CHAPTER IV.
"N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS?"
Even in the silent heart of the Carpathian woods two had heard that shout of mortal extremity.
They were but a woman and a wolf-hound, resting together under the shade of the pines higher up, where the head of the torrent tumbled and splashed from rock to rock, its sheet of foam glittering in the warmth of the risen day. They heard it;and the woman rose with a stag-like grace of terror, blent with a haughty challenge of such weakness, and the dog, with his bristling mane erect, and his head lifted in the air, woke the echoes with a deep-mouthed bay. Both listened—all was still;—then she laid her hand on the hound's shaggy coat, and gave him a single word of command. He waited, suiting the scent borne to him on the wind, then, with his muzzle to the earth, sprang off; she followed him; the lights and shadows from the pine boughs above flung, flickering and golden, on her uncovered hair; a woman fair as the morning, with the free imperial step of the forest deer, and the beauty of the classic and glorious south; the beauty of Aspasia of Athens, of Lucrezia of Rome.
A few short seconds, and the hound plunged down into the pass, baying loud in fear and fury, as though he tracked the trail of the crime. The birds flew up with whirling tumult from the meal, and wheeled aloft, scared and scattered; the vulture that had her talons tangled in the hair of the fallen man, and was stretching her plumed throat to deal her first aim at his sightless eyes, taking wing slowly, leaving her prey reluctantly. The woman fell on her knees beside him where he lay across the body of his slaughtered mare, as lifeless to all semblance as the animal.
She knew that she was in the presence of crime, and she believed herself in that of death; this man had been slain foully in the heart of the forest, and she was alone, in the mountain ravine that had seen the guilt done and the blow dealt, alone with one whom his enemies had left to perish and lie unburied for the hawks and crows to tear. The night had witnessed the sin and shrouded it; she and the sunny light of day had tracked and found it. And the sickness of its guilt was on in all its ghastliness, it all its secret craven vileness.
One thought alone seemed left her; was she too late, or could this human life, even in its last hour, be saved, be called back even though it ebbed away?
She felt for the beating of his heart; a quick shudder ran through all her frame—her hand was wet with the blood that had soaked through linen and velvet, and flowed in its deep stream from his breast. Yet she did not shrink, but pressed it there, seeking for the throbbing of the life; the pulse beat slowly, faintly still, beneath her touch—he lived even now. The carrion birds were poised on the boughs, or settled on the rocky ledges, waiting for the prey which soon or late must come to them; the hound was tearing up the moss with his muzzle to the earth; she called him to her; the dog was her friend, her guard, her slave—he came, reluctantly, looking backward at the mosses he had uprooted in his thirst for the scent they gave; she drew him to her, and signed him to look at the dying man where he was stretched across his horse; then pointed to the westward with some words in Silesian. The hound looked upward an instant with earnest, eloquent eyes, trying to read her will —then, at his full speed, obeyed her, and went down the ravine; she had sent from her her sole defender, while, for aught she knew, the murderers of the man she sought to save might return to the scene of their outrage, and deal with her as they had dealt with him. But cowardice was scarcely more in her blood than in his to whose succour she had come with the light of the morning, and whose face was turned upward white and rigid, in mute appeal, in voiceless witness, stern, as one who has fallen in fierce contest, but calm as though he lay in the tranquillity of sleep. She gazed at him thus, till hot tears gathered in her eyes, and fell upon his forehead; he was a stranger, and not of her land; she knew not how his death had been dealt, nor in what cause he had fallen, whence he came, nor what his life had been; but his face touched to the heart all of pity there was in her, where he lay blind and unconscious in the glory of the sun, though many had said that pity was a thing unknown to her. The falling of her tears upon his brow, or the touch of her hand as it swept hack the hair from his temples, and fanned his temples with a fragrant bough of pine to freshen the sultry heat of the noon-day, awoke him to some returning life; a heavy sigh heaved his chest, he stirred wearily, and his lips moved without sound. She knew what he must need—all of comfort or of aid that she could give—and folding one of the broad dock leaves cup-shape, she filled it at the bed of the torrent, and, raising his head, held the cold water to his parched and colourless lips.
Unconsciously, instinctively, he drank and drank, slaking the intolerable thirst; she filled it three times at the channel of the river, and he drained in new existence from that green forest-cup, from that fresh and icy water, held to him by his ministering angel. Then his head sank back, lying against her, resting on her arm; his eyes had not unclosed, he was senseless still, save that he was vaguely conscious of a sense of coolness, languor, rest, and peace; and the vultures on the rocks above looked down with ravenous impatience, waiting till the watcher should weary of her vigil, and their prey be their own again.
She would not have left him now though she should have died with him. She knew the lawless brutality of the mountain hordes of gipsies and of plunderers, well enough to know that in all likelihood those who had left him for dead might return to strip him of all that was of value on his person, and would slay her, without remorse or mercy, lest she should bear testimony to them and to their work; but to desert him and leave him to the lost of the carrion-birds and the torrid heat of the noon never passed in thought even before her—whatever fate should come of it, she had cast in her lot with his.
The sun fell through the tracery of firs upon the rushing water, the mosses red with blood, the black flock of the waiting birds, and the motionless form of Erceldoune, stretched across his slaughtered horse, his head resting, as if in the serenity of sleep, upon the bosom of the woman who had saved him, while above bent the magnificence of her face, with a golden light on its mournful splendour, and the softness of compassion in the lustre of the eyes that watched him in his unconsciousness.
Time wore on, the sun rose to noon height, the heat grew more intense, and they were still alone; he lay as in a trance still, but with that vague sense of coolness and of peace, all that he knew or sought to know; once his eyes unclosed, weary and blind, and saw, as in a vision, the face as of an angel above him. He had not strength to rouse, power to wonder, consciousness to know or ask whether he slept, or dreamed, or beheld but the phantom of his own brain; but his eyes gazed upward at the loveliness that looked down on him, with the warmth of mornig on it, and it pierced through the mists of death and the chaos of unconsciousness, and sank into his sight and heart, never again to be forgotten. While the sun was at its zenith and the day rolled onward, he was conscious, through all his anguish, despite all his stupor, of the fragrance of leaves that fanned his brow and stirred the heated air with southing movement, of the gentle murmur of river-waters sounding through the stillness, and—ever when his eyes unclosed and looked upward on the radiance of the day—of the face that he saw in the luminance of the light, even as the face of a guardian angel. And he knew no more in the dulness of lulled pain, in the languor of profound exhaustion.
The loud hay of a hound broke the silence when noon had long passed, the rapid rush of the dog's feet scoured over the rocks above and down the winding path; he had known that he had been bidden to seek succour, and had left those he first met no peace till they had followed him-two Moldavian peasants, herdsmen or stable-helpers, who had understood the meaning of the hound's impatient bark and whine.
At the sound of their steps she moved from the wounded man, and rose, with the grace which made her every action beautiful as the wild antelope's, imperial as a sovereign's in her court.
The Moldavians listened with profound reverence whilst she spoke, and without pause or question hastened to obey her command; deeds of violence were not so rare at the foot of the Carpathians, in the heart of the Principalities, as to excite either the horror or the wonder of the passive serfs; they went without a word to their work, wrenched down the long boughs of the pines, stripped them, lashed the bare poles together, and covered them with lesser branches of the firs, overstrewn in turn by the yielding velvet moss of the forest, till they had formed a rude stretcher, rough in form but fragrant and easy, then they laid him on it, lifting him with kindly gentleness. At the first movement which raised him, and the sharp agony it caused, careful and not untender though it was, he fainted; they might have taken him where they would; he knew nothing. The Moldavians prepared to raise the litter on their shoulders, then looked to her:
"Home, your Excellency?"
She stalled, and stood silent; then over the light and beauty of her face swept a shadow, as of bitter memory.
"No—no!" she answered them, in their own Moldavian tongue. "Go to the convent of Monastica; it is nearer, and they will tend him better there. If any can save him, the Sisters will."
"And we are to tell them?"
"Tell him where you found this stranger, lying as one dead, and powerless to say who are his assassins; do not give my name, or speak of me; that he is wounded, and alone, and in need, will be enough to gain him care and pity at Monastica. When you have left him in safety at the convent, come back here; you shall bury the horse, it shall not be food for vultures. Now go—each moment is precious. I shall know with what fidelity you serve him, and shall reward you as you do it well."
Yet, though she had bidden them go, she stood still, looking down on the litter where Erceldoune lay; she had saved this man's life at peril of her own, yet they would probably never meet again; she had redeemed him from amidst the dead, yet he would have no memory of her, no knowledge that she had been with him in the hour of his extremity, and rescued him from his grave. Her eyes dwelt on him in a silent farewell, and a certain tenderness came over all her face as she bowed her head, while her lips moved with the words of a Greek prayer and benediction over the life of which she knew nothing, yet which in some sense had been made her own by every law of gratitude for a great deliverance.
Then she signed to the bearers to raise the litter and go onwards. They wound slowly with their burden up the narrow pass, and she sank down on the fallen trunk levelled by his assassins for their barricade, her rich dress sweeping the blood-stained mosses, her head resting on her hands that were twisted in the lustrous masses of her hair; her eyes, with their mournful brilliance, their luminance fathomless as that of tropic skies by night, gazing into the depths of the torrent foaming below in its black bed; and at her side the Silesian hound, his mane erect, his head uplifted, his feet pawing the turf, as though he scented the blood-trail, and panted for command to hunt the evil-doers to their lair.
A small antique chamber, with grey walls and snow-white draperies; an ebony crucifix with a marble Christ hanging above an altar draped with velvet, and broidered with gold, and fragrant with lilies in silver cups; a painted Gothic window through which were seen stretches of green pine-woods and golden haze beyond: and an intense stillness through which pealed, softly and subdued, the chant of the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi; these were what Erceldoime opened his eyes upon, and saw, and heard, when he awoke from a long trance that had been death itself for aught he knew, and through which he had only been conscious of burning torture, of intolerable pain, of mellow strains of music floating through his brain, and of one face of divinest beauty bent above him whilst he lay bound in bonds of iron, in swathes of fire. For he had been delirious for many days in the Convent of Monastica.
His life had hung on a thread; the ball was in his breast, and the fever of his wounds, combined with the weakness consequent on loss of blood, had kept him in sharpest peril through all the rest of that sultry autumn. But the bullet had missed his lungs, and the intense vitality and resistance in him brought him through all which would have slain at a blow a weaker and less hardily trained frame. The skill in leechcraft of the Sisters of Monastica was proverbial in the Principalities; women who loved him could not have tended him more tenderly and unweariedly than did those high-born recluses who had sought the solitades of the dense Moldavian pine-forests, in a conventual community different to those of any other country. He was saved, and awoke one sunlit evening, conscious and calm, gazing dreamily and wonderingly at the dead Christ on the altar, and the narrow arched window, with its glimpse of plain and forest through the slit, while the Agnus Dei pealed on the stillness of the chamber. He thought himself dreaming still.
To his bedside came a nun, pale, gentle, with dove-like eyes, a woman no longer young. Erceldoune looked at her dimly; the past was a blank, yet familiar as the chamber was to him, and unreal his own personality, he vaguely desired and missed what he had seen throughout his delirium—what he did not behold on awakening. And the first words he spoke were:
"Where is she?"
The Sister shook her head, looking on him with a compassionate welcoming smile.
"I cannot understand, my son. I can speak a little French, but you must not talk yet, you are too weak."
All European languages, most of the Eastern, had been as familiar to him as his own. He repeated his question impatiently in the nun's tongue:
"Where is she?"
"Who, my son?"
"Who? A woman—or an angel—who has been with me always."
"None have been with you, my son, save myself and those of my Order."
He made a faint intolerant sign of dissent; and his eyes wandered over the place where he lay, in weary search, missing in consciousness and in reality the face which had been ever before him in delirium.
"Where am I, then?"
"In our convent at Monastica. You were found all but lifeless in the forest by two peasants, who brought you hither. You have been in sore peril, my son, but, by the blessing of the most holy Mother of God, we have wrought your cure. But keep silence, and rest now, yon are very weak,"
"Weak?—I?"
He repeated the word in marvelling incredulity; he who had stood face to face with the lion in the sultry African night, and measured his strength with the desert king's, and prevailed,—he who from his childish years upward, through a long, and daring, and adventurous life, had never known his force to fail, his power to desert him,—was unable to realise that he could be laid low and powerless as any reed levelled by the wind! Instinctively he lifted his right arm to raise himself—that right arm which had never failed him yet in battle, in storm, in the death-grapple, or in any blow dealt in love of justice, in hatred of dishonour—it fell nerveless and broken. Then he realised that his strength was gone; and for the sole time in his life, Erceldoune could have turned his face to the wall and wept like a woman.
"I remember," he said, faintly. "I remember now. The cowards shot me down, and she saved me. Tell them I destroyed 'the papers;' but"
The words died away unintelligible to the nun, his head fell back,^and his eyes closed; he felt how utter was his weakness. He lay exhausted, his thoughts wandering over all that past of peril which had long been a blank to him, and which now slowly and by degrees returned to memory, striving to realise what manner of thing this could be, this calamity of stricken strength which his life had never before dreaded or conceived. Sweeping like fire through his blood, and filling his frame as with fresh life, there came with consciousness recollection of the murderous gang who had stretched him there, and fierce, natural thirst for vengeance on his cowardly foes, for the hour of reckoning when he should rise and deal with that cravon womanish brute, whose gentle mellow laugh had bidden them "kill the Border Eagle," and whose shot had brought him to the earth.
A fair and open antagonist Erceldoune would honour, and forgive frankly and generously from his heart; but to the coward treachery that struck him in the dark, he swore that death itself should not be more pitiless or more inexorable than his wrath.
The shadows lengthened through the painted window, the music ceased from the convent chapel, the nun left him, and knelt before the altar lost in prayer; it was intensely still, no sound was upon the air save that from the distance the bells of one of the Moldavian monasteries were chiming the vespers—it was a pause as strange in his strong, rapid, varied, richly-coloured life of action and adventure as that which we feel when we enter the shaded silent aisles of some cathedral, and the doors close behind us, shutting out all the accustomed crowds, the busy whirl, and the swift press, and the hot sunlight of the city we have left without. He had never known in all the years of his existence that profound exhaustion, that death-like prostration, in which all vitality seems suspended, and in which a lulled, dreamy, listless meditation is all of which we are left capable; he knew them now as he lay gazing at the altar, with its dead Christ and its white river-lilies, and the bowed form of the kneeling nun, while all sense of pain, of weakness, of thirst for the just vengeance he would rise and reach drifted from him, merged and lost in one memory. A memory luminous, angel-like, as are the imaginations which fill the mind of painters with shapes divine and visions of beauty, but such as had never entered the life or the thoughts of this man till now, when, in the sunset stillness of the lonely oratory at Monastica he saw ever before him, with the depths of an unspeakable compassion in her fathomless eyes, the face of the woman who had saved him.
Where was she ?
He questioned ceaselessly for many days each of the Order who came to his bedside and tended him with skilled care, and brought him fruits and sherbet, and prayed for him at the altar, where the lilies were placed fresh with every dawn, and the dead God looked down with serene and mournful smile. He insisted that a woman had come to him in the defile when he lay there dying, and had given him water, and had saved him. They thought his persistence the remembrance of some delirious hallucination, some dream which haunted him, and which he could not sever from reality. He saw the Moldavian serfs, who came each day during his danger to the convent for news of him; and, whilst he rewarded them, interrogated them as to how and where they had discovered him. They answered that a dog had led them to where he lay, and that they had seen that he was all but lifeless, and had made a litter of pine-boughs and brought him to the gates of Monastica for succour. When he pressed them, and insisted that a woman had been the first to rescue him, the Moldavians shook their heads; they had found him, and had brought him hither. They had barely more intelligence than that of a kindly good-humoured animal, and adhered doggedly to their statement; it was useless to question them; Erceldoune bade them be given half the gold pieces in his travelling-belt, and let them go. It was not his nature to pursue uselessly, nor to give expression to a futile annoyance or an unavailing disappointment; he was silent from that moment on the subject.
The nuns, with their Mother Superior, thought he had become convinced that his fancy was the phantom of his delirium, Erceldoune remained certain that no unreality, no mere vision fever begotten, would have been impressed as this was upon him; he remembered what it would have been wholly unlike him to have imagined. And this fugitive memory of one who had been his saviour in his extremity, yet who was lost to him on his awakening to consciousness, filled his thoughts unceasingly during the loll of his life in the solitudes of Monastica.
For many weeks he lay there in the antique quiet chamber, with the glimpse of hill and torrent seen through its single casement, and the cadence of the Angelus or the Pro Peccatis alone breaking the stillness at matins, mass, or vespers; the inaction, the imprisonment, the monotony, were as intolerable to him as to a fettered lion, for though solitude might be oftentimes his preference, it was ever the solitude of freedom, of action, and of the grandeur of desert wilds, he recovered slowly but surely, the science of the sisters and his own natural strength bringing him through in the teeth of imminent peril; but it was far into the autumn, and the pines were the only trees not bare in the Moldavian woods, when he rose with anything of his old power in his limbs, with anything of the old muscular force in his right arm, and breathed without pain, and was free to go back to the world of the living without danger.
Mean while, Europe rang for a space with his attempted assassination. A Queen's Messenger could not have been left for murdered, and English state papers of the first and most secret importance been waylaid by so singular and trained a conspiracy, without the outrage being of import, and rousing alike the wrath of his government and the speculations of all other Powers. That those who had stopped him were no ordinary assassins and marauders the object of their plunder showed; common banditti would have menaced his money, not his despatches. It seemed evident that his enemies had been men of considerable resources and power, that they had been well acquainted with his movements, and that their object had been political. Southern Europe was in the throes of revolt, and much of central and eastern Europe seething in intrigue; political gamesters would have counted one man's assassination a very little cost for the gain of political information and advantage in their unscrupulous rouge et noir.
Amidst all, the criminals remained untracked. Moldavia said she did all she could to discover and render them up to justice. Whether or not this were true, they were undiscovered; the little State was heavily mulcted for the outrage, and the perpetrators went scot free at large, the night and their masks having shrouded them, the pine-forests telling no tales, and the sole clue to their subsequent identification lying in Erceldoune's recognition by voice of their ringleader, as the vivacious and graceful bewailer for the sacrifice of crystallised violets, whom he had met at the Paris cafe.
The menace of England failed to track his assassins and bring them to their reckoning; but he swore that sooner or later his own vengeance should find them, and strike home to that tiger brute whose laugh he would know again though a score of years should have rolled away before they stood face to face.
"You bear no malice to your savage murderers, my son?" said the Abbess of Monastica to him, wistfully, one day, an aged woman, white-haired and venerable, gentle as a child, and unworldly as an infant, for she had taken the veil in her fourteenth year, and had never left the convent now that she had reached her seventieth, save on an occasional visit, as permitted by Moldavian rules, to the innocent festivities of Jassy.
"Malice, madam? No! I am not a woman!"
The Abbess looked at him wistfully still; the answer was affirmative, yet she was not wholly secure that this was the meek and lowly mercy which she sought to win from him.
Then yon forgive them, my son, and would remember, if you met them, the Lamb of God's injunction, 'If thy enemy smite thee on one cheek, give him the other,' and would refrain from all vengeance—would you not?"
Erceldoune's hand came down on the massive oak table standing by him with a force that shook it to its centre.
"By my honour, madam, I would remember it so, that the life should not be left in one of them! Forgive? Ay! when I have turned dastard like them."
The Mother Superior gazed at him with perplexed trouble in her eyes; the childlike innocent woman could not understand the strong unfettered nature of the man, with its deep passions and its fiery honour, which made the low serpent meanness of malice as impossible and incomprehensible to him as it made the chastisement of cowardice and the vengeance of treachery instinctive and imperative, resistless as an impulse as it was sacred as a duty.
"But forgiveness is God-like, my son."
"May-be, madam; but I am mortal."
"But it is a human duty."
"To an open, gallant foe, madam—yes! I will render it him to-morrow, and honour him from my soul the better he fights me and the harder he strikes; but the serpent that stings me in the dark I set my heel on, for the vermin he is, and serve God and man when I strangle him!"
The venerable Abbess sighed; she had ministered to him through his unconsciousness and through his suffering, she had seen him bear torture with a silent endurance that seemed to her superhuman in its heroism, and she had wept over the stately stature, levelled like a cedar felled by the axe, and the superb strength brought down to worse than a child's weakness, till she had felt for him something of a mother's tenderness, and found it hard to urge him to love and to pardon his injurers. Moreover, Mother Veronica was no casuist.
"It must be bitter, my son, I know," she murmured, "and the evil spirit is strong in us, and fearful to subdue; but one who suffered a deadlier wrong than thine forgave the traitor and the murderer, though Judas sold him to the Cross."
Erceldoune gave a movement of impatience, and the muscles of his arm straightened as though by sheer instinct of longing to "deliver from the shoulder."
"Pardon me, holy mother, I am no theologian! But I know this, that if there had been a touch of loyalty and fealty among the eleven left, that scoundrel of Iscariot would not have lived till the morrow to hang himself. If I had been in Galilee, he would have had a lunge of steel through his lungs, and died a traitor's death!"
So startling a view of apostolic duty had never penetrated the sacred walls of the convent of Monastica; the whole range of her instruction from the Church had never given her a rule by which to deal with such a novel article of creed, and she sat silent, gazing at him with a wistful bewilderment, wondering what the sainted Remigius had replied when King Clovis gave him a similar answer in the old days of Gaul.
Erceldoune, who felt a sincere gratitude to the aged woman who had showed him a mother's tenderness and care throughout a lengthened peril, bent to her mih gentle reverence, which sat well upon him.
Pardon me, madam, I spoke something roughly, and men should not talk of these matters to women. There is one broad ground on which we can meet and understand one another, that of your goodness to a stranger, and his sincere recognition of it. Let that suffice!"
And Mother Veronica smiled wistfully on him, and after seventy years of unsullied devotion to the Supreme Church, found herself guilty of the horrible heresy of loving one whose soul was lost, and whose wild living will, and erring, wayward creeds, were the most fatal forms of tumult and revolt against which the Infallible Faith warned her!
An eagle from his native Cheviot-side fettered in a cage, would not have been less fitted for it than Erceldoune for his imprisonment at Monastica; as soon as he was strong enough to be raised in his couch, and was able to use his arm, he beguiled the time with a pastime which had often whiled away hours and days of enforced inaction, in quarantine, on board ship, becalmed in the tropics, or cooped up in Marseilles during the mistral. He painted extremely well. He was too thorough a man of action, too truly the English Effendi of the Eastern nations, ever to take art or indolence by choice; but there had come many times in his life when to paint the rare scenery, or the picturesque groupings around him, had been his only available pursuit; and he did this with singular dash and delicacy, vividness and truth. Erceldoune would never have been a creative artist; he had not the imaginative or poetic faculty which idealises, it was wholly alien to his nature and his habits; but what he saw he rendered with a force, a fidelity, and a brilliance of hue which painters by the score had envied him. He passed the dreary weeks now at Monastica painting what he had seen; and the picture grew into such life and loveliness that the nuns marvelled when they looked on it, as the Religieuses of Bruges marvelled when they saw the "Marriage of St. Katherine" left in legacy to them by the soldier-artist Hans Hemling, whose wounds they had dressed, and cried out that it should be the Virginal altar-piece in a world-famed cathedral. Yet the picture was but a woman's face—a face with thoughtful lustrous eyes, and hair with a golden reflex on it, and lips which wore a smile that had something more profound than sadness, and more imperial than tenderness; a face looking downward from an aureole of light, half sunlit and half shadowed.
"Now I know that I have seen it, or I could not have painted it," said Erceldoune to himself, as he cast down his brushes; and to know that, was why he had done so.
"Keep the picture, madam, as altar-piece, or what it please you, in token of my gratitude at the least for the kindness I cannot hope to return," he said to the Mother Superior; "and, if you ever see a woman whose likeness you recognise in it, she will be the one to whom I first owed the rescue of my life. Tell her Fulke Erceldoune waits to pay his debt"
And Mother Veronica heard him with as much pain in his last words as she had had pleasure in his first, for she saw that the phantom of his delirium was still strong on him, and feared that his mind must wander, to be so haunted by this mere hallucination of the lady of his dreams.
A few days later on, Erceldoune, able at last to endure the return journey through the mountains and across Hungary, attended a Te Deum to gratify the Abbess, in celebration and thanksgiving for his own restoration from death to life; left his three months' pay to the almsgiving of the Order; bowed his lofty head for the tearful benediction of the Mother Superior; and quitted the innocent comnunity of religious women, in whose convent he had found asylum; the Angelus chiming him a soft and solemn farewell, as, in the late leafless autumn, while the black Danube was swelling with the first rains of winter, and the forests were strewn with the yellow leaves that covered the grave of his dead sorrel, he went out from the solitudes of Monastica back to the living world.