CHAPTER IX.
BITTER TANNHAUSER
Of his foe there was no trace.
The Monarch stood undisturbed, with the bridle flung over the cedar bough, and the Barbary mare lay motionless, with her right fore leg twisted under her and broken; of his foe there was no trace, and he rode on silently down the Bosphorus shore back into Pera, with the Albanians running by his horse's side, their torches throwing a ruddy glare over the moonlit sea and silvered sands, and on their own picturesque dresses and handsome classic faces, as they held on to his stirrup-leather.
A few moments before, and he had had no thought save of the blood-thirst with which he had ridden his enemy down the shore, and of the just vengeance of an unpardonable wrong; now he had no memory save one.
With the morning he rose, with but this one thought still—he would see her again! With the early dawn, while the sound of the drums was rolling through the mists, as they heralded the Commander of the Faithful going to prayer, he was plunging into the grey depths of the Bosphorus: sleep beyond his bidding. He knew that for hours yet he could not go to her, but he watched the sun in intolerable impatience for it to travel faster on its way; he walked alone to and fro the silent shore in a dream that was filled with her memory, and dead to all else. He did not pause to analyse what he felt, not even to wonder at it; his life was launched on the tempestuous sea of passion, and he lived in a trance of feverish intoxication, restless pain, and sweet idolatry. What avail how great had been his strength before? It only served to fling him down in more utter captivity now.
Far sooner than ceremony would have allowed him, he rode down the same path by which he had pursued the Greek the night before; but of him he had no more thought than if he were blotted from his life, when once more he looked upon her;—a woman fitted for a throne.
She did not give him her hand, but she smiled, that smile which gave its light to her eyes yet more than to her lips; and he thought that she must hear the beating of his heart—it had never throbbed so thick and fast when he had given the word for his own death-shot in the Carpathian pass. He had never felt himself stricken strengthless and powerless, blind and dizzy with a thousand new emotions, as he felt now:—so had another bold Border chief, the Night Rider of the Marches, been conquered when Bothwell stood before his Queen.
His thoughts were full of fever, his life seemed confused yet transfigured. To have thrown himself at her feet and gazed there upward to her in silence and in worship, would have been to follow the impulse in him. She knew it; his eyes spoke all on which his lips were perforce dumb; he did not think how much they betrayed him, he did not dream how much they told—to a woman who had wakened so much love that its faintest sign was known to her—of the tumult in. his heart, of the glory in his life, of the madness in his soul, which were so mingled and so nameless to himself.
In that moment, the whole heart of the man, in its brave truthfulness, its bold manhood, its head-long faith, and its awakening passions, was open before her as a book;—she knew her power over a dauntless, loyal life: how would she use it?
She let her glance dwell on him for a moment, those lustrous changeful eyes, whose hue could never be told, calmly meeting the passion of his own: calmly reading and watching the type and the worth of this life, which through her was still amongst the living.
"Have you found no trace of your assassin?" she asked him carelessly. "They told me there were no signs of him on the shore last night."
"I forgot him! I have only, remembered that he brought me here."
"It is not many who would follow so generous a code as yours. You have a deathless memory for gratitude, a forgiving oblivion of injury."
"Hush! do not give me credit that is not mine. As for gratitude—it is not that only which has made my life know no memory save the memory of you!"
His voice trembled, the words escaped him involuntarily: he was scarcely conscious what he said. She bowed with that dignity which repulsed without rebuking the meaning of the words.
"You do me far too much honour. The little I did in common human charity merits, as I said before, neither thanks nor memory. You stay in Constantinople, I suppose?" she continued, with that ease which was almost cold—cold, at least, compared to the tumult of impassioned impulses, unconsidered thoughts, and newly-born emotions which were warm and eager in the heart of her listener. It checked him, it stung and chilled him.
"I am waiting for home despatches," he answered her; "I am a Queen*s courier, as you may have heard. You are living here?"
"Only for a while; some months, a few days, I do not know which it may be. You, who are so splendid an artist, must find constant occupation in the East?"
"I? I am little of an artist, save when my horse or my rifle are out of reach. We, of the old Border, rarely carved our names in any other fashion than by the sword."
She saw how little his thoughts were with his words, as she met again the burning gaze of eyes that told far more than he knew; their language was too familiar to her to move her as it would have moved a woman less used to its utterance; it was a tale so old to her! She sighed, a little impatiently, a little wearily; she was unutterably tired of love. What was intoxication to him was but a thousand-times-told story to her. And yet—she saw that this man would suffer, and she foresaw that he would suffer through her. She pitied him, as it was not in her commonly to pity.
"I saw you in Sicily, surely?" he pursued. "For one moment, as you passed in a lateen-boat?"
"I was in Sicily a year ago; I dare say you might have seen me."
"You travel much?"
"Who does not in our days?" she answered, with carelessness, but carelessness that veiled a refusal to speak further of herself, which was impenetrable. She had every grace of womanhood, but beneath these she had a haughty and courtly reticence that was impassible. "Travel has one great attraction—it leaves little room for reflection. You like it yourself?"
"Yes, I like it. A courier's suits me better than any life, except a soldier's, would have done. However, it was not with me a matter of preference; I was ruined; I was glad of any post."
He said it frankly, and with the indifference which his decayed fortunes really were to him; but he saw that she was rich, he beard that she was titled, and he would not form her friendship under false colours, knowing that his own title gave him a semblance of wealth and of station he had not.
She smiled slighUy, there were both wonder at his honesty, and comprehension of his motives in that smile; the candour and the integrity of his nature were very new to her, and moved her to a wonder almost kindred to reverence.
"You are rich, I think," she said, a little wearily. "You have strength liberty, manhood, independence, honour;—how many have forfeited or never owned those birthrights! You chose very wisely to take a wanderer's freedom rather than the slavery of the world."
Erceldoune shook himself with a restless gesture, as an eagle chained shakes his wings:
"Ich diene nicht Vasallen!"
he muttered in his beard.
She laughed, but her gaze dwelt on him in sympathy with the fiery independence of his nature.
"Never the vassal of a slave? Then never be the slave of a woman!"
He looked at her, and there was something wistful in the look; he wondered if she knew her power over him, and if she made a jest of it; he could not answer her with that badinage, that gay light homage, that subtle flattery, to which she was accustomed; he felt too earnestly, too deeply; a man of few words, save when keenly moved or uracil interested, he could not give himself to the utterance of those airy nothings, while all his life was stirred with passion he could not name.
At that moment the great Servian hound entered through the open window from the terrace, and stood looking at him with its wolf-crest up, its fine eyes watchful and menacing, and a low angry growl challenging him as a stranger. It was a magnificent brute, massive in build, lithe in limb, pure bred, and nearly as tall as a young deer.
Erceldoune turned to him and stretched out his hand.
"Ah! there is my gallant friend. I owe him a debt too."
The animal stood a second looking at him, then went and laid down like a lion couchant at her feet.
She laid her hand on his great head—a hand of exceeding firmness and elegance, with the sapphires and diamonds glittering there, which Mother Veronica had noted, with a recluse's quick appreciation of worldly things.
"You must forgive him if he be discourteous; he has so often been my only champion, that he is apt to be a little raah in his chivalry."
"I honour him for his fidelity. But, your only champion? Where was the chivalry of the world, to leave such a post to a dog?"
"Where! In idle vows and poets' dreams, I imagine; its only home in any time, most likely. The Ritter Tannhäuser swore his knightly homage in the Venusberg, but ere long he turned on her who gave him his delight:
"O Venus schöne Fraue mein,
Ihr seyd eine Teufelinne!"
The German legend is very typical!"
"Tannhäuser was a cur!" said Erceldoune, with an eloquent warmth in his voice rather than in his words. "What matter what she was—what matter whence she came—she was the sovereign of his life; she had given him love, and glory, and delight; she was his. It was enough—enough to lose a world for, and to hold it well lost!"
He paused suddenly in the passionate poetic impulse on which he spoke, which had broken up in bis heart for the first time, utterly alien as he believed to his nature, to his temperament, to his will. It was of her and of himself that he thought, not of the old Teutonic Minnesinger's legend of Tannhäuser: and the rich glow of the sunlight slanting across the mosaic pavement, shone in the dark eagle lustre of his eyes> and lent its warmth to the Murillo-like bronze of his cheek.
She was a woman of the world; that noble truthfulness, that gallant faith, that knightly earnestness were new and very strange to her. They touched her.
"If Tannhäuser had loved like that—who knows?—even she, the Teufelinne, might have been redeemed. She could not have been faithless to such faith." she said, half musingly, rather following oat her thoughts than addressing him; and in her voice there was a vague pathetic pain.
Mad words rose to his lips in reply—words that he had to hold down in silence; the room seemed dizzy round him, the odours of the flowers reeled in his brain as though they were narcotics; he watched, like a man half-blinded, her hand wander among the scarlet blossoms, and toy with the waters of the fountain. It was a delirium; and, for all its feverish pain, he would not have exchanged it to have back the happiest and most tranquil hour of his past. He had dreamed of her, till he had loved her, as utterly as ever a man loved a woman; he was in her presence—at last!—and all love that before might be but a dream became at once with giant growth a passion. She did not—with him at least —seek her power; but such power was hers in its widest magnitude of empire; and she was a little weary of it, as sovereigns are weary of their crowns.
"You give fresh air the preference,—will you come into my gardens? They are very wild, but I like them the better for that," she asked him, as she rose with that half-languid grace which bespoke something of oriental blood in her, and moved out on to the terrace.
The gardens were, in truth, untrimmed as the neglect of years could make them« but they had been originally palace grounds, and all the colour and luxuriance of unchecked vegetation made them beautiful, with their wilderness of myrtle, cactus, and pomegranate, and their stretches of untrained roses blooming round the splashing waters of the marble and porphyry fountains.
"Little has been done here, for years, and yet there is a loveliness in them not to be had in trimmed and trained château gardens," she said, as she turned so that the sun fell full on her face with its delicate haughty lustre, its richness and fairness of hue.
"Yes! there is a loveliness," he answered her, as his eyes looked down into hers, "greater than I ever believed in before."
She laughed a little; slightly, carelessly.
"What enthusiasm. So great a traveller cannot, surely, find anything so new and striking in a wild Turkish garden?" she said, half amusedly, half languidly, a little ironically, purposely misapprehending his words.
The look came on him that had been there before, when she had bade him never to be the slave of a woman; proud, and yet wistful.
"I do not know that!" he said, almost bitterly: "but I know that the gardens may be as fatal as those of Uhland's Linden-tree. You remember how the poem begins?"
The words took an undue effect on her; resentment came on her facce, inquiry into her eyes, that she turned full on him in some surprise, some anger, and yet more, as it seemed to him, disquiet. Then all these faded, and a profound sadness followed them.
"Yes, I remember," she said, calmly. "Take warning by Wolfdieterich, and do not lie under the linden! Rather, to speak more plainly, and less poetically, never come where you do not see where your footsteps will lead you. You know nothing of me, save my name; leave me without knowing more. It will be best, believe me—far best."
She paused as she spoke, as they moved down the avenue, the roses strewing the grass path, and the Bosphorus waves flashing through the boughs. The singularity of the words struck him less at that moment than the injunction they gave him to leave her. Leave her!—in the very moment when his quest had been recompensed; in the first hour when, at last in her presence, at last in her home, the fugitive glory of his dreams was made real, and he had found the woman who had literally been to him the angel of life.
Beneath the sun-bronze of his face she saw the blood come and go quickly and painfully; he paused, too, and stood facing her in the cedar aisle, with that gallant and dauntless manhood which lent its kingliness to him by nature.
"Best? For which of us?"
"For you."
"Then I must refuse to obey."
"Why? Refuse, because it is for yourself that I have spoken?"
"Yes. If my presence jeopardised you, I must obey, and rid you of it; if I alone be concerned, I refuse obedience, because I would give up all I have ever prized on earth—save honour—to be near what I have sought so long, and sought so vainly."
It was all but a declaration of love, to a woman of whom he knew nothings save her beauty and her name. She read him as she would have read a book, but she did not show her knowledge.
"You are very rash," she said, softly, without a touch of irony now. "I have said truly, I have said wisely, it will be best for you that our friendship should not continue—should barely commence. If you persist in it, the time will, in every likelihood, come when you will condemn me, and reproach yourself for it. I speak in all sincerity, even though I do not give you my reasons. You consider—very generously—that you owe me a debt; it would be best paid by obeying what I say now, and forgetting me, as if we had never met."
She spoke with the courtly ease of a woman of the world, of a woman used to speak and to be obeyed, to guide and to be followed; but there was a certain inflection of regretful bitterness in her voice, a certain shadow of troubled weariness in her eyes, as if she did not send him from her without some reluctance. They were strange words; but she had known too many of the multiform phases of life to have any feminine fear of singularity or of its imputation, and had passed through unfamiliar paths with a fearless careless grace wholly and solely her own.
His frank eyes met hers, and there was in them a passionate pain.
"You bid me pay my debt in the only coin I cannot command. Obey you, I will not. Forget youy I could not."
She smiled.
"Twenty-four hours' absence soon supplies any one with oblivion!"
"It is a year since I saw yon in the Sicilian boat, yet I have not forgotten. I shall not while I have life."
His voice was very low; he was wounded, but he could not be offended or incensed—by her.
She bent her head with a sweet and gracious gesture of amends and of concession.
"True! Pardon me; I wronged you. Nevertheless, indeed rather because, you remember so well—I still say to you, Go, and let us remain as strangers!"
All that was noblest in her spoke in those words: all that lingered, best and truest, in her, prompted them. She wished, for his peace, that he should leave her, because she knew his heart better far than he himself; she wished—now, at the least— that he whom she had rescued, should he spared from all shadow from her, from all love for her; she wished—now, at least—to save him. From what? From herself.
Yet it was not without pain on her side also, though that pain was concealed, that she spoke.
He looked at her steadily, the earnest, open, loyal, unartificial nature of the man striving in vain to read the motive and the meaning of the woman, and failing, as men mostly do.
His face grew very white under the warm brown left there by Asian and Algerian suns.
"If you command it, I must obey. My presence shall be no forced burden upon you. But you cannot command on me forgetfulness, and I could wish you had been merciful before, and left me to die where I lay."
Unconsidered, spoken from his heart, and the more profound in pathos for their brief simplicity, the words moved her deeply, so deeply, that tears, rarest sign of emotion with her that she had never known for years, rose in her eyes as they dwelt on him; her lips parted, but without speech; she stood silent.
The day was very still; sheltered by the cedars from the heat, the golden light quivered about them; there was no sound but of the cicala among the pomegranate leaves, and of the waves breaking up against the marble palace stairs; neither ever forgot that single hour when on one word the future hung. His eyes watched her longingly; he did not ask who she was, whence she came, for what reason she thus bade him go from her; he only remembered the glory of her loveliness, and the words in which she had said, "Go, and let us remain henceforth as strangers"
"Answer me, Madame," he said, briefly, "Do you, for yourself, command me to leave yon?"
"For myself? No. I cannot command you—it is only for your sake"
She paused. What was, in truth, in her thoughts it would have been impossible to put in clear words before him; she could not tell this man that what she feared for him was the love that he would feel for herself; and what she had said sufficed to give back to his heart its restless tumult of vague joys, sufficed to make the present hour in which he lived full of sweet intoxication.
"Then, since not for yourself you command, for myself I refuse to obey; refuse, now and for ever—come what will—ever to be to you again as a stranger."
The tremor was still in his voice, but there were in it, too, the thrill of a triumphant gratitude, the feckless resolve of a tropic passion: she knew that the die was cast, that to send him from her now would serve but little to make her memory forgotten by him. She knew well enough that forgetfulness was a treasure for evermore beyond the reach of those who once had loved her.
"Be it so! We will have no more words on the matter," she said, carelessly, as she passed onward with a low, light laugh; her temperament was variable, and she did not care that he should see that new unwonted weakness which had made her eyes grow dim at the chivalry and pathos of his brief words. "The fantasies of Uhland have made us speak as poetically as themselves. My counsels were counsels of wisdom, but since Wolfdieterich will rest under the linden, he must accept the hazard! How calm the Bosphorus is, the waves are hardly curled. There is my boat at the foot of the stairs; it is not too warm yet for half an hour on the sea if you would like to take the oars."
A moment ago and she had forbade him any knowledge of her, and had sought to dismiss him from her presence; now she spoke to him familiarly and without ceremony, with the charm of those first bright sweet hours of communion when strangers glide into friends; that hour which either, in friendship or in love, is as the bloom to the fruit, as the daybreak to the day, indefinable, magical, and fleeting.
The caïque rocked on the water, half hidden under the hanging boughs of myrtles at the landing-stairs, while the sea lay calm as a sun-girded lake, nothing in sight except a far-off fleet of olive-wood feluccas. And with one stroke of the oars among the fragrant water-weeds, the little curled gilded sea-toy floated softly and slowly down the still grey waters that glistened like a lake of silver in the sun. Erceldoune was in as ecstatic a dream as any opium-eater. She had cast away whatever thoughts had weighed on her when she had bade him leave her; a step once taken, a decision once given, she was not a woman to vacillate in further doubt or in after regret, she was at once too proud and too nonchalant. She had bidden him, in all sincerity, remain a stranger to her; he had refused to obey, and had chosen to linger in her presence. She let his will take its course, and accepted the present hour. The vessel dropped down the Bosphorus in the sunlight, so smoothly, that a lazy stroke of the oars now and then sufficed to guide it along the shore, where the cypress and myrtle boughs drooped almost, to the water, and the heavy odours of jessamiae and roses floated to them from the gardens across the sea. Lying back among her cushions, so near him that he could feel the touch of her laces sweep across him as the breeze stirred them, and could see the breath of the wind steal among the chesnut masses of her hair that was drawn back in its own richness from her b0row and fastened with gold threads scarce brighter than its own hue, the fascination of Idalia—a danger that men far colder and better on their guard than he, found themselves powerless against—gained its empire on him, as the spell of the Venusberg stole on the will and the senses of the mailed knight Tannhauser. With a glittering gaiety when she would; with a knowledge of the world, varied, it seemed, almost beyond any woman's scope; with the acquisition of most languages and of their literature, polished and profound to scholarship; with a disdainful, graceful, ironic wit, delicate, but keenly barbed; and with all these a certain shadow of sadness, half scornful, half weary, that yet gave to her at times an exquisite gentleness and a deeper interest yet, she would have had a fatal and resistless seduction, without that patrician grace of air and form, and that rarity of personal attractions, which made her one of those women whom no man looks on without homage, few men without passion. With the ease which long acquaintance with the world alone gives, she spoke on all topics, lightly, brilliantly, the languor or the satire of one moment changed the next to the poetry or the earnestness which seemed to lie full as much in her nature; and even while she spoke of trifles, she learnt every trait, every touch of his life, his character, his fortunes, and his tastes, though he never observed or dreamt of it—though he never noted in turn that in it all no word escaped her that could have told him who she was, whence she came, what her past had been, or what her present was. The frank, bold, loyal nature of the man loved and trusted, and had nothing to conceal. She, in penetration as keen as she was in tact most subtle, read his life at will, while her own was veiled.
The caïque dropped indolently down the shore, the oars scarcely parting the bright waters, the warmth of the day tempered by a low west wind, blowing gently from the Levantine isles, spice-laden with their odour. With the rise and fall of the boat, with the perfames of rose gardens borne on the air, with the boundless freedom of cloudless skies and stretching seas, there were blent the murmur of her voice, the fragrance of her hair, the glance, whose beauty had haunted him by night and day, the fascination of a loveliness passing that even of his remembrance. It seemed to him as if they had been together for ever, drifting through the glories of an Avillion—as if, until now in all his life, he had never lived. He was like a man in enchantment; the world seemed no longer real to him, but changed into a golden and tumultuous dream.
Time, custom, ceremonies, all grew vague and indifferent; it seemed to him as if he had loved this woman for an eternity. The passion suddenly woke in him would have broken its way into hot unconsidered words, but for that light chain lying on his love and binding it to silence which only gave it more tenacity and more strength. She would not have been what she was to him could he have approached her with familiarity; could he have sought her as his mistress, she would have fallen as his ideal.
No one could have called her cold who looked on the brilliance of her beauty, on the light of her smile; but the languor with which she turned aside homage, and let words of softer meaning glide off her ear unnoted br unaceepted, gave her an impenetrability, a nonchalance, a serenity, that were as impassable as coldness.
"I may return to-morrow?" he asked her, when she at last had made him turn the caïque back, and had tacitly dismissed him.
He spoke briefly, but his voice was very low, and there was entreaty in the tone that pleaded far more than a honeyed phrase would ever have done with her. Her eyes dwelt on him a moment, once more with that profound and undefinable look of pity.
"Yes, since you wish. I shall be happy to see you at dinner, if you will do me the honour. Adieu!"
She bowed, and moved to leave him. Something in his look as he answered her made her pause as she swept away, and stirred by a sudden impulse (impulse was rare with her), she waited an instant and held out her hand.
He took it; and bending his head, touched it with his lips as reverently as a devotee would kiss his cross. She laughed a little as she drew it gently away.
"We are not in the days of Castilian courtesies! Farewell until to-morrow!"
And with that graceful negligent movement which gave her so languid a charm, she passed away from him into the villa; and for Erceldoune the sun died out of the heavens, and all its beauty faded oil the bright earth about him.
He spent the remaining hours of the day alone—alone till long after nightfall—pushing a boat far out to sea, and letting it float at hazard, in the sunset, in the twilight, in the phosphor-brilliance of the moon, till the chant of the Muezzin rang over the waves with the dawn. His existence seemed dreamy, unreal, trans figured; he neither heeded how time went nor what he did; but lay leaning over the side of his boat gazing all through the night at the lighted lattices of her windows, where they glittered through the cypress and myrtle woods. He was in the first trance of a passion he had scorned.