CHAPTER XI.
LION AND LEOPARD.
With the first break of the dawn, freed by his Umbrian friend, he went back to bis work on the waters; the cool long hours were precious for labour, and he desired so to gratify and serve them, that the Brethren should be loth to lose his services. He was thankful that he was given liberty at all with the sunrise. When the bolt of his cell had been drawn, a horror of dread had stolen on him that his errand was suspected, and that he was trapped, like a fox in a keeper's gins.
The morning was balmy, clear, and beautiful; even the naked wastes and smoking marshes looked brighter in its light, and he went forth with the scythe, and the nets, and the lines across his shoulder, and the hound following close in his path. He had strapped his gold about his waist, and he brought the dog with him. The hound's eyes asked, with as much eloquence as human lips ever framed, to be allowed to seek out his mistress; but he was perfectly trained, and he understood at a glance that the time for his search of her had not yet come. As Erceldoune descended the steep incline of rock-steps, he glanced up at the lancet window at which yesterday he had seen the woman who was the single thought and idol of his life; she was not there. Though he knew nothing of it, her prison-chamber had been changed for one in which there was no casement—one to which light and air only strayed through by a score of circular holes pierced in the stonework, high above the reach of her gaze; a chamber on which no eyes could look, from which no cries could be heard. His heart sank at the dark vacancy which was alone seen through the bars, whence a few hours before her eyes had dwelt on him from which she had watched him all through the length of the previous day. It was bitter work so to rein in his impulse, that he did not rush blindly into the den where she was hidden, and see what a sure shot and a merciless blow could do to free her. He choked the longing down as best he could; he knew there were eighty men there who would swing the ponderous gates to on him, and shut in with him for ever every chance of rescue for her; he knew that the only hope for her, or for himself, lay in the course he now pursued; and he went out to his toil. There was abundance both of sport and of labour in those wild marshes and ill-preserved pools to have occupied for months one who brought to them the lore and the skill of Scottish moorlands, and he returned to them with unflagging pertinacity, mowing down the osiers, slinging the teal, and widgeon, and mallards, reckless of season so long as they served to fill the monks' buttery; stretching the nets and thrashing the sedges till the frightened fish swam in by the score; working through hour on hour till the Umbrian brought him his mess of breakfast-soup, and some tough cakes of rye, and sat down beside him under the stunted cypresses, gazing with devouring, delighted eyes at the stores of food laid upon the banks.
"Thanks, father; but that is a poor breakfast for either of us. See here; I have done better than you," said Erceldoune, as he stooped over a fire he had lit with the touchwood, and broke the clay covering off two succulent water-birds and half-a-dozen dainty trout, that he had baked in a sports-man's fashion, practised many a time in Canadian woods, and Kansas wilds, and Thuringian forests, and Australian deserts. The eyes of the monk glittered with glee; he dearly loved savoury food, and abstinence was a sore trial to him.
"Eat of them as you will," said Erceldoune, as he laid them on the slab of rock that served as a table. "They are better than rye bread, at any rate; and if you fear the Brethren, not a soul can see you here. You seem very strict in your Order?"
The Umbrian sighed, and shook his little brown bullet head, while he betook himself to the precious banquet in silence.
"Yet you have a woman in your holy walls?" He spoke abruptly; it was fearful to him to speak of her, and he could have better loved to force the answer out by a sterner mode than words.
The Umbrian started, and flushed guiltily.
"Nay, my son, you make a strange error. By all the saints of the calendar, nothing feminine ever "
"Spare your perjuries, father. I saw her yonder."
He motioned his head backward to the frowning wall behind them; his pulses beat like sledge-hammers as he spoke.
The Umbrian hung his head, and hastily gobbled up a liver-wing.
"A delusion of the eye—a snare of the senses, my son. Maybe your thoughts run too much upon women."
Erceldoune swept the board bare of all the untasted fare.
"By my faith! you are a good comrade. I have brandy that will make you dream yourself in paradise, and we would have had a carouse with it tonight; but since you tell me such lies, when my own eyes saw her yonder, you shall have no drop of the cognac as long as you live, and every fish I have heaped on these banks I will fling back in the lakes again, and leave you to fill your own buttery as you best may!"
The Umbrian, terrified and aghast at what he had lost, seized the ends of his companion's sash imploringly:
"Oh, my son! do not be so rash. Set down the good food; to waste it is a sin. You did see her; you are right. But, for pity's sake, never breathe it."
"What is she, then?" asked Erceldoune, as he gave back the birds and trout, that had served him so well, into the eager hands of the monk. "And why should you deny it? except that priests always deny any truth."
"She is a prisoner, and a rebel; and you should not blaspheme."
"Whose prisoner?"
"The king's, my son."
"The king's! Has he no prisons of his own, then, that he must borrow your convent?"
The Umbrian hesitated; he was sore afraid to answer the question, but he was more immediately afraid that his impetuous questioner should sweep his meal away again.
"Monsignore Villaflor is interested in her recovery to the One Faith, my son," he said, slowly and unwillingly.
"Giulio Villaflor!" The words leaped from his lips ere he knew they were spoken; the blood rushed into his face, his hands clenched; the name confirmed his worst horror, his worst dread. He knew the temper and the repute of the mighty Roman; he shivered where he stood in the hot sun.
"What do you know of our holy father in God, my son?"
Erceldoune turned his eyes full on him.
"What do you know?"
The other flushed shamefacedly; he was an honest peasant in his way, to whom the mask of sanctity was very irksome, and the great ecclesiastic, and the uses to which the monastery was put, had alike cruelly gone against his simple instincts of a just life.
"You must not question me, my son; I know nothing—nothing save to obey the little I am ever told."
"What are you told of this captive, then?"
"That she is a sceptic and a revolutionist; a very evil and fatal woman."
"And his Holiness of Villaflor, out of his divine love, wishes to reclaim her into the bosom of the Church!"
The words were hot and acrid as they were hurled through his set teeth: it was all he could do to keep any chain on them.
The Umbrian wineed under their sting.
"Surely, my son. It would be well that she should be reclaimed. But, of a truth"
"What? Can a priest speak truth?"
"Hush, my son; you must not be so bitter upon the appointed of God. I was going to say"—the monk played restlessly with the savoury bones he had been crunching, and the colour burnt in his yellow cheek, as his voice sank low, and his eyes glanced around furtively—"whether it was sorcery given her by the Evil One or no I cannot tell, but there was such a look in her eyes—ah, Madonna, she has a fearful beauty!—that when they bade me scourge her for contamacy, the lash dropped from my hands, I was as one paralysed. I could not. I could not!"
With a cry as though the scourge fell on him, cutting into the livid flesh, Erceldoune sprang to his feet; his hands fell on the Cistercian's shoulders swaying him to and fro.
"Scourged her?—scourged her? O God! they never dared"
"I dared not," muttered the Umbrian, sorely in fear; "they were bitter upon me, but they did not force it—then. She will have the punishment tomorrow, if she have not yielded"
"Yielded to what?"
"Yielded to the persuasions of the Church, my son."
Erceldoune flung him off with a force that made the Umbrian's blood run cold.
"Yielded to the passions of Giulio Villaflor, you mean! You hell-hounds!—you fiends!"
His voice choked in his throat; the muscles of his chest, where the fishing-shirt was open, swelled convulsively; he felt blind with rage and agony;—the monk watched him in wonder.
"The sight of her beauty beyond those bars has stirred you strangely, my son. Verily, she is a sorceress, as they say. You feel marvellously for a strange woman."
Erceldoune shook in every limb with the effort to control what, betrayed, must betray both her and him.
"That she is a woman, and you are brutes, is enough! What man that had not the heart of a cur could hear such infamy and keep his peace? It is well the lash dropped from your hands, or I would have shaken life out of you where you stand!"
The Umbrian gave a shudder.
"Truly you could do it, for you are a son of Anak! I must leave you now; I am due with the Almoner; and as for that little matter of the brandy, I will come to your cell after supper, if you be still in the mind."
He made his way back with speed, anxious to get out of reach of this unchained lion; and Erceldoune stood alone in the hot sun-scorch, with shivers of fire and of ice, turn by turn, in his veins. Whatever could be done for her must be done swiftly, or it would be too late.
Across the pitiless clearness of the transparent air there was alone in the arid wastes about him the figure of a pifferaro, a mere lad, singing a barcarolle, whose burden was borne musically and wildly over the marshes as he toiled on his way with his monkey on his shoulder. With lightning quickness, Erceldoune, keeping out of the sight of the monastery-casements, waded through shallow pools and dashed through thickets of osier, till he reached the boy, a bright-eyed, bright-witted Savoyard, with a dirty, tattered sheepskin for clothing, a little ape for a comrade, and a light childish heart that made him happier than a king. Erceldoune glanced at him, and saw both intelligence and frankness in the arch, brown, ruddy face of the little bohemian; he stopped him as the boy was leaping from tuft to tuft of the rank grass that studded the shaking quagmires, and stretched his hand out with a broad gold coin.
"Had you ever so much in your life?"
The Savoyard opened wider his keen, dancing, black eyes.
"Never! Of a truth, signor barcarolo, if that is the fish you angle out of these pools, your craft's a thriving one!"
"You shall get just such fish yourself if you choose. Will you go on an errand for me? You shall have this coin as you start, if you will, and ten like it when you come back and show me the errand is done."
The pifferaro stretched out his little tanned hand.
"Give it here," he said, laconically. "The errand is done."
Erceldoune tossed him the gold.
"The errand is this. Do you know Ferratino?"
The boy nodded assent. "Go thither, then; quick as a lapwing, straight as a crow flies. Run, as if you ran for your life. Take a paper I will give you to the villa, and say it is for his Excellency the Baron; he will send word by you, yes or no. Bring the word to me here, truly and instantly, and you shall have ten of those pieces, I promise you. Can you do the distance? It is far?"
The Savoyard laughed, his bright eyes all glittering with eager zest.
"I have done farther for a dozen bajocchi! You shall have your answer as fast as a pigeon could bring it. Give me the paper. I shall find you here?"
"Yes. On these waters. Wait a second while I write, and then be off like the wind."
As he spoke, he tore a leaf out of a pocket-book in which his circular notes had been sent from the yacht, and wrote with its pencil a few rapid lines; they were simply, in German:
"Dear Anselm,—I am in pressing need. Send me at nightfall two of the fastest horses you have; let some boy ride them who cannot speak a word of Italian, and wait with them, unseen, in the cypress grove under the monastery of Taverna—wait all night till he sees me. Do no more than I ask, for God's sake. I know I need not say grant my request; our alliance is too old and too sure. Forgive all that sounds strange and vague in this, and send me simply word, 'yes' or 'no' by the Savoyard.
"Yours ever,
"Fulke Erceldoune." Men of his temperament make firm and warm friendships amongst men. The Hungarian noble to whom he wrote, and who, as he had remembered, occupied a villa some dozen miles from the wastes in which he stood, was a generous, reckless man of pleasure, who, he knew well, would have done far greater things than this at his entreaty, and would have the sagacity to do as he asked, and no more. Ernst von Anselm and he had once passed through a mad night together on the burning decks of a ship in the midst of the broad Pacific, when mutiny and drunkenness in a Lascar crew had added their horrors to the pandemonium; and together, back to back, against a legion of devils, and in the red-hot glare of leaping flames, had sent their bullets through the ringleaders' brains, and saved the vessel alike from fire and from anarchy. From that hour they had been friends, true and close and tried, in that noble friendship of brethren, which is worth all the love of women.
The little pifferaro, flinging his ape over his shoulder, where it gripped a sure hold, darted off, over the dreary plain, as he had promised, as fast as a pigeon could fly: that broad gold coin locked in his hand, and the promise of ten more like it, lent him the speed of a desert pony. "I shall go back a millionnaire to my people!" thought the child in his glee. There was hardly so much money in the whole of the little hamlet that had given him birth, where it nestled in a sleepy hollow under the brown hills of Savoy.
Erceldoune looked after him a second,—the careless child was a frail little basket-boat to launch on such stormy waters weighted with the fate of two lives! Then he went back to the work of the monastery, labouring all through the noon-heat among the sedges and the still, shallow, yellow lagunes—working as men only work when in that ardour of physical toil, that restless bodily exertion, they give vent to the thoughts which, if they paused to muse a moment, would unman and madden them.
He felt as if the hours would never move; the sun seemed to stand still; the blazing radiance of the day had a sickening oppression;—what might she not be bidden to suffer in it!
He knew the temper of Giulio Villaflor, that leopard of the velvet skin and of the unsparing fangs. He shuddered as he looked on the rugged silent pile, that kept her chained for such a tyrant. He had never fancied that the world could hold such agony as those burning, endless, intolerable hours brought him, as he plunged down eagerly into the coolness of the waters to chill the torture in him, and laboured to kill thought under the burden of corporeal fatigue, under the fever of ceaseless activity.
The day grew on; noon came and passed; the glow of light lay clear and golden over the plains, and the breadth of the sheeted water; the hours were tolled monotonously from the campanila, ever and again the drone of the monks' voices rising in regular diapason, in chant or office, swelled through the narrow apertures of their chapel casements, and echoed with melancholy rise and fall over the silence. When he heard it, deadlier oaths than his lips had ever breathed were hurled over the slumbering pools at the priestly formulas that sheltered a Nero's cruelties, a Borgia's lusts. Once or twice a peasant or a muleteer passed across the horizon line: otherwise there was nothing to break the eternal sameness of the glittering sunlight, the sear country, the cypress points cutting so sharply against the intense blue of the sky. He knew what men had felt who had lost their reason through a captivity that made them dwell in one unending solitude—look on one unchanging scene.
The deep radiance of colour that precedes the sunset was just flushing earth and sky, as the shrill hoot of an owl's note pierced his ear—a night-bird's cry in the sunshine. He guessed at once that it was a signal of the little pifferaro, and followed it. Under the reeds, some half mile or less from the monastery, the boy was crouched, panting like a tired dog, but glowing with life and zest and eagerness as he lifted his hot brown face.
"I have done it," he cried, with all a child's exultation. "Here is your answer—written. Stay here, lest the crows yonder should spy on us. Let priests smell gold, and it's all up with him who owns it."
Erceldoune took the paper and read it, lying there under the shelter of the sedges. It was in German; the Baron was from home, but an old lacquey, who had chanced to be the first to greet the Savoyard, seeing an open scroll, and, pressed by the boy's urgency, had read it, had hesitated at first what to do in his master's absence, but, knowing how well Anselm loved the writer, had known he should run no risk by compliance, and might by refusal risk much displeasure. He wrote now in reply, with sagacity and foresight, promising that the horses should be in waiting at nightfall with a lad to hold them, and that as they would be something worn by the transit, another pair should be in readiness at the gates of Ferratino in case Erceldoune's errand should bear him near, which in all likelihood it might, since all things must pass by there to reach the road to the shore.
His hand shook with joy as he read, and scattered the old man*s tremulously-written characters in fragments lest they should tell tales. So far the means for flight were secured, could her freedom be compassed. He had not much gold about him, but he gave double the fee to the little pifferaro, while the child stared in amaze at the twenty shining yellow pieces. He caught them greedily, yet when he had them he was half stupefied with the enormity of his possessions.
"The pastor, and the bailiff, and the innkeeper never had more than that all put together!" he murmured, his thoughts drifting to the village of his birth, with its little steeple hidden under chestnut leaves, and its mild-eyed herds browsing on the green breadths between the rocks. "That is no barcarolo; and, whatever the mischief is, I will be bound there is a woman in it," considered the shrewd little lad as he went on his way, the gold safe in the bosom of his sheepskin shirt.
With the dead mallards and teal flung over his shoulder, and with a great osier-basket of fish filled to overflowing, Erceldoune passed, unsummoned, from the lake side up the rock, and to the monastery gates. He thought they might make question of letting him enter for a second night's lodging, and without entrance all hope of her rescue was ended. The Umbrian, however, who through the grating saw the abundance brought in for the larder, admitted him instantly, with many praises of his industry and adorations of his skill.
"You have a heavy door there?" said Erceldoune, turning to glance at the ponderous mass of iron-clamped oak that swung slowly behind him.
"Ah—heavy indeed!" sighed the Benedictine, as he stooped to draw the huge bolts, which were only drawn stiffly and with effort into their sockets. "It is heavy enough, but it is these are the misery."
"These? I will soon make them run smoother. I have something of a smith's skill. Fetch me a file and a little oil."
The Umbrian fetched them gladly, marvelling what manner of man this was who knew every craft under the sun. A little while, and the rusted iron bolts ran noiselessly and smoothly in their massive channels; the monk's lament had given him an opportunity more precious than any other could have been in that moment, and in easing the run of the bolts for the gatekeeper's indolence, he paved the way to a facile exit by night from the monastery, if by any means he could also obtain the great key that swung from the Umbrian's girdle.
"You have a wonderful science, my son," said the Cistercian, with musing amaze. "You can do all things that you turn your hand to it seems!"
"I have lived in many countries and with many men."
"You must have been more than a mere barcarola, my son?"
"I told you I have been a 'wanderer' from my birth," said Erceldoune, with a smile at the play on the Celtic meaning of his nationality. "The career is a bad one for gold, but it is the best in the world, I fancy, for learning self-help and other men's virtues."
"But you must learn much vice too, my son?"
Erceldoune shrugged his shoulders.
"What of that? Vice is a good teacher too, in its way, and one must take the warp with the woof."
"But, you know, one cannot touch pitch, my son, and keep undefiled."
Erceldoune laughed a little.
"Good father, where is the man that ever did keep so? And as for that, the pitch will not stay long unless the surface be ready for it. But, for Heaven's sake, chatter no more; I love speech little at any time, and now—I am famished."
"Truly you have earned your supper; and—as for that little matter of brandy? I have not tasted a drop since I was in Naples, seven seasons ago!"
"All right, I have the best cognac in a flask here; if you come to my cell after supper, you shall be heartily welcome to a draught of it."
The monk's eyes sparkled with glee; he nodded a hasty assent, and, relieving his guest of the fish and the birds, took him for the second time to the refectory. The same silence, the same rigour, the same fare prevailed; the same double line of lean immutable, saturnine, emaciated faces were in the dim light of the stone hall; the same swift upward glance was cast on him as he entered; the same abstracted severity of repose was observed throughout the meal. He had no wish to break it; only for her sake could he so far restrain the hatred in him towards the men who were her torturers and her captor's tools, as to share their bread, justly as he had earned it, and to sit in such semblance of amity with them as lay in this compulsory companionship. Some among them noted that there was a dark shadow on the strange barcarolo's face that had not been there so deeply on the previous day, and the monk nearest him heard a heavy oath mnttered under the waves of his beard when the blessing before the refection was chanted;—it was a curse on those who covered the lusts of a velvet-voiced-priest with the savour of sanctity, with the odour of rituals. Often, moreover, his passionate eyes flashed over the countenances around him, seeking to read by instinct which amongst them was the brute who had dared bid the lash be raised against her: had he known, scarce every memory of the prudence and the abstinence needful for her sake would have availed to chain back his arm from a blow that would have felled the offender level with the flags of the stone floor.
The meal ended, a fresh torture waited him; the Superior summoned him to the head of the table, and held a long converse with him, the rambling verbosity of old age combined, in the incessant vagaries of his interrogation, with the subtle veiled promptings of curiosity and cunning. There was that in the bearing and the glance of the stranger they harboured which made the priests uneasily suspect that this was too bold a lion for their episcopal lord to welcome were he aware of the shelter they gave. Erceldoune saw the suspicion, and saw that he must allay it, or all hope of sufficient freedom for the purpose he held would be for ever denied him. With an effort which cost him far inore than any physical toil or bodily strain could have ever done, he forced himself into the part it was imperative to play. Lie he would not, not even for her; and reserve, he saw, would confirm all the doubts rising in the breasts of his gaolers and auditors; he cast himself into a bolder venture. "These men," he reckoned, with a swift glance over them, "must be of two classes only—those who have forsaken the world, and those who have never known it; to hear of it will enchain equally those for whom it is a lost land and those to whom it is an unknown one." On that rapid inference he acted. In answer to the Superior's questions he told his life frankly; changing it in little, save that they deemed his travel had been the travel of a restles, bohemian—a man poor enough to have been glad at times to serve before the mast.
Though he was averse to many words usually, he could speak with a vivid and impressive eloquence when the fire of it was struck alight in him. He forced himself to speak so here. He answered, as one who would tell his adventures, without pressure or comment; and after the brevity of his previous curt replies, the monks heard the picturesque flow of his swift Italian with the same amaze with which they regarded the stature, the strength, the sweeping beard, and the careless royalty of bearing of this athlete, who came amongst them as though to show them all that this manhood, which they had crucified and buried in their own lives as an unholy and accursed thing, might be and might enjoy. His past had been full of ever-changing scenes and experiences; hair-breadth escapes, desperate dangers, wild adventure, and keen perils, had been continually his portion in the distant and intricate missions on which he was sent. A struggle of life and death in the heart of Persia had been followed by dreamy barbaric luxury and magnificence in the midst of Mexican palaces; a death-ride through Russian snow-storms, with the baying pack of starving wolves on his track through the whole of a bitter icy night, had been succeeded by months of gaiety in the capitals of Europe; a shipwreck in the midst of the Indian Ocean, with a Malay crew ripe for murder, and an open boat living for days on tempestuous seas in the glare of a tropic sun, with men around him dying like dogs for water, had been effaced almost as soon as endured by the brilliant fiery pleasures of a volunteer service with the French cavalry in a campaign against the Arabs; or a desert quest for desert game over the wild Libyan tracts in the sultry glories of autumn days and nights, by a season's sojourn in some friend's summer-palace among the roses of Damascus, or in the ruby glow of the Nile suns, painting, shooting, swimming, boating; finding ever and everywhere the happiness of fearless, fetterless, vivid life, oftentimes nomadic, and glad in the mere gladness of strength, in the mere desert chief's sense of liberty, with
"the rich dates yellow'd over with gold-dust divine,
And the locust's flesh steep'd in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river channel, where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well."
The memories even of a single year supplied him with a thousand sources from which to draw pictures of varied scenes, whose recital entranced imperceptibly and unconsciously first one and then another of his auditors, till the whole circle of the monks stood around as men in the East will stand around the narrator who tells of far countries and of strange fortunes, while the narghilé vapours out, and the coffee steams fragrantly in the open divan, and the grave Mussulmans stroke their beards in silent wonder.
It entranced them, this recital of worlds unknown, and of joys as of dangers undreamed of by them. When he paused, the Father Superior pressed him eagerly for more; those bold, terse, picturesque words that drew them sketches of different lands and unimagined pleasures with the same rich vigorous sweep as that with which his hand would paint tropic foliage and mountain outline, the stretch of seas and the burning warmth of sun-tanned prairie, held the priestly circle spellbound. Those who had known no existence save that of the cloister from their youth up, heard with an entranced, stupefied amaze, as children hear tales of genii; those who had come to the cloister only when every hope of life had been bruised, and wrung, and killed, heard with a terrible pained look of hunger on their faces, as exiles hear a strain of melody which brings them back the songs of the land they have lost for ever. Both alike hung on the swift flow of the descriptive words, only more warmly coloured by the Neapolitan idiom he still employed, as on some tale of paradise; the worn sallow cheeks flushed, the deadened lustreless eyes flashed, the dropped veiled glance was lifted eagerly, the thin and silent lips were parted with rapid breaths, and once a sigh broke from a monk still in the years of youth—a sigh so bitter, so intense in its anguish of vain lament, that a whole broken, wasted life seemed spent in it.
Never again would they be as they had been ere this wanderer had come amidst them; through him they saw all that they had lost for ever.
He had conquered them. When they parted, and he went on his way to his cell, there was not a doubt of him lingering in any heart, there was not a man who had one thought left with him save of that glory of manhood, that splendour of liberty, that beauty of unknown worlds, which they had voluntarily surrendered and buried from themselves till the death of the grave should release them from the death of the monastery.
"Come," he whispered, as he passed the Umbrian, "and if you can bring lemons, sugar, and spices with you, you shall dream yourself in paradise tonight."
"Hush, my dear son; do not be so profane!" murmured the other, while bis eyes danced in expectant ecstasy. "I will come, and bring the things, if I can, from the buttery. Your tales were beautiful, but I thought the Superior would never have let you go!"
"Great Heaven! to save my own life I would not stoop to dupe and bribe these brutes as I do for hers!" thought Erceldoune, where he leaned on the stone ledge of his cell-window awaiting the monk. It was very bitter to him, this truce with her enemies, this false play with these ecclesiastics. The soldier-like frankness and the proud honesty of his nature rebelled irrepressibly at the dissimulation he was driven to match them with thus. To lead a charge through the heat of battle, as he had done in Mexico and Algeria more than once, when the chiefs had been shot down, or to imperil his life against all odds in a deadly contest with overpowering numbers, as had chanced to him in Persian defiles and Argentine revolutions, was far more suited to his temper and his instincts than the part that, for her sake, fell to him in these cloisters of Taverna. Yet played out the part must be, or she would be beyond rescue, beyond hope.
It was not long before the Umbrian made his stealthy entrance, with the treasures of the buttery hidden under his frock.
Erceldoune in silence took the things from him. His own flask was large and full of brandy, strong as fire and mellow as oil; he emptied out half the water of his pitcher, tossed the whole of the cognac in instead, and with the spices, lemons, and sugar, made a fragrant and intoxicating drink. The Umbrian, squatted on the dry grasses of the bed, watched its preparation with thirsty, devouring eyes.
"He will be dead drunk before this is half empty," thought Erceldoune.
"There, tell me if that is not better than sour wines and rancid goat's milk," he asked, as he poured some into the little drinking-horn the monk had brought. It was swallowed in an ecstasy; the Umbrian had no need to dream of paradise, he was in it the moment the strong, odorous draught touched his lips. As fast as he stretched the horn out, so fast his host filled it; the pitcher held more than a quart, and Erceldoune scarcely drank himself, though he made a feint of so doing; he did not yet know how much or how little would be needed to steep the Italian in the slumberous intoxication he required to produce. As he had imagined, the first few draughts rose straight to the brain of the recluse, who, well as he loved it, had not tasted any alcohol for years; the luscious, fiery, highly-spiced liquid quickly flushed his face, and whirled his thoughts, and loosened his always loquacious tongue; he sat with the jovial content of a Sancho Panza, laughing, chattering, heeding very little what replies he had, and very rapidly forgetting all things except the tender of his horn for its replenishing. Erceldoune sought first to make him garrulous, so that he might glean intelligence from his drunken verbiage. The Umbrian's idle tergiversation of speech soon wandered off to the captive of their clerical bondage—wandered to such ardent maudlin ecstasies on the subject of her beauty that his hearer suffered tortures as he listened perforce to the profanation. Erceldoune flung himself down on the flag floor, resting on his elbow, in such enforced stillness as he could command, while the rambling fervour of the gluttonous Brother desecrated her name and catalogued her charms; happily, the drinker was too giddy with his potations to notice the shudder that every now and then at his hottest epithets of descriptive admiration shook his listener's limbs, or the flash that darted over him from his hearer's eagle eyes when he betrayed, in his unconscious loquacity, the purpose of her imprisonment in the Cistercian sanctuary.
It needed no questions to elicit all he knew; the brandy fumes rising over his brain undid all caution it had ever been taught, and spread out all its shreds of knowledge as a pedlar spreads his wares. Erceldoune heard enough to convulse him with horror as he was stretched there on the naked stone, with the lustre of the Italian night finding its way dimly through the aperture above;—enough to know that he must rescue her to-night, or never.
"And I will tell you more," hiccuped the monk, laughing low and cunningly, too blind with drink to have much knowledge left of whom he spoke to, or of where he was. "Monsignore comes to-night—he often visits us, you know; we are his special children, and it has a fair odour for so great a man to leave the world for such holy, rigorous retirement!"
"To-night!"
Erceldoune sprang to his feet as a lion springs from its lair; the priest's villanous chuckle rang like a rattlesnake in his ear; in his cups the Umbrian was but an animal—a very low one to boot—and the better instincts which had moved him when the lash had dropped from his hand were drowned and dead.
"Ay, to-night!" laughed the monk, while his head hung on one side, and his eyes closed with the fatuous cunning of intoxication; "he comes for the last time—do you mark me?—for the last time!"
The oath that shook the stone walls thrilled even through the mists of drink and the imbecility of his dulled brain, as it was hurled from bis hearer's lips; an agony was in it such as mere grief never spoke yet. The Umbrian, sobered by it for the moment, shuddered and strove to rise, looking about him with blind, terrified eyes.
"What have I said? What have I done?" he muttered, piteously. "Ah, Jesu! Monsignore—Monsignore!"
And with that last dread name on his lips he fell back stupefied, rocking himself to and fro, and sobbing like a child.
Erceldoune neither saw nor heard him; he stood like a statue, his hands clenched, his face dyed crimson, the black veins swollen on his forehead and his throat, his breath caught in savage» stifled gasps, his bared chest heaving like the flanks of a snared animal.
"To-night!—to-night!"
The words rattled in his chest with a curse that would have chilled even the bold blood of his mighty rival.
The Umbrian sat motionless, staring at him with distended, senseless eyes; he was filled with a great terror, but the terror was vague, and his mind seemed to swim in vapour. Erceldoune cast one glance at him, and by sheer instinct forced the vessel, still half-filled with the liquid, into his hands.
"Drink!" he said, fiercely; "drink, and be a beast at once."
The monk, with whom there was but one sense left, that of desire for the alcohol that destroyed him, seized it thirstily, and drank—drank—drank—till the fiery stream flowed down bis throat like water. Erceldoune watched him with eager, aching eyes; every moment seemed an eternity, every thought maddened him till he felt like a desert brute; he could not stir till this priest lay senseless before him.
He paced the narrow limits of his cell like a caged lion, his face dark as night, his heart panting till its throbs sounded through the stillness, his breast heaving till the loose light folds of the fishing-shirt felt like a case of iron, his gaze never leaving the obese wavering figure of the stupefied Italian, who followed his movement with a dizzy, blinded sight that grew dimmer and dimmer with every moment that the brandy rose over his brain like waves that washed all lingering sense away.
At last the pitcher dropped with a crash from hands that lost all power; a vacuous laugh sounded a moment in the Umbrian's throat; bis eyes stared senselessly at the slender silver cimeter of the young moon that shone through the slit of the casement, then their lids closed, his head fell back, he lay like a log of wood on the pallet—unconscious, sightless, dead drunk.
Erceldoune stooped over him, and forced his eyelids up; by the look of the eyeballs beneath he saw that this was no feint, but the deep-drugged sleep of intoxication that would be unbroken for a score of hours, whose stupor made the man it had enchained powerless as a stone, brainless as a hog, deaf to all sound, insensible of all existence;—he wanted no more.
With his knife he slashed noiselessly the band of the great keys that swung at the monk's girdle, and fastened them on his own, so muffled that they would make no sound as he moved. He looked at his pistols, and put them back in his sash ready sprung; they were double-barrelled revolvers, that carried sure death in their tabes. Then he laid his hand on the hound's collar, led him without, closed the door, and drew its bolts, locking in the Umbrian.
The dormitory was quite dark; not even the moon's rays strayed into its narrow black aisle of stone, with the double line of cells flanking its length; a single footfall overheard, a single echo sounding down the silence, and the sleeping monks would pour out of their lairs upon him. While waiting, he had bound his feet with withes of hay, so that they fell noiselessly on the pavement; and the hound stole softly on, as he had been bred to steal on a roebuck's slot or a brigand's track. The first thing Erceldoune sought was to make the road free to leave the building; he found his way, that he had carefully noted as he came, back to the great entrance. The whole place was still; there was not a sound; he passed uninterruptedly to the vaulted gate-passage. Here a single oil-lamp burned, its light dully shed on the broad low oak door, with its iron cramps and fastenings. He drew back the bolts gently, and turned the keys in the two ponderous locks; the door would open now at a touch. He motioned to the hound to wait and guard it; the dog understood the trust, and couched motionless as though cast in bronze; a truer or a bolder sentinel could not be placed there, and it was not for the first time that the brave sagacious Servian monarch had been trusted in a crisis of life or death. Then rapidly, and with the light swift tread of a deer, Erceldoune retraced his steps; he had but the shadowy, rambling information of the monk to guide him to where Idalia was, but he knew, by that, that she was in the westward wing of the monastery, and he made his way there through the thick darkness about him, and down the stone passages winding one in another. It was all so still; he thought the story of the drunken Italian must have been a drink-inspired dream.
And yet—men who came for shame would come in silence and in secret; his hand was on his pistols as he went, his limbs shook as he traversed the interminable gloom, a hot joy, a terrible torture, were on him; he went to save her—and he might be too late.
He had found his way into what, as far as he could judge, was the western part close on the chapel which the Umbrian had spoken of as the place of her fresh lodgment. Here, also, the darkness was unbroken; he could not pierce it to see a yard in advance; he felt the rough cold stone of the wall against his hand; he felt by the greater chillness of the air that no ray of daylight ever penetrated; he paused a moment, tempted at all risk of discovery to return and fetch the dog to track her. At that instant his eyes caught a faint narrow thread of light, pale and close to the floor—the light, doubtless, of a chamber within glimmering above the door-sill; he made his way towards it, careless what hand might be stretched out to arrest his course; before he reached it, the sweet imperial tones of a voice that thrilled him like an electric touch rang through the solitude:
"Back!—or your life or mine ends. It matters little which!"
The voice was clear as a bell and rich as music, but it vibrated with a meaning that struck like steel to the heart of the man who loved her;—it told him all.
With the force of a giant he threw himself against the door, guided to it by the light that gleamed beneath against the stones. Passion lent him herculean strength; the bar within was drawn, but the weight of his pressure suddenly flung on the panela sent both bolts and sockets back, wrenched from their fastenings, while the wood was shivered beneath the crash, and a dusky yellow light flared in his eyes from the cell within.
Across the broken half of the door, still jammed by its Staples to the floor, he saw Idalia; such light as there was, was on her where she stood close pressed to the bare stone wall, upon her face loathing and scorn unutterable, yet even now no touch of fear; the rich-hued draperies of her masque-dress were torn, as though she had just wrenched herself free from some polluting grasp; her hair was loosened, and against her bosom she held clenched the blade of the Venetian stiletto, its point turned inward against her heart. Above her stood her great tyrant's lofty form.
As the bolts broke, and the splintered beechwood flew in fragments, Giulio Villaflor swept round, his forehead red, his eyes alight with a Borgia's fury of baffled and licentious love—an amazed rage on him at the stranger who dared stand between him and his captive, between him and his will. With one glance, in which his gaze met hers, and with a lion's spring, Erceldoune was on the mighty Prelate, his hand at the other's throat, as a forest hound's fangs fasten in a wolfs; the shock of the sudden collision dragged the Italian back staggering and breathless ere he heard or saw his antagonist. Then that sheer blood-instinct woke in Villaflor which wakes with the first sense of conflict in all men not cowards from their birth; he closed with this unknown foe, whose gripe was at his throat, holding him powerless.
Not a word was breathed, yet both knew— strangers though they were—that they met thus but for her sake. It was the work of an instant, yet to the Neapolitan it seemed long as half a life, that struggle in which the lightning swoop of his unseen enemy swept him from his prey, and bore down on him with the might of vengeance, in the silence of the night which he had thought had veiled his tyranny and his crime from all eyes. No living man had ever crossed the will or the passions of the great prelate until now that he was seized as lions seize in the death-grapple.
They were almost perfectly matched; equal in strength as in stature, though in one a life of adventure and hardihood had braced all that in the other a life of effeminate indulgence had enervated. Giulio Villaflor beneath his sacerdotal robes had a warrior's frame and a warrior's soul; many a time, hearing of battle-fields and soldier's perils, he had longed to gird a sword on his loins and go down in the van to the slaughter; and as the gripe of Erceldoune's hand fastened on his throat, and the gleam of his enemy's eyes flashed suddenly into his, the desert rage, the desert courage, roused in the silken soft-footed panther of the Church. In the lamp-lit cell, under the black vaulted roof, in the hush of the midnight-silenced monastery, they wrestled together in that wild-beast conflict, which makes the men who are maddened by it savage and bloodthirsty as the beasts whose ferocity they share.
Such feeble flickering light as there was in the dungeon shone on the majestic figure of the priest clothed in the dark floating robes of the Church, and the athletic form of his foe, in the white loose linen dress of the Capriote sailors, as breast to breast, face to face, with their lofty limbs twined like gladiators, and their hands at each other's throats, they swayed, and reeled, and rocked to and fro, in that deadly embrace. It was the work of scarce twenty seconds; yet in it they rent and tore at each other as lion and leopard may do in the yellow dust of a tropic dawn, when long famine has made both ravenous for blood, and each beast knows that he must conquer and kill, or feel the fangs plough down into heart and flanks, and his own life pour out for ever. The prelate, who, ere now, had never even known a hand too roughly brush his sacred person, sought only to fling off the grasp that strangled him; his foe, rife with revenge and burning with a rival's hate, could have torn his heart out where they wrestled in as mortal a combat as ever was that with which retiarius and secutor reddened the white sand of Augustan amphitheatres.
A moment, and the hardier strength, the leonine force, of Erceldoune, so often tested in victory under the red foliage of Canadian forests and the scorching suns of African skies, conquered; he crushed the priest in his sinewy arms till the chest-bones bent, and the breath was stifled, as in the gripe of the Arctic bear; then, with one last effort he swung the Italian off, and raising him by the waist, flung him with all his might downward on to the stone floor, the limbs falling with a dull, crushing, breaking sound as they were dashed against the granite.
Thrown so that his head smote the flags with a shock like iron meeting iron, Villaflor fell insensible, the force with which he was tossed outward stunning his senses, and throwing him a bruised, motionless, huddled mass in the gloom of the dusky cell. The proud and princely ecclesiastic lay powerless, silenced, broken, helpless, like a dead cur, in the heart of the monastery where his word was law, and his will absolute as any sovereign's.
His foe stood above him, his foot on the prostrate throat, that swelled and grew purple with the suffocated breath, the stifled blood. He had lost all memory save the sheer animal impulse to slaughter and avenge; and his heel ground down on to Giulio Villaflor's neck, treading out life till the rich lips of the Neapolitan gasped in unconscious torture, and the olive tint of his bold smooth brow grew black as the full veins throbbed and started beneath the skin.
One pressure more, and the last pulse of existence would have been crushed out where he lay, with his teeth clenched and his senseless eyes staring upwards:—the touch that could lead him where it would, as a child, fell lightly on her avenger's arm. Idalia's voice thrilled him with its sweet brief words:
"Wait! You are too brave for that. He is fallen; let him lie."
Her gaze dwelt on him, full, humid, eloquent, speaking her gratitude far more deeply than by words. Breathless, victorious, with the war-lust in his eyes, and his heart panting under the bruised muscles and the aching sinews of the chest to which his enemy had been strained in so deadly an embrace, Erceldoune turned and looked at the woman for whose sake he had fought, as a hound, called off from the throat of the thief he has pulled down, looks at the master whom he obeys, even whilst he longs to disobey, and serve him, and revenge him, with the death-gripe.
He took his heel off the neck of Giulio Villaflor.
"As you will."
His voice shook over the simple words; his face flushed hotly to the very temples as, for the first time, he met her gaze; his eyes searched hers, thirstily wistful, wildly eager.
"Come, for the love of God! You trust me?"
"As I never trusted any."
She stretched out to him, as she spoke, her fettered hands that, even chained, had found strength in them to hold the slender blade that would have sheathed itself in her heart or her tyrant's. There was that in the action which, even in such a moment, made him feel faint and blind with hope. It repaid him all—would have repaid him his death-stroke, had he laid dying at her feet.
For all answer he crushed the steel links that hung, holding her wrists powerless, in the grasp which had stifled Giulio Villaflor, and bent and wrenched and twisted them with the same force as that by which he had once torn off an Indian boar from its writhing human prey; the chain broke and fell asunder.
His eyes, as they looked up to hers, spoke a meaning to which her own heart answered as flame leaps to the touch of a torch.
"We will have one freedom—the freedom of death, if not of life!"
She knew all that the whisper meant; knew that he might be powerless to give her the liberty of existence, but that he would give her the liberty of the grave—and share it.
As the links of her fetters broke, a rush, an alarm, a tumult, were borne down the silence from the distant corridors; the monks had awakened, and found, either their stranger-guest absent or their bolted gates unloosed. Those doors once freshly closed, those sleepers once aroused from their countless cells, and every avenue of escape would be sealed, every chance of flight ended for ever.
Without a pause for breath, without a glance at the fallen form of the great churchman, without sense or memory of the aching sinews and the bruised nerves that throbbed in heavy pain across his own breast, where the strength of his foe had dealt him blows that had rained down like an iron hammer on an iron plate, he drew his pistol with one hand, while with the other he held her close against him.
"We will beat them yet!" he said, in his teeth, that were clenched like the strong fangs of a mastiff. He was a soldier at the core; all a soldier's daring, all a soldier's war-fire, rose in him, as with him alone lay her defence, her liberty, her life.
With the swiftness of a moorland deer he plunged out into the passage beyond, and dashed down the windings of the narrow ways. The darkness was like the depth of midnight, and the first false step might fling them like broken birds upon the wall that towered on either side, or down the sheer descent of the granite stairs that ever and again at intervals led into the unknown horrors of the underground crypt and vaults. Yet, as he bore her onward through the rayless, treacherous blackness, fierce joy was on him: for her pleasures, and her riches, and her brilliance, half the world might be her comrades and her candidates, but he alone shared her danger. In her prosperity so many had been round her; in her extremity he had no rival.
The rush of feet, the clamour of voices, the tremulous utterance of vague alarm pierced shrilly and íncessantly from the farther end of the building the dead silence of the night. From the broken cries which reached him, he could tell that the priests knew nothing as yet of the fall of their great leader, but had been awakened by the noise of the far-off conflict, and had discovered his absence and the Umbrian's drunken sleep. But one chance remained—the single chance of reaching the entrance-hall before they searched there for him.
"Can you fire?" he whíspered, as he bore her onward and outward to where the feeble lamplight gleamed yellow and faint in the passages he had traversed.
In answer, her hand glided over the barrel of his weapon, and closed on the butt firmly.
"My life has hung on my own shot before now."
There was no tremor in her own tones as she replied to him; there was only the calm valour that thrilled him as a clarion thrills the soldier who hears its silvery melody command him to face death and to deal it.
"Promise me one thing?" she murmured.
There was light enough now, grey and dusky as it was, for him to see her eyes as they looked up to his, the gold gleam of her hair against his breast, the glisten of the steel blade against her bosom.
"All things."
"Then, if we are outnumbered, keep the last shot for me, and take sure aim."
A mortal anguish quivered through him; he knew it might well prove that this boon, and this only, would be all that he could do to rescue or obey her.
"The last but one," he answered. "The last shall bring me to you."
The words were brief, and had the noble simplicity of his own nature in them; blent with a high devotion that held her honour dearer yet than all her beauty, and would obey her will even unto this last night of all. He had loved her ere now as dogs love, as slaves love, as men love whose passions can make them madmen, dotards, fools; but with that hour he loved her more grandly, more deeply, with a passion that sank into her heart, and stirred it as the storm winds stir the sea; that, for the first time in all the years in which this insanity had been roused by her and lavished on her, moved her to reverence what she ruled, to feel the strength, the depth, the force of this life that she, and she alone, could break as a child breaks reeds. She was silent; she let herself be borne by him through the twilight; she, too, felt a lulling sweetness, a subtle charm, in that breathless passage through the gloom, whose only goal might be the grave. She, too, felt something of that dreamy sorcery which lies in the one word—"together."
Nearing them came the clamour of the shrill Italian voices; behind them, from the cell where Giulio Villaflor was stretched senseless, the shouts of those who found their lord lie dying as they deemed, rang the alarm through the whole monastery, till the stones echoed with the outcry. From the stillness of slumber and the drowsy monotone of prayer, the whole silence teemed with noise and tumult; the whole building was alive with men, who started from their first stupor of sleep in vague terror and senseless excitation, while above all thundered the roll of the hound's bay, attacked at his post and giving challenge to his menacers.
"If he can guard the gates, we are free!"
The cry broke from her with the agony of a prayer as they pressed on into the great hall, where the single swinging entrance lamp burned dully through night and day. Hope almost died in him as he saw the crowd of monks that filled it, while before the unbarred door the dog couched like a lion ready to spring, with his mane erect, and his eye-balls red with fire, and his mighty teeth gleaming white under his black-bearded muzzle, holding them so at bay that none dared be the first to pass him and swing to afresh the unloosed bolts and chains. They forgot the hound as they saw the prisoner of their Church, and rushed on to her with a shrill yell. There were men among them who had flung the priestly robes over lives of foul crimes and unsuccessful villanies; and men who had hated her for that mere feminine forbidden loveliness that here, in their stone-locked den, they never looked on; and men who would have killed her, were it only that such service might find them fair favour in the eyes of the great dignitary, who held their fates in the hollow of his hand. These threw themselves headlong towards Erceldoune as he came out of the darkness of the corridor into the entrance-square, low-roofed and broad, with the arch of the door filling its farther end.
He paused, and levelled his pistol full in the eyes of the foremost.
"Let me pass, or you are dead men."
END OF VOL. II.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.