CHAPTER VI.
"THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD."
In a distant apartment of the villa a youth lay sleeping, his richly-tinted face with the black curls falling back from the bold brow, like one of the beautiful boys who loved, and laughed, and danced, and sung in one long carnival, from sunset to sunrise, in the glad Venice of Goldoni. He slept soundly, as only youth sleeps, dressed in a Capriote fishing suit; and on his chest, as the striped shirt fell back from it, there were the scars of deep wounds just healed—no more—over the strong fearless beatings of his young heart. A little distance from him sat his father, an old man, with the grand head of a noble of Tintoretto's or Bassano's canvas—the head of the great mediæval signori who filled the porphyry palaces, and swept through the Piazzo San Marco, in the red gold of glowing summer evenings, when the year of revel was held in Venice for the Foscaria's accession, and the City of the Waters was in her glorious reign. The elder man was not sleeping; his eyes were on his son. He had lost three such as that sleeping boy for Italy—three trampled down under the tread of Austrian armies or of Pontifical mercenaries; the one left was the last of his name. But he would have sent out a hundred more, had he had them, to bring back the dead grandeur to Rome, to see the ancient liberties revive, and the banner of the free republic float in spring-tide air above the fresh lagoons and over the green-wreathed arches of his beloved Venezia.
They had suffered much, both of them, for liberty; but they were both willing to suffer more—the boy in the dawn of his manhood, and the elder in the weariness of his age. There was no sound in the chamber; food and wine stood near; the shutters were closed; through a small oval aperture the glowing sun in the hour of its sunrise alone penetrated, flooding the floor with seven-coloured light. From the dawn without there came a faint delicious odour of carnations, of late violets, of innumerable leaves. The door opened noiselessly; through it came Idalia. The old man started and rose, took her hand and pressed it to his lips, then stood in silence. She glanced at the sleeping youth, lying there in so profound a rest with a smile on his arched full lips.
"Poor boy!" she said, softly; "it is a cruelty to waken him. Dreams are the mercies of life. Yet there is no time to be lost. You may be saved still."
"What! your friend will serve us so well as that?" asked the Italian, wonderingly, "But it is not strange; the English are a bold people, they never refuse to resist oppression."
Over Idalia's face swept an unspoken contempt.
"The individual English, no!—but the nation would let any freedom be strangled like a hanged dog, rather than risk its trade or lose a farthing."
"But it is a great risk for him. We have no right to expose him to it."
"No; we have no right," she answered, almost bitterly. "Not a shadow of right!—still he accepts it: he does not heed peril. What brave man does?"
"For you."
The words were softly added; the old Venetian looked at her with a mournful fixity, an unuttered interrogation. She turned slightly from his gaze; she knew what was in his thoughts; she knew that he reminded her of the many who had gone out to peril, and fallen beneath it, for her sake.
"We can waste no time, caro amico," she said, rapidly, in his own liquid, caressing Venetian tongue. "The earlier yon leave, the less likelihood of detection. He will wait for you on the shore; you will row him to his vessel amongst others; nothing can be simpler. You will be safe with him."
Something that was almost the weakness of tears rose in her eyes as she spoke; she thought how entirely her trust would be preserved, how surely, at risk of very life, he, whom she recompensed with cold words and bitter neglect, would redeem his promise.
Over the browned, stern, noble face of Filippo Fiesoli the warmth of his lost youth stole; a look came into his glance that only was not love because chastened by so utter a hopelessness, and purified from all touch of passion.
"Ah!" he murmured, in his snow-white beard, "I can give you nothing, save an exile's gratitude and the blessing of an old man near his grave. You noblest among women!—what you have asked for us!"
Idalia's eyes softened with a mellow wistful tenderness, with an unspeakable regret.
"Ah, Fiesoli! if all patriots were pure, all liberators true as you are, my best friend, I would count every loss my highest, holiest gain! But there is so much dross amidst the little gold, there are such coward villanies masked under freedom's name. I, too, 'noblest amongst women!'—O God, sometimes I think myself the vilest."
He sighed; he knew her meaning; the grand pure heart of the old patriot would not take on itself the falsehood of flattering disguise.
"You are noblest in much," he said, softly; "something too pitiless, something too alluring, it may be, to the many who love you; but your errors are the errors of others, your nobility is your own." She shook her head.
"Gentle sophisms and full of charity, but not true. My errors are my own, woven close in my nature and my mind; such nobility as you speak of—if I can claim it—comes rather from the recklessness of courage, the passion for liberty, the hatred of tyranny, than anything better in me. But I am not here to speak of myself; there is not an instant to be lost: wake Cesario, poor child, and then leave me. We are too used to life and partings to feel this sudden or strange; but, my dear friend, my honoured friend, peace be with you, if we never meet again."
She held out both her hands to him with a look on her face that her lovers had never seen there, so gentle, so softened, so full of reverent sweetness. Filippo Fiesoli stooped over them in silence, pressing them in his own; he was an old man, very near his last years, as he had said, but perhaps in all the homage that had been lavished on her she had never had one heart more nobly and more purely hers than was that of the great age-worn patriot's. His voice was unsteady as his farewell was spoken.
"Death will take me, most likely, before I can ever look upon your face again; but my dying breath will be a prayer for you."
There was an infinite dignity, a sublime pathos, that were beyond all pity in the benediction; age had set its barrier of ice betwixt them, and the grave alone waited for him, but the love wherewith he loved her was very rare on earth.
Without another word he turned from her, and awoke his son. The young soldier sprang up alert and ready on the instant: he had often wakened thus with the Sicilian legions. As he saw Idalia, his beautiful Titian face flushed, his eyelids fell shyly as a girl's, he sank before her on one knee with the old grace of Venice, and touched the hem of her dress with his lips. She smiled at him, an indulgent, gentle smile, such as she would have given a caressing animal.
"There is no time to spare in courtesies, Cesario. The moment is come. You are ready?"
The boy's lips trembled.
"A soldier is always ready, but—if you would rather let me die near you, than send me out to exile!"
She passed her hand lightly, half-rebukingly, over the silk of his dark curls.
"Foolish child! you talk idly. To stay here were to be locked in the dungeons of the Capuano. Go with your father, Cesario mio; your first duty is to him, your second to Italy and to liberty."
The youth's eyes gleamed with tho fire of the south and the fire of the soldier—the fire that her words could light as flame lights the resinous pinewood.
"My first is—to you."
She smiled on him; she knew the romantic adoration that he bore her would harm him little, might lead him far on noble roads.
"Scarcely!—but if you think so, then obey me, Cesario. Give your thought, beyond all, first to your father; give the life that remains through all trial and all temptation to Italy and to freedom."
The boy's earnest, impassioned gaze looked upward at her through a mist of tears.
"I will!" he murmured, fervently—"I will."
She drew her hand from him with a slight gesture of pain; she had seen that gaze from so many eyes, she had heard that vow taken by so many voices. Eyes that were sightless; voices now for ever stilled.
"Farewell," she said, gently, to both. "I will send my Albanian to you—he can be trusted; and you must go down alone to the shore. Give this to my friend, and he will know you. He will be in waiting."
She took from her hand one of her rings, a lapis-lazuli stone of ancient workmanship, and held it out to the eider Fiesoli; then, without longer pause, she passed from their presence. The boy Cesario flung himself down on the couch she had just risen from, and with his head bowed on his arms sobbed like a woman, he was a bold and gallant soldier, but he was but a youth; his father stood motionless, the morning sunlight, as it strayed through the oval in the casement, falling with a golden hue upon his grand bronzed brow and the white sweep of his patriarch's beard. Differently they both loved her, equally they alike knew their love hopeless.
Idalia passed on to her own apartments. These were not the first lives she had saved by many; at personal cost, personal peril; saved with courage, and daring, and fertile expedient; but they were as nothing to her in this moment beside the many more that through her had been lost. She had not yet slept or rested for a moment, but she felt no sense of fatigue, no willingness to sleep. Alone, the proud sapphire-crowned head of the coquette, the lionne, the sorceress, the brow that would have borne so royally the Byzantine diadem of her ancestral Comneni, drooped wearily, yet not from physical weariness; the flush upon her cheeks had faded, and her form, with its trailing rich-hued skirts, and jewels flashing in an eastern splendour, was in strange contrast with the melancholy of her attitude and of her thoughts as she stood there in solitude at last, with the dawning light of the young day shut out by draperies of falling silk, and a single Etruscan lamp only burning near.
"Now he has seen me as I am," she thought—"as I am!" A smile crossed her lips, but it was a smile more sad than tears;—there was in it so much hatred of herself. "It was but just to him. No cruelty from me would kill his love, but his own scorn may. They love me for my beauty, because I charm their sight and their senses, because they are fools, and I know how to make them madmen! So that a woman were lovely, they would care not how vile she might be! But he—he has the old knightly faith, the old gallant honour; he gives his heart with his passion; he must revere what he adores. He has seen me as I am to-night; the pain was deadly to him; yet, if it rend me out of his memory, he may live to be grateful for it."
The warmth of the chamber seemed stifling to her, the perfumed oil of the lamp oppressive; the room itself, with its hangings, its cabinets, its decorations, its countless bagatelles of art and wealth, of extravagance and of effeminacy, struck. on her loathsomely.
"Ah! how like my life!" she thought, with an impetuous scorn. "The pure day is shut out, and all that is heated, unreal, luxurious, meretricious, worthless, is chosen instead! A diamond-studded, gas-lit, dangerous lie, instead of the sunlight of truth!"
She pushed the heavy folds of a curtain back, and opened the casement beyond it; as the villa overhung the sea, so the window jutting out overhung the rock, and gave to view in one grand sweep the whole bow of the bay, with the white mists of earliest day resting still midway between earth and heaven. Sound there was none, save close at hand the low music of a monaco's wing, and from afar the swinging cadence of a chiming angelus.
She stood silent, looking long outward through the fragrant coils of orange-blossom and of climbing ivy that hung in their green shadow before the oval of the window, towards the waking world that smiled below. To her, whose heart had never beaten for one of those which had throbbed for her, there came at last some recoil of the suffering which she had so often dealt, some touch of that futile pain which for her and through her had been so often borne. She saw still, in memory, the wondering and grieved reproach of the eyes which had haunted her throughout all the past hours.
"Do I love!—I!" she thought, while a laugh half haughty, half ironic, and yet more mournful than either, came on her lips. And she turned back again from the brightness of the day with a gesture of her old imperious disdain. She was too proud, too sceptical, too used to command, too unused to weakness, not to be loth to admit such yielding folly in her, not to be contemptuous of her own softer thoughts and tenderer impulses. Love!—to her it was a fool's paradise, a gay and glittering masquerade» a sceptre with which to sway a court of madmen, a weapon with which to reap the harvests of gold and power, a passion that men got drunk with as with raki, and through which, as they pampered or inflamed it, women could indirectly rule the world. Her contempt for it had been as great as the sovereignty with which she had used it.
It was bitter to her to think that she could have so much weakness in her—so much living still beneath all that she had seen, known, done, to slay it by the roots. Something of the warmth of passion, something of its tenderness, were on her; and she flung them away, she would not have them. The unquestioning fealty which was ready to do her will at all and any cost, the devotion to her which, without any recompense, any hope, any self-interest, accepted the peril from which she had offered to free him, and with a simple grandeur claimed the right to be true to his word: these moved her as nothing else could have done. Tempests had swept over her, leaving her utterly unswayed by them; the rarity which touched her as something strange and unfamiliar was the unselfishness of the love he bore her. Many had loved her as well; none so generously.
She could see the shore far below—down through a wreathing, shimmering interspace of green leaves. She had rescued men at far keener, closer danger than there was in this. She had gone to Russian masked-balls, ignorant whether at any moment the hand of an Imperial officer might not be laid on her domino, and her fettered limbs be borne away without warning, through the frozen night, over leagues on leagues and steppes on steppes of snow, to the Siberian doom which awaits the defenders of Poland. She had swept at a wild gallop through the purple gloom of the midnight Campagna with her courage only rising the higher, her eyes only gleaming the darker. She had glided in her gondola through balmy spring sunsets, when all Venice was wreathed and perfumed with flowers in some Austrian festa, and had laughed, and coquetted, and stirred her fan, and listened languidly to the music, while hidden beneath her awning was one whom the casemates of the Quadrilateral would endose only to let him issue to his death, unless her skill could save him. She had passed through many hours of supreme peril, personal and for others, and the disquietude had not been on her that was on her now.
She leaned there against the casement watching the beach beneath, where it stretched out along the glittering sea. It was still only the daybreak, but the fisher-folk were astir, in different groups, spreading out their nets in the warmth of the rising sun, or putting out in their boats from the shore. There was glowing colour, picturesque movement, life, healthful, active, innocent, along the grey line of the sand; she sighed half impatiently as she watched it. Was it good to have no thought, save of a few fish?—no fear, save of the black swoop of the mistral?—no care in life, save for those striped sails, and those brown keels, and those sun-browned, half-naked children tumbling in the surf?
No; she did not so belie herself as to cheat her thoughts into the lie; she would not have relinquished the power, the genius, the vitality, the knowledge of her life, for a thousand years of the supreme passionless calm that looks out from the eyes of Egyptian statues, far less for the dull brute routine of peasant ignorance and common joys.
On the sands Erceldoune waited, leaning against a ledge of rock, with his eyes fixed absently on the waters. Even at the distance he was from her she could see the profound weariness that had altered his bold and soldier-like bearing, the hopeless melancholy that darkened his face as the light of the dawn fell upon it. She was not a woman to wish things done undone, or to know the vacillations of regret; yet, in the moment, she almost wished the words unspoken which had been uttered by her in a sudden impulse and resolve to let him blind himself no longer.
"It is useless to try and save him now," she thought; "he will never forget."
There was something which touched her infinitely in that guard he kept there; patient as the Pompeian soldier standing at his post, while the dark cloud of the ashes and the liquid torrent of lava-flame poured down, certain as he that no reward could come to him for his unrecompensed obedience, save perhaps one—death.
The Venetians left her garden. She saw them approach, and address him; she saw him start as the eider man handed him the ring, and, as he took it, give one upward glance at the eyrie of the villa where she leaned. Then he signed to him the sailor whom he had first spoken with on the night of his arrival at Capri.
There was an instant's terrible suspense as the Capriote stood curiously eyeing these two unknown sailors, whose presence on his shore he felt to be odd and unwelcome, since living was poor in the Picola Marina, and strangers likely to take a share of it were commonly roughly handled: then he gave good-humoured assent to whatever had been asked of him and launched his boat into the breakers with the single force of his broad breast and brawny arms. He motioned the unknown fishermen to take the oars, with somewhat of a sullen grace, as though their advent still annoyed him; he took the helm himself; Erceldoune flung his limbs down across the benches; the little skiff put out to sea. Thus far the work was done.
As the boat left the shore he turned, rose slightly, and looked back at Capri: that mute farewell, that speechless witness of how his promise had been redeemed, smote her keenly.
She watched the movement of the boat through the waves, with tho daybreak light upon the stripes of its orange awning—watched it as it receded farther and farther, the tall figure of the Capriote standing at the stern, in his loose white shirt and his brown brigand-like Italian beauty—watched it till it swept out unarrested, unobserved, to where the yacht rocked at anchor.
The boat reached the vessel's side; a while longer, and the anchor weighed in the quiet of the dawn, whilst the only things that stirred on the whole width of the bay were a few scattered fishing-craft. She, leaning there against the grey of the stone, looking out through the wreaths of the leaves, never left her watch, never relaxed her gaze. She knew the tigers who slept yonder where Naples lay; she knew the cannon that would boom out through the sunny air if the errand of the Etoile were dreamed of; she knew the dungeons that yawned in the Vicaria for those who fled. She could not tell how much, how little, of the escape that she had organised was known to the Bourbon court; she could not tell that the government of Francis might not be only seeming to slumber, that it might crouch like a jungle-beast the surer to seize. She could not tell, even though to no living being had a word been whispered of her intent; she could not tell, for walls have ears where tyranny rules and priestcraft listens.
Any moment while the anchor was slowly wound upward, and the rigging of the yacht covered with eager sailors, the alarm-gun might boom from Naples, and the pursuit run down the schooner, boarding and swamping her in the midst of the smiling seas of the tranquil dawn.
At last she moved; her white canvas filled with a fair wind, her helm was turned straight westward, her ensign of St. George fluttered in the favouring breeze. With an easy gliding motion, like a swan's, she passed through the sun-lit waters, unnoticed, unpursued. Against her rails one figure leaned motionless; his eyes were turned towards the rock, hanging so far above, where the villa was suspended like a falcon's nest; turned there always whilst the yacht passed onward, out beyond Capri, beyond Ischia, beyond the range of Neapolitan guns and the pursuit of Neapolitan ships, outward to round the snow-peaks of the eyrie of the Buonaparte eaglets, and to steer on towards the southern coast of France, in safety.
As it receded, slowly, surely, till its sails looked no larger than the sea-gulls that flew past her, and the busy day of the young summer awoke all round the semicircle of the bay, then, only then, Idalia moved and left the ivy-sheltered casement. From the glittering stretch of the azure seas, as from the thoughts newly arisen in her, she turned, with a pang of pain, with a throe of regret, the bitterness of pride repelling weakness, the bitterness of pride warring with remorse.