard in silence; he felt giddy, blind, heartsick; his knowledge of her association with his enemy was lying like a dead weight on the indignant scorn with which he would, without it, have flung back the insult offered her; the remembrance was upon him of her intercession that had screened the criminal from justice, of her conjuration that had interposed between the guilty and his retribution, of the mingling of shame and of terror that had broken and bent her haughty nature like a reed.
"You lie," he said, savagely, seeking only to defend her at all hazards. "She never knew;—he is her foe not less than mine."
"Ah! she has spoken of him then!"
"What if she have?"
"Nothing. She said he was her foe, did she? What other things did she say of him?"
Erceldoune*s hand seized him by the linen of his vest, and shook him as a strong grasp will shake the slender stem of a larch-tree.
"You will make a brute of me! You have some ​hellish meaning hidden—speak it out, if you have a man's heart in you. What would you dare bring against her?"
Vane freed himself with difficulty, and moved slightly aside; but there was no anger in the serenity of his voice, only some pity and much patience.
"I have nothing hidden; if you hear me, you will know as much as I know. I see your error; many have made it. You have thought in such divinity of form divinity of soul must dwell. Scores have made your mistake, and died for it—as you may before the game is out. Miladi has had many lovers, and—dead men tell no tales."
He paused; his rival's hand was on his mouth, and the steel tube of a pistol was pressed against his forehead.
"Another syllable like that, and, by Heaven! I will shoot you with the lie on your lips."
Courage had never been lacking in him; his eyes looked up none the less tranquilly into the dark, flushed, haggard face above him, though the cold ring of the weapon pressed its mark on his skin.
"You can, if you choose. I am unarmed. You will oblige your mistress too. I know many of her secrets."
Erceldoune's arm fell to his side; he shivered ​through all his frame; he could not use violence to a man without the power to return it; he could not force to silence words which, if he refused to hear them, he would seem to know were true in all their shame. He dropt the pistol down on the sands between them, and crossed his arms on his chest.
"Say your worst. Our reckoning shall come later."
"Well, my worst is —the truth. You love this woman; but you are not in her confidence ; you never will be."
He saw a quiver of pain break the wrath on his listener's face, and he saw that the bolt had struck home.
"You believe everything she tells you? I never found the man who did not. I doubt if a man can look long at her, and see clearly, unless he have known her well, and come forewarned to her—as I came. Well, you have thought her a mistress for 'Shakspeare's self;' you have seen her in great dangers; you have imagined her foully wronged; you have cast away all your heart on her, and now are casting your life away after it. And you do all this without ever having asked yourself and the world what a woman must be who, titled, is yet out of society; who, young, yet recklessly defies all custom; who, rich, ​can summon round her none but men, and those men adventurers or conspirators; who shelters your assassin in her Turkísh gardens, yet affects all ignorance of his identity or vicinage; and who, driven at last to speak of him, tells you he is her foe, yet omits altogether to explain why, if so, she has so long shielded him from your discovery and the law's justice. You love, and therefore you are blind. Yet is it possible that even that blindness can be so utterly dark that you have never remembered all these things?"
The black blood gathered in his listener's face; he kept his passions down, because, for her sake, he held it best to hear all her calumniator would bring against her; but they well-nigh mastered him, rising the darker and the stronger for the keen pang of truth that every shaft of the abhorred words stung him with—truth that she had herself placed it beyond his power to refute.
"Go on," he said, simply. "You called yourself her friend, I think?"
The rebuke was bitter, yet it did not move the man it lashed.
"Scarcely so much," he returned, quietly. "Her acquaintance—indeed, her associate in not a few political matters—but scarcely her friend. Miladi's ​friendships are too perilous. Look you; I had a friend once, an Austrian, though I bear Austria no love. We had been lads together in Venetia, and the war-feuds failed to divide us. I think he was the brightest and the bravest nature I have ever known. Well, in an evil hour he fell, as you have done, under the eyes of Idalia. He had a military secret in his keeping; a secret, granted, that was of import to Italy, so perhaps you will deem what she did was justified for Italy's sake. I might have done so, had I not known him from his boyhood; I might have done;—who touches politics fast grows a knave. Well, she sunned him in her smiles, till sense and judgment both were gone—as yours are gone. Then, while she promised him her beauty as its price, she stole his secret from him—bought it with those caresses you believe are only yours—and, when his honour was yielded up to her, turned him adrift with a laugh at his weakness. Ah! that is Miladi's way! So—I saw him shot one sunny summer dawn; with the balls in his throat, fired by a volley of his own Cuirassiers. Politically, we owed her much; personally, I never in my soul could trust the woman who betrayed Hugo."
Erceldoune shook through all his limbs; the spasm not alone of rage but of a more cruel emotion. ​The tale bad too cióse a likeness with her own self-accusing confession, her own keenness of remorse, not to bear a burden of possibility with it—a hideous surface of truth which made it impossible it should be cast away as calumny. Yet through the dizzy misery that came upon him he grasped one thought still foremost of all—to defend her.
"Is that all you stayed me to tell?" he asked. "It was not worth your while. I have no heed for libels."
"It is not all. I know well that my words are wasted, and that you think me a slanderer for them: that is a matter of course. Hugo thought me the same when I told him what the tenderness of his imperial mistress would prove worth. I will not strain your patience longer; let us keep close to one fact—the attempt upon your life. You deny the association of Idalia Vassalis with that crime?"
"I deny it— utterly."
His voice had a harsh vibration in it like the tone of one who speaks under unbearable physical suffering. He denied it in her name; but whilst he did so there ate like fire into him the remembrance of that horror, that remorse, that passion, with which she had looked upon the Greek, and held him from his vengeance. With his last breath he would have ​declared her guiltless; with his last thought held her so; yet the shadow of guilt fell on her, and he could not drive from her the taint and the tarnish of its reproach.
"You do? She is indebted for your chivalry," resumed the slow, sweet voice of his companion. "I see how little you must ever have heard of the fínest mistress of intrigues that Europe holds, to yield it so unhesitatingly. Now bear with me a moment while I ask you why you are so certain that she had no share in the attack made on you?"
"Ask yourself. You know her."
"And you mean that none who do can doubt her being the proudest and the purest, as well as the fairest among women? Ah! but then I have passed by that stage; I knew her by repute long before I ever saw her face. Your reasons for thinking her both innocent and ignorant of your attempted assassination are these: that she was on the spot at the time you were shot down; that she saved your life, and concealed the action even from yourself, allowing it to be believed that Moldavian herdsmen rescued you; that you chased the leader of the band as far as the gardens of her villa at Constantinople, and there lost sight of him, though the walls of the gardens were so disposed that he could only have been ​concealed within them, if not in the house itself; that she invited you to spend many hours alone with her in her Eastem hermitage, and so spent them that she found little difficulty in making you believe her all she would; that she then sought to throw you off by leaving you abruptly without any clue to her movements; and that when you persisted, against her wish, in seeking her, you found her, first the associate, and a little later the fellow-prisoner, with the men of that very party of extreme liberalists to whom you have always attributed the murderous onslaught made on you. These are your reasons for holding her innocent of all treason to you; they would not be very weighty evidences in law and in logic."
As the chain of circumstances uncoiled link by link in the terse, unadorned words, it seemed to tighten in bands of iron about the heart of the man who trusted not less than he loved her. His face changed terribly as all the force of meaning and of circumstance allayed itself against her, and the vague doubts, that he had strangled in their birth as blasphemies against her, stood out in unveiled language. A dogged, savage, sullen darkness lowered on his features; it had never been on them before then; it was a ferocity wholly akin to his nature, hardened and embittered by the knowledge of his ​own powerlessness to repel or to refute the evidence arraigned. They were but facts which were quoted—facts not even distorted in the telling; the inference drawn from them was the inevitable one, however his loyalty to her disowned it. He felt driven to bay; he was fettered to inaction by the knowledge that on him alone her safety hung; he was weighted to silence by the memories which thronged on him of her own acts and words, of that poignant remorse which had sunk so deeply into her nature, of that self-condemnation which had so unsparingly condemned her. Yet amidst all he never hesitated in her defence, and his eyes fastened on her accuser with a steady unyielding gaze.
"I am no casuist and no rhetorican; you are both. Once for all—no more words. If you have been her friend, you are a traitor; if you have been her foe, you are a slanderer. Either way, one word more, and I will choke you like a dog."
"An unworthy and a coarse threat. What falsehood have I told you yet? I named but facts."
"Your outline might be fact. It was your colour was the lie."
"I think not. I can prove to you that your mistress was in the secret of your assassius."
"And your motive in that?"
​The lion-like eyes of Erceldoune literally blazed their fire into those that met them with unchanged serenity. There were volumes in the three words; all of distrust, disbelief, hatred, and scorn that his heart held for the one who had turned counsellor to him. Their sting pierced deep; but the wound of it was covered.
"My motive is this. A party with which I was to a great extent associated, yet from whose measures I very often dissented, implicated me by their extreme opinions in many courses that I utterly disapproved, and implicated my name still oftener unknown to me. I am entirely against all violence and all fraud—not from virtue—I do not affect virtue—but from common sense. Politically, much is permissible——"
"I am not inclined to hear your creed. I make no doubt that it is an elastic one! Your motive?"
"You pass it in your haste. I endeavour to explain it. I became entangled in earliest youth with men whose association has been the greatest injury of my career. I have never been able wholly to free myself from their influence, but I have long ceased to countenance their more unscrupulous intrigues—not from virtue, I distinctly say, from policy. It is a lack of sagacity that produces all crimes; nothing ​else; except an excess of animalism, which produces the same results, because it amounts to the same thing."
"Spare your ethics! Your motive?"
"Springs from the inability of my late associates to discern the kinship of crime and foolishness. When I first heard of your robbery, I had my suspicions; I was baffled in my inquines; I believed that men with whom my name was connected were concerned in it, but they feared that I should learn their complicity, and for some time succeeded in concealing it. Recently—indeed, the day before the affair of Antina—I found my suspicions right. I am ashamed to say that I have traced that melodramatic villany to those who call themselves of my party, although I have fully and finally broken off all collusion with them. In a word, I have felt disgraced that men with whom I have been allied should have been capable of such an outrage, and so much reparation as can lie in the acknowledgment is of course your immediate due. I care little how you revenge yourself, so that your vengeance maybe the executor of mine for the deception passed on me. Moreover, in leaming the truth of the crime you suffered from, I learnt what you have a right to know, since you believe the Countess Yassalis worthy the surrender ​of your own life, which is probably the cost you will pay sooner or later for your loyal efforts to save her."
Erceldoune breathed fast and heavily; a sickening sense of mystery, of treachery, of evil, of half-truths told him only that by them he might be led deeper into error, was upon him.
"Had I twenty lives, she commands them," he said briefly. "Say out your meaning—honestly, if you can."
"Very simply, then;—the woman to whom you would give a score of lives, if you had them, has from first to last sheltered your assassin from you, and has counterfeited tenderness for you that she might gain an influence strong enough to enable her to turn aside your vengeance from the only man Idalia Vassalis ever loved."
The words were cold, clear, incisive, calm with the tranquillity of unwarped truth. Under them he staggered süghtly, like one who reels under a deep knife-thrust; his hands fell once more on his torturer's shoulders, swaying him dizzily to and fro.
"Own that you lie, or by——"
The closing path rattled hard in his throat; in the moment he could have choked her traducer dead with no more thought, no more remorse, than men ​strangle the adder that has destroyed the life t]iey treasure closest.
Vane, deficient neither in courage nor in supple strength, shook himself loose with a rapid movement, and lifting the pistol from the sands, held it out with a grave, graceful gesture, as though the weapon were a branch of palm.
"Take it back, and lay me dead with it, if you find that I tell you untruth."
"If!"
"Yes—'if.' I am no slanderer weaving a legend; no gossiper trafficking in cobwebs I tell you a hard, unglazed, pitiless fact; there are many such in the history of the woman you imagine has so stain- less, so martyred, so royal a soul! Take back your weapon, and use it if I play you false. You are longing to kill me now—I see that in your look; but you are a lion, not a fox, and so you will not kill in the dark. Make it day about you, broad noonday, by which you can read the depths of your mistress's heart, and then—if she prove guiltless and I a liar—then compénsate yourself as you will."
Erceldoune answered nothing. A dusky reddened light was glowing in the darkness of his eyes, the light that glows in a dog's when the longing to seize and rend is rousing in it; his blood felt like fire; the ​dawn seemed to glow like night; the corrosion of a jealous hate was in him, and in its evil all other memories were drowned, all desires quenched, all loyalty loosened.
The other touched him as he turned and strode over the wet stone-strewn beach.
"Wait. Where do you go?"
"I go to 'make it daylight,' as you say—daylight strong enough to unbare your villany."
"But first you must hear——"
"I have heard too much."
"Stop an instant. Remember, I have known the story of Idalia as you will never know it."
"The more you know, the more honour should bind you into silence."
"Madman! When I tell you——"
"Mad I may be. Rather that than a traitor."
"It is a traitress of whom we speak."
Erceldoune's eyes flashed a strange glance into his; it was scorching as fire, yet it had in it a terrible appeal.
"Take care what you do. You will make me kill you."
"No. But I will make you prove my words truth or slander."
"I go to do it."
​"You think you do; you do not. You go to hear a few soft words from lips that have duped the subtlest intriguers in Europe, and to believe every phrase that they breathe with a kiss upon yours, as though it were witnessed by angels! I tell you that my honour shall not rest upon so wayward and so frail a thing as her caprice of invention."
"And I tell you that her honour shall not rest upon the tongues of traitors. You have dared to say she shielded my assassin——"
"I say more;—I say she loved him. No! Take your hand off; you can seek my life later on; at present you must save your own, if you do not want a Bourbon bullet through your lungs for this woman who has fooled you, as she fools us all. There is one man, one only, that your mistress ever loved. She has wearied of him now, found him a thorn in her side, learned to hate him as such women can hate, drawn all the fragrance from her rose, and thrown the old withered leaves away—only the leaves are poisoned, and they cling, they cling! One man she loved, and she lavished her gold on him, and she reared her ambitions for him, and she was half his slave and half his sovereign, while she was for all the world beside that beautiful, cruel, wanton, pitiless, divine, and devilish sorceress that we know. She ​has had many lovers, but she duped them all. This man she never duped. A panther, with a velvet eye and a glorious beauty; a sun-god, with the soul of a fox and the heart of a carrion-crow—nothing more. But who shall measure the passionate fancies of a woman?—and such a woman? Well, she loved him; and he was your assassin. No way so sure to shield him, as to bring you under her dominance! It may be, it is true, that whilst fooling you for his sake, you dethroned him, and she grew in earnest, and it is he who is now to be thrown ad leones. It may be; Miladi has had many such caprices! That you may know I say truth, and not falsehood, go and put but two questions to her. Ask her first, who the man is who left you for dead in the mountains. Ask her last, what the tie is that binds her to the companion of her life, Conrad Phaulcon."
Erceldoune had listened, without a word, without a breath, his face with that tempestuous darkness lowered on it, and a great horror, a great misery gazing vacantly out from his dilated eyes. Yet the loyalty and the faith in him were stronger than all tests that wning them; he struggled to keep his hold upon them, and to keep them pure, unsoiled, unswerving, as men may strain to guard their honour unwarped, when all the dizzy world about them ​reeks with infamy, and presses them on to crime.
"I will ask her," he said, hoarsely, while his lips were white and dry as dust. "Not to prove her purity, but to prove your shame."
Then, without another syllable, he turned and set his face southward, and went by great swift steps, that sank into the sand, backward to where he had left her—backward, with the Sicilian sea lying silent and untroubled by his course, and the sun rising higher from over the red wall of rock. Belief in what he had heard there was none, even yet, in his heart; off the brave allegiance of his rash nobility the evil fell, finding no grappling-place, no resting-lair; but on him a heavy, breathless, deadly oppression lay, and the first fear that his bold life had ever known ran like a current of ice through all his veins. The poison of doubt had been breathed on him, and its plague spot widened and deepened, let him rend the canker out as he would.
Once he stretched out his arms to the vacant air as he went on in his loneliness, as though he saw her beauty, and drew it to him, though death should come with it.
"Oh, my love, my love!" he muttered ​unconsciously, in the longing of his soul. "What matter what you be, so you are mine!"
It was in the blindness of the senses that he spoke the mere idolatrous desire for the loveliness that to him had no likeness upon earth; the cruel, intoxicated, fiery riot of the "love, lithe and fierce" that counts no cost to itself or to its prey, and that would plunge into an eternity of pain to purchase one short hour of its joy. A moment, and the nobler emotion in him rose; the perfect faith, without which his one idolatry would be but brutalised abandonment, rebuked him; his head sank, his eyes saw the grey, glooming sea, through a hot rush of tears.
"God forgive me so much sin to her as lay in the mere thought!" he murmured as he went; to think that the lips which had lain on his had ever breathed the kisses which betray, to think that the heart which had beaten upon his had ever throbbed to the warmth of guilty pleasure, seemed to him a blasphemy against her that was sin itself. For, even though those lips should be his, even though that heart should beat for him, if there were past treachery or present infidelity in her life, she would be dead to him—dead, more cruelly than though the steel had pierced the fairness of her breast, and the golden trail of her hair been ​drawn through the trampled dust of blood-stained streets.
If truth abode not with her, and the fealty of honour, she was dead to him.
"If her eyes shrink from mine, let the seas cover me!" he prayed in his soul; and the length of the shore seemed endless to him, and the tawny stretch of the beach to be the waste of a desert, and the surf, as it flowed up and broke at his feet, to force his steps backward and backward, and to bind his limbs as with lead.
For many moments the man who had tortured him stood motionless, following with his gaze the retreating shadow. The grave patience, the genile tranquillity, the subdued regret his features had worn throughout their interview, passed away; a thousand emotions, a thousand shades of thought, of feeling, and of suffering, swept over them; alone there, with no living thing near him save the white gulls resting on the curl of the waves, he had no need to wear a mask, and he endured as sharp a misery as any he had dealt.
The deadliest pang in it was shame; the carking jealous, bitter shame that where he had failed another should have won; the knowledge that the ​love borne her by the man who had left him waa to the love that he himself had borne as the purity and value of purged gold against a pile of tinsel. It stilled in something the tortures of jealousy, it sated in something the thirst of hatred, to cast—were it only ín thought—irony and invective, and scornful calumny upon his rival; it waa natural to him to despise with all the contempt of his fine and subtle intelligence a character that its own frankness and loyalty and high courage left naked to all poisoned shafts, and that was so rashly liberal in faith, so unwisely incapable of falsehood, so blindly and wildly careless to how it wrought its own weal and woe. Yet the most carking wound of all that now ached in him was the latent sense of superiority in the one who had supplanted him, who had succeeded where he had been vanquished, and whom he had regarded, with the cold disdain of a flippant wit, as holding all his worth and merit in an athlete's mere physical perfection of thews and sinews. Steeled against all such emotion as he was, the greatness and the nobleness of Erceldoune's faith forced themselves on him; they wrung a reverence out of him despite himself, and they dealt him a mortal pain; pain that was in one sense vanity-moved, since it would no longer leave him the one solace of scorn for his rival, ​but a pain that sprang from, and that moved, a deeper, better thing,—a recognition, tardy and unwilling though it was, of some greatness he had missed in missing truth; some base and guilty cowardice that he had stooped to when once truth had passed from off his lips, banished with a scoff as only fit for fools.
Beyond jealousy, beyond hatred, beyond every other feeling in him as he stood looking southward at the great shaft of russet stone that screened the pathway of his rival from his sight, there was on him then an intense humiliation. Beside the sincerity, the fealty, the self-surrender, the brave patience of a generous trust, his own subtleties looked so unworthy, his own fine crafb so poor; another conld render her a love that deemed life itself well lost for her, and he—he was her traitor!
There was enough of honour and enough of tenderness in him for the contrast to strike into him, hard, sharp, swift as steel. This man whom he had contemned with all the mockery of his brilliant mind had grown great in his sight simply through the ennobling influence of a mighty passion and a heroic faith. He still cursed these with his lips as insanity, as idiocy, but in his heart he knew their greatness—a greatness that he had by his own choice, his own act, put far from him for ever.
​Away in the world again be would again cleave to his old creeds, and deem this moment womanish weakness; but here in the loneliness of the morning, under the sting of an intolerable torment, the man he hated was great in bis sight, and he himself was base exceedingly. Where he stood, with no eyes on bim that could read bis shame, a red flush slowly stole over the wanness of his face; none living could have brought it there, but the scourge of his own thoughts did.
For though he had fallen willingly, the fall seemed to him hideously vile; as in the grey, cold, unpitying light of a dawn that brings him no slumber, the sins and the burdens that a man counts recklessly, and bears lightly, in the crowds of the daytime and the dissipations of the night, stand out in their true colour, and grow unendurable in his sight and his memory.
But the better instinct too soon perished; there was passion in him, and passion choked conscience; he could not have told whether he most loved or most hated this woman, but whichever emotion swayed him furthest, the jealousy that he had so often laughed at as a barbarism of a bygone age was born of both, and in its fire quenched all other things. He felt for her that covetous, sensual, ​pitiless growth of mingled envy, admiration, and ambition, which, long after all tenderness has perished out of it, will retain all its imperious egotism, and all its thirst for sweeping destruction of everything preferred before it. An acríd bitterness against her for her príde, her power, her keen wit, and her fearless intellect, had been blent with the earliest hours of his subjugation to her; and this served now to strengthen tenfold the fierce, mute, aching impatience with which he now mused on the possibility that this woman, so cold, so merciless, so full of mockery for him, had ever stooped to the weakness she had often played with, and so often rídiculed.
"Is it possible! Is it possible!" he muttered, while his delicate lips sbook and worked in the anguish which, in a youth, would have been spent in tears. "She—so victorious, so ironic, so chill, so world-worn, love for sake of a wanderer's eagle glances, a rough-rider's lion-graces! She!—a woman who could fill a throne, and rule it single-handed. Psbaw! she is a voluptuary, she is a coquette, she has her caprices—Miladi! And he is handsome as a gladiator. She loves him—oh yes— she loves him for six months, six weeks, six days. And what price will he pay for the paradise?"
​The venomous words were murmured to the solitary shore; even thus, and alone, it was a cruel solace to him to taunt her with those sneers, to soil what he had lost for ever, to libel what he envied. It could not harm her thus to slander her, where none made answer, but he felt a relief in it, a joy kindred to that with which he had sold her into the hands of Giulio Villaflor.
Moreover, he believed what he said; partially because his suffering made him cling to whatsoever could lessen it; partially because the character of Idalia had escaped him in many of its hues, keen and varied as were the worldly experiences by whose light he had first set himself to read it. He had known of her through a thousand tongues ere ever he had looked upon her face; the poison-mists breathed from their distortions had never wholly faded from before her in his sight. Such a woman needs a mind singularly truthful and singularly liberal to understand her aright. Truth he had not in him, and to all talent save his own he was illiberal; thus he had failed in following the complex meanings of her life and of her thoughts. He had uttered but what he held himself when he had said that
beautiful she is,
The serpent's voice less subtle than her kiss,
The snake but vanquished dost; and she will draw
Another host from heaven to break heaven's law.
But he had withheld what was not less true, that it was because she had this sin of merciless destruction in her, this serpent skill of tempting, this guilty power over the fates and souls of men, that he had first been fascinated to her dominion, and first seen in her a mistress by whom and with whom he could reach all to which his restless and insatiable ambition aspired, and aspired in vain.
"Will he believe?" he wondered, as his eyes vacantly rested on the sands where the footprints of his rival had sunk. "Not he. What man would belíeve the witnessing voices of the whole world if she once whispered them false? And she pays him, too, with love-words, with the sweetness of her lips, with the touch of hair on his cheek;—ah, God!"
He could have thrown himself on the sands and bidden the sea surge up and cover him, when he thought of that caress which already had been the reward of the man who had succoured her. And he—he who betrayed her, what had he won by the treachery?
"Revenge at least," he thought; and as he thought so his head sank, his limbs grew rigid, his ​chest rose and fell with a single voiceless sob. He only remembered that revenge was valueless, since revenge could not bring him the lips that he longed for, the beauty that he desired as the ice-bound earth desires summer.
Valueless?—yet not so. It could not give her to him, but it could withhold her from any other.
A young, shy, gentle, little sea-bird, whose wings as yet could scarcely bear it, rose at his feet as he mused, and fluttered a hand's breadth, and then trembled and fell, panting and glancing up with its bright, dove-like, brown eye. He took it savagely and wrung the slender snowy throat, and flung it out on to the crest of a breaker—dead. He had never before been cruel to birds or beasts; such fierce and wanton slaughter was not natural to him, but in this moment it had a horrible pleasure in its brutality. He had subdued all his impulses of hate so long, it sated them, if ever so slightly, to wreak them on that innocent thing. He had seen the dying eyes glaze and fill with misty fear with a gladness he would have believed impossible; he wanted to see hers fade out thus; to stand by and see them fade with just that look of terror and of helplessness;—eyes that had given such smiling scorn to him, such passionate eloquence to others. ​He watched the tumbled heap of white ruffled plumage washed in and out by the wind-moved caprices of the "tideless sea."
"I can destroy her as easily as I killed that bird," be thought, and the worst instincts of his nature had their sway once more, as his mouth laughed with his slight, soft smile. "Barbaric! Terribly barbaric!" be murmured. "And I was so wise in my diplomacy with him; I told him only truth. Talleyrand is right. Truth is so safe and so sure!"
Then leaving the dead curlew floating on the water's play he went whither he came.
"Monsignore will rally enough to sign an order," be mused. "A half-score soldiers, and they will be netted. Miladi's passion will not be smooth in its course!"