I D A L I A.
CHAPTER I.
"STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE."
The flash of the steel tube in their sight, the pressure of its cold circle on the forehead of the nearest, staggered the monks a moment; they recoiled slightly one on another. They had measured the height and the girth of this stranger's limbs as they had sat with him at their meal, and they dreaded the tempest of his wrath. Erceldoune, holding her to him still with one arm, and covering the foremost with his aim, thrust himself against the mass and strove to pierce his way through them to the gates. A voice from behind cut the silence like a bullet's hiss.
"Cowards! Bolt the doors and trap them; we can pinion them then at our leisure!"
The speaker, as his figure towered in the shadow, was a gaunt Abruzzian giant, fierce-eyed, hollow cheeked, eager and lustful for slaughter; in a long dead time he had been a chief among ferocious soldiery, who had imbrued his hands deep in blood, and the old savage instincts flared alight, and the old brute greeds breathed free again, as for once after long captivity they broke the bondage of the priesthood. He took the leadership among the herd of half-awakened and bewildered monks, as the long-stifled impulses of war and murder rose in him, and glared wolf-like from his eyes, reddened with a light that was well-nigh insanity. He lived once more in a thousand dead days of battle, of rapine, and of cruelty, as he strode downward into the hall, heaving aloft a great iron bar with which he had armed himself, in default of other weapon.
Erceldoune, as he turned his head, and saw the lamplight glow on the lean ravenous face, knew that here lay his worst foe; the rest might be driven like a flock of sheep if once terror fairly mastered them, but in this man he read the bloodthirst of the tiger, the fiercer and the more ruthless for its long repression. With the keen glance of a soldier the warrior-monk sprang forward to secure the doorway; once netted, he knew that the prisoners could be dealt with at pleasure. The weight of the iron bar was lifted, to he hurled on to the hound's head, where—no more to be moved in fear or in wrath than the sentinel, who perishes at his post for sake of honour and obedience—he might be slain so with ease, though not passed or approached except at cost of life. The iron swung above the Abruzzian's head, swaying lightly as a flail, to descend with another instant on to the dog's bold brow; as it was raised, his arm fell paralysed, Erceldoune's first shot broke the bone above the wrist. Maddened with the pain, the monk shifted the bar to his left hand, and, forgetful of the hound, rushed on to his antagonist, head downward, with the blind infuriated onslaught of a wounded boar. Erceldoune, watching him with quick, unerring surely, was ready for the shock, and, sparing his fire—for he knew not how much more yet he might need it—caught him with a blow on the temple as he rushed on, which sent him staggering down like a felled ox. As he dropped, his brethren, catching that contagion of conflict which few men, priests or laymen, can resist when once launched into it, threw themselves forward to revenge his fall, rough-armed with the hatchets, the clubs, the pickaxes used in out-door toil, which hung or leaned against the wall.
Brigands of Calabria, tigers of the Deccan, would not have been wilder in their rage than were these sons of peace, who took in one brief hour payment for all that had been silenced, and iced, and fettered under the weight of the Church*s rule. The sight of a woman's loveliness lashed like a scourge the futile envy roused beforehand in them by the stranger who had broken their bread, and who had showed them all that they had lost in losing for ever their freedom of will and act. What was at riot in them was not a gaoler's rage or a hireling's terror of chastisement; it was their own heart-sickness, their own rebellion, and despair, which made them savage as murderers.
For the only time in all his life a deadly fear came on Erceldoune—fear for her. He glanced down once on her, and her eyes gave him back a smile proud, serene, resolute, sweet beyond all tenderness—a smile that said, as though her lips spoke it, "Remember!" It nerved him afresh, as though the courage of Arthur, the power of Samson, poured by it into bis veins and limbs. He had sworn to give her the freedom of death, if that of life were beyond bis reach; the memory of his promise made him mad with that desperate strength whereby men, in their agony, reach that which, told or heard in the coolness of calm reason, seems a dream of impossibilities, wild as those of the deeds of the Red Cross.
"Fire with me!" he said in his teeth. "Our lives hang on it."
She heard, and raised her weapon steadily as the priests rushed at them, while the Abruzzian lay like a mass of timber at their feet; the two shots echoed together, aimed at the mass of stretching hands, of brawny arms, of gleaming hatchets, of lifted clubs, that was within a hand's breath of them in the twilight of the lamplit hall. The mass wavered, quivered, staggered back; in that one breathless pause Erceldoune, with his arms round her so that she was held close against his breast, dashed forward with a rush as the lion will dash through the cordon of hunters who have fenced him in for the slaughter, hurling them back and front, left and right, by the impetus that bore him through them as swiftly, as resistlessly, as a scythe clears its way through the grasses.
One Cistercian, more rapid than the rest, swerved aside from that terrific charge which carried all before it like the sweep of cavalry, and threw himself against the door to swing the oak close ere the fugitives could reach it. "Seize him!" shouted Erceldoune in Servian. The hound had waited, panting and agonised, for the command; he sprang on the monk's breast, and threw him prostrate, his fangs clenched in the man's throat almost ere the words that loosed him from his guard were fairly uttered. The fair, still, lustrous night gleamed soft and starlit through the narrow space of the opened portals; the world and all its liberty lay beyond.
Blows were rained on him, yells hooted in his ear, hands clutched his clothes, his limbs, his sash, to wrench him back; an axe hurled at him struck him, grazing a wound an inch deep in his shoulder; a herd of devils shrieked, cursed, wrestled, and pursued behind him. He heeded nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing; he only guarded her from the weapons that were flung in his rear, so that none should touch her save such as struck first at him, and bore her like the wind through the half-opened door, out into the night air, and down the flight of rock-hewn stairs; the hound, coursing before him down the slope of the black rugged precipitous steps, slippery with moss, and worn uneven by the treading feet of many centuries. One step unsure, and they would be hurled head downward on to the stones below; there was no moonlight on the depth of intense shadow that shelved straight into fathomless darkness; behind, the rash of the priests followed, and the clamour of their shouts shook the night silence;—yet on he went, fearless, reckless, impervious to pain, and feeling drunk with the sweet freedom of the fresh night wind, with the beating of her heart upon his own. To have held her thus one instant he would have given bis life up the next.
Of that downward passage he had no knowledge, no memory in aftertime; he followed it as men in a nightmare follow some hideous path that ends in chaos; he touched the earth at last, clearing the three last granite rungs of the rock-ladder with a leap that landed him on the breadth of turf that stretched beneath. He rushed across it at the speed of a wild deer, making straight for the cypress knot where he had bidden the horses be waiting. A monk held him close in chase—so close, that the priest reached the ground well-nigh with him. He did not see or dream his danger; Sulla did, and, with one mighty bound, was on the Italian's naked chest, as he had dealt with wolf and with bear in bis own Servian woods. The monk fell well-nigh senseless, and the dog tore onward through the moonlight with a loud bay of joy.
They were alone; the pursuit could not reach them for seconds at least—seconds, precious in that extremity as years. The clamour and tumult of the monastery pealed from the height above; but few of the brethren he reckoned would dare to risk the peril of descent in the blackness of midnight, the few that would must be some moments yet before they could be on him. In the shadow of the cypresses stood the horses, held by a German lad, and eased by rest till they were fresh as though they had not left their stalls.
Without words, she threw herself into the saddle; she had ridden stirrupless ere then across the brown dark desolation of the Campagna in an autumn night, with the Papal troops out against her. Idalia was of that nature to which danger is as strong wine. Her face was pale to the lips, but resolute as any soldier*s on the eve of victory; her hair shaken down rested in great masses that gleamed golden in the flickering light; her right hand still held the pistol as though it were some love-gage that she treasured close, and the fairness of her face was set calm as death, resolute as steel, even while her eyes burned, and glowed, and dilated with the ardent fire of war, and with a look sweeter than that which swept over him like a sorcery.
"Off! Every second is life!"
While she spoke he was in the saddle; the horses, young and wild, broke away at a touch in a stretching gallop, with the brave hound coursing beside them, mad with the joy of his liberty. The hoofs were noiseless on the moss that was damp and yielding by the moisture from the swamps, and the belt of the cypress screened their flight from the monastery; the monks would search for hours, till their torches flared out, in every nook and cleft of the rocks around, ere ever they would dream how that midnight ride had borne away their prisoner.
Out of the cypress-grove and beyond the beetling wall of the crags the moonlight lay in a broad white sheet, clear and soft as dawn, across the open country, scarcely broken by a tree or hut. Afar the still green fields of rye and maize were scarcely stirred by a breath, and the twisted boughs of the olives were veiled with a soft mist, the steam of the marshes and the plains. Through the luminous half-light the horses dashed at racing speed, while the water-threaded earth trembled beneath them, and the rank grasses were crushed under their fleet hoofs.
Through the shallow pools, with the water splashed to their girths, and circling away in eddying rings as they broke its slumbering quiet; through the vaporous haze that hung oyer the black expanse of the morass and the plain till they seemed to hunt down the white wraiths of its smoke that curled and uncurled before them; through the tall reedy grasses that broke as they crashed them, and sent dreamy odour out on the aír as they bowed their broad ribands and their feathery clusters; through the intense silence, till the water-hen flew with a scream from her rest, and the downy owl brushed by with a startled rush, and the landrail woke with his shrill cry from his sleep in the midst of the millet-stalks; through the balmy southern night they rode as those can only ride behind whom yawn a prison and a grave, before whom smile the world and all its liberty.
All through the night they rode on, till the slender arc of the young moon was sinking towards the west, and countless stars were shining larger and clearer towards the dawn, burning through the blue-black darkness of the sky, veiled ever and again by sweeping trails of mist.
Under the grey dim colossal arches of the Ferratino gates fresh horses waited. The tired beasts were changed in haste and without question, and the young unworn ones raced on through the gloom as fleetly as wild horses sweep over prairie plaíns.
Behind them hunted Death; with the morning light the whole land would be as one host risen against them, as one snare spread to trap them; the bloodhounds of a Church were on their track, and the hate of a king and a priest ran them down; yet scarce a touch of fear, scarce a breath of the chillness of terror were on them; they had drunk deep of the rich wine of danger, and one at least was blind with the blindness of passion.
The world was still about them; all things slept. The earth was hushed and without sound, as though the deep tranquillity of death had fallen everywhere. Only through the calmness came the low sigh of the air through grasses, and the liquid murmur of unseen waters foaming down from height to height, or stealing under the broad leafage of arum-shadowed channels. Nothing awakened around them, save the downy-winged aziola, or the changeful bands of the fireflies gleaming like gold among the grey plumes of olives, or above the tender green seas of ripening millet. The summer was still young, and the night was divine, as the nights of the south alone are; the barren plains and the vaporous pools were passed with the swiftness of a dream, and beyond the olive belts, and the outer woods of cypress, lay the richness and riot of Italy, all shadowed and softened, and steeped in the moonbeams. Vineyards where the budding grapes were thrusting their first life through the leaves; great chestnut woods, where no ray pierced the massive fans of foliage, and the ground was white as though from snow with the heavy fall of the dropped flowers; fields where melon and gourd, and the fantastic shapes of the wild figtree coiled one in another, fragrant as gods' nectar, when the hoofs trod out the fruit and bruised the amber skins, and broke through the filmy, silvery webs of weaving insects, glittering with the dew; black, silent groves, noiseless and cavernous, with the hollow moan of earth-imprisoned torrents, and lofty aisles of cedars shutting in the broken ivy-covered ruins of the deserted altars of dead gods; vast piles of rocks, and stretching plains and hills covered with ancient strongholds mouldering to dust, and nestling dells where sheeted water mirrored in the starlight slender stems of sea-pines and marble shafts of classic temples. Through them all they went, never drawing rein, with the hound coursing beside them, through the changeful light of the calm late hours, guiding their flight by the stars, and holding ever straight for the sea. With sunrise the soldiers of the King, the mercenaríes of Church and of State, would be out over the land; the night alone was liberty. Liberty, for the breath of the wind on their brows, for the splash of river-spray on their lips, for the wild joy of fearless speed, for the fragrance of trampled flowers, for the limitless glory of sight free to range over the width of the earth, for the nameless rapture of living when every sense and pulse of life is hot as with wine, yet is lulled as with sleep, and holds the pain of the world well endured for the sake of one hour of joy;—Liberty, in whose sweetness lies all the ecstasy of life, and in whose loss lies all its anguish.
Through the shallow foam of half-dry watercourses, through the long sear grasses where the cattle couched, through the odorous thickets of wild myrtle, through the withes of osiers where the bittern, wakened, rose with his sullen booming cry, they rode on towards the sea. Down the perilous slopes of ravines, where the loosened shingles shook in showers into yawning depths; down naked breadths of stone where no mosses broke the polished incline, and one uncertain step was death; across bridges high in air, spanning the white smoke of boiling torrents, while the timbera shook and bent beneath them; under mighty aisles o£ oak and cypress, where no path led save such as the rush of their gallop forced between the breaking boughs, they held their way through the twilight haze that deepened to blackest gloom where the woods closed above, and lightened to silvery lustre where the plains stretched out unbroken. All memory of danger, all sense of danger had fallen from them; on her the dreamy night silence and the passionate sweetness of freedom rested; with him tbere was no thought remaining save that he alone held his place by her bridle-rein, that he alone had delivered her out of her bondage.
In the calm around them all was at rest save their own hearts, save their own flight that held on for the same goal; all human Ufe except their own seemed banished from the world, and the slumber-hushed earth left only to them; through ravine and woodland, througk vineyard and valley, under the overhanging brow of lonely cliffs, and across the swaying bridge of giddy heights they rode together; and while the flickering light flashed down through parted leaves upon her beauty, and ever and again as he swept on beside her he met the gleam of her eyes through the shadows, he who loved her felt drunk with his joy. What cared he though he should fall dead at her feet when that midnight ríde should have reached its end? He should have passed to his grave with her.
Where the jagged iron had been hurled against him, the rent nerves throbbed, and the linen wae stained with blood; where his rival had strained him in that deadly embrace, the breadth of his chest was bruised as though weightily strucb by a mace, and compressed as though tight bound in bands of steel; but he felt none of its paín, he knew none of its suffering; he only knew that she rode beside him, that through him she was saved, that once his arms had held her, that still in all the width of the world there was none with her in her extremity save himself,—whose love she had forbidden, yet whose love, she had seen, outlasted all, and only asked of her a place with her in her danger, a place near her in her death.
No words passed between them; the breathless passage of their flight left no space for speech, and the soft hush of the darkened world was too solemn to be broken. They had passed away from the beaten track, lest any should see and mark their course, and had borne straight across the country westward to where the bay lay—breaking through the blossomed vines, the sheets of maize, the nets outspread for birds in southern mode, the deep-grown screens of myrtles fencing villa lands, and the wild growth of rocky channels, where hidden streams ran below earth, and made the vegetation riot rank and thick, where the snake found its lair, and the mosquito swarmed in hundreds, and the hot heavy vapour uprose like clouds of steam. Now and then her eyes turned on him in the darkness of cypress shadows, or where some yawning river-bed, yellow and reed-choked, and unfathomed in the gloom, was crossed with a measureless leap, their horses close abreast. For all except the echo of the ringing hoofs trampling through ripening corn, or sounding loud on rocky pathways, there was utter silence between them.
The night was fast waning, the stars growing larger, till the whole skies seemed on fire with their brilliance; the hours were passing swiftly—the hours which alone were safety. Here and there, from lonely marshes, the bittern's booming call sounded, desolate and mournful; or, as the trodden millet-stalks muffled the noise of their gallop, the cry of the cicala could be heard from under the maize. The world went by them vague as a dream, mist-like as a cloud; ruined temples, shadowy landscapes, waters glistening white, monastic piles darkly looming down from rocky heights, sullen depths malarious, impenetrable, death-laden, divine beauty gleaming vine-crowned under southern moonbeams, all passed by them like the fleeting, changeful phantoms of a feverish sleep. They rode on and on, without thought, without refuge, with one impulse only, to leave league on league between them and the abhorrent dens of the Church; the burning breath of the past hours was on them, driving them forward as the curling prairie flames drive the lives they course after; and the riot of liberty was in them both, with every breath of wind that tossed the foliage from their path, with every current of air that drove sweet, and wild, and warm against their faces, as they dashed down by the pole-star's guide straight to the sea, yet southward first, ere they bent round to the shore, since Naples, where she lay amidst her loveliness, was the tiger's lair of príest and king, was death and worse than death.
The horses coursed like greyhounds; their feet scarcely touched the earth; the shallow brooks, the parched soil, the reddening osiers were scattered as they went; neck and neck, their heads stretched like racers, their flanks heaving, their bits foam-covered, they held on at that mad pace, without pause, without stint, now forced through screens of netted boughs, while the great chestnut fans blinded their eyes, and the branches snapped with a crash, and the vipers slid from under their feet—now scouring swamps where the earth quaked beneath them, and the heron's wings, startling, brushed them, as the brooding birds rose with a rush—now keeping footing, as best they could, down narrow ledges of slippery rock, where the mosses glided, and the stone crumbled under the crush of their thundering gallop. Mile on mile, league on league, were covered with that breathless racing speed, that reckless course on giddy heights, that headlong plunge through tawny waters; when any risk, darker than the rest, was in their way, his hand closed on her bridle-rein, so that the peril which might menace her should by no chance swerve by from him. She was his in these hours at least—his in her need, in her solitude, in her jeopardy, in her flight; his now, for this one night, so far as bonds of mutual danger could so render her, so far as his arm alone to shield her, his heart alone to beat for her, his strength alone to stand between her and her foes, could lend him right to hold her so; his, while the net and the withes were about her, and the sleuth-hounds were tracking her down, even though—if she ever again reached her freedom and her sovereignty once more—she should forget that he once had served her thus, and bid him go and see her face no more. He loved her with an exceeding love; not less would he have brought her from her misery, or less have laid down his life to save hers, though he had known that, dying thus, she should never have seen even one look that thanked him.
Passion was stronger than pain, and gave him unconsciousness of it, as it had given him the thews and the sinews of giants in the contest whereby he had freed her; though the monk's blows had been rained on him like a smith's blows on his anvil, and his breast had been bruised and dinted and swollen by the grip of his priestly foe when they had strained and stifled each other like wrestlers in the death-fling, he had no feeling of suffering, no feeling of exhaustion. The glow of triumph was on him; the fragrance of the sultry night seemed to steep his senses in voluptuous delight; the fierceness of contest and slaughter were still hot in his veins, and the lulling charm of a dream fell upon him while the world lay sleeping in silence and darkness.
At every leap to which their hunters rose, the wound that the iron had slashed opened as though the rusted axe afresh was hurled at it; at every convulsive bound with which the beasts cleared some riven chasm of stone or some high aloe fence that lifted its sharp foliage ríght in their course, the weight on his chest caught his breath, and the bruised muscles ached to bursting; often the stars grew giddy above him, and the lucciole glitteríng among the leaves looked a confused heap of sparkling fire, till he could scarce tell which was earth beneath and which was sky above him; often faintness came over him from the loss of the blood that had soaked his fishing-shirt through, and the weight of the blows dealt upon him which, at the time of cootest, he had felt no more than he felt now the gentle rain of syringa flowers as they were showered from bonghs they broke asunder. Yet he had barely any knowledge of this; he flung it off him, and was strong as he rode—strong to watch every danger that threatened her in their passage—strong to lead their flight with a mountaineer's keenness of vision, a desert-hunter's instinct of guidance—strong to let her see no paleness on his face save the pallor of moonlight, no look in his eyes save the love that had dared all things for her, and would do so unflinchingly on to the end, whatsoever that end might still be. A wild, senseless, fiery intoxication of joy was upon him; he knew no pain, he knew no weakness, he fled with her alone through the night. Come what future there would, no fate could wash this out, no fate could steal this from him;—that once his arm had thrust dishonour and death back from her, that once his heart alone had been her shield against her foes.
The first grey gleam of dawn was breaking where the morning star hung in the deep mystical blue of night, when their horses, panting, worn, steaming, covered with foam, and staggering in their gallop, tore down through forest glades of oak and bark into the heart of woods where once the altars of Dionysus had arisen, and the print upon the thyme where the wild goat had wandered had been kissed by shepherds' lips as sacred ground touched by the hallowing hoof of Pan. The wood stretched up a hill-side's slope, dark even by day, so thickly woven were the old gnarled boughs, so heavy was the foliage even in summer drought, from the hidden streams that ran beneath its soil, sun-sheltered and making cool liquid music through the gloom, rising none knew whence, flowing none knew whither, but telling to all who chose to hear of the dead days when their song had mingled with the vine-feast chants to Bacchus, and had borne their cadence in companionship with the thoughts of Virgil or of Martial. No heat could reach, no season parch, those subterranean waters that here and there welled up to síght, rushing brown and bright under the moon, but soon were lost again in the recesses of the earth, and only traced by the rich herbage that grew wherever they wound, or—when the stillness was intense as Alpine solitudes—by the murmuring hollow ripple that told where they threaded their way through secret channels to the sea. Here the sun-rays could not touch to burn the grasses black; here the twisted leafage was fresh and dew-laden as though a northern coolness fanned them; here the silvery arum uncurled above the screened channels of the brooks; here the white hellebore thrust its delicate head through mosses green and curling as though, they grew under English elm-woods.
And here in the deep loneliness, sunk over their hocks in the water-fed reeds and grasses, the worn-out horses slackened speed and strained to reach a freshet that brimmed and bubbled under an aisle of oaks; and as the headlong gallop paused, and the swift rush of the air ceased, as they entered those dim aisles that had the twilight gloom and calm of some mighty temple to forgotten gods, a sudden blindness veiled all things—even her face—from his sight, Erceldoune swayed heavily forward on his saddle, the faintness of mortal pain vanquished him at last.
With sheer instinct he threw himself from his stirrups and staggered towards her; all was dark and sickly to his senses and the iron bands seemed to crush tighter and harder round his chest, straining out the very life; but his thought was still for her, and he smiled in her eyes, though he could no longer see but only felt that they were on him.
"Have no fear;—it is nothing!"
But even as the words left his lips his strength at length was conquered; and senseless from the loss of blood, be reeled slightly, and fell, head backward, on the earth.
Almost ere he had fallen Idalia was beside him; she had not dreamed that he was wounded or even in suffering, till with those few gentle words he had swayed downward like a dying man. Then, where the moonlight strayed in through a parting in the branches above, she saw that his face was white as the arum lilies amongst which he fell, and that the snowy crowns of the flowers and their broad and pointed leaves were darkened with the stain of blood, soaking through the linen of his barcarolo's dress. He was stretched there as when first, under the Carpathian pine-woods, she had found him laid struck down by the ballets of the Greek assassin, with the vultures waiting above to swoop to their feast. For many moments she knelt by him; no tears rose before her sight, and her lips were pressed close without a sound, almost without a breath, but as she gazed an agony came in her eyes greater than any that the uplifted scourge or the locked fetters of her prison had wrung from her.
She had seen so many perish for her, perish through her; she had seen the brave lives at Antina fall like the ears of wheat ripe to the reaping; she had known that east and west, far and near, in the wide wastes of the Magyar-land as in the silent streets of Venice, in the snow-plains of the Muscovite empire as in the laughing loveliness of Lombard meadows, men had poured out their blood like water at her bidding, under her will, only for sake of that fatal beauty which many with their last breath in the battlefield or on the scaffold had cursed with bitter reproach, which some—and not so few—had to the last still blessed. So many had died for her!—and now he who had found at her hands but coldness and suffering, and gone without reward for a loyalty passing all that even she had ever found, lay to all seeming dead or dying at her feet; as a noble hound dies for its mistress' sake, dies faithful to the last, though never may her hand have given him one caress, though never may her lips have spoken more than careless command or chill dismissal.
She knew then that she loved him; loved him, not with pity, nor with disdain for it as weakness, nor with mere warmth to one who had risked all things in her cause, but with a passion answering his own, with a passion holding the world worthless if he no more were numbered with the living. Tonight, when his heart had throbbed against hers; to-night, when his strength had stood between her and her destroyer; to-night, when his promise had been given her to save her with death, if no other freedom were left him wherewith to rescue her; to-night, she had known that she had loved him with the love she had deemed dead in her heart, impossible to her nature; she, with whom love had been but the sceptre with which to sway slaves, the mandragora with which to blind madmen, the supreme foUy with which women, otherwise powerless, reach a power that mocks at kings and creeds, and reign over the broadest empire of earth.
She knelt by him, mute, motionless, with a terrible longing in the eyes that had never quailed under Giulio Villaflor's, and had made the Umbrian priest let fall the lash. In that moment, in the silence and the loneliness of the forest, where the shadows dosed above them, and in all the width of the land there was not one whom she could summon to his aid, one whom she dared trust with their Uves, the anguish she had oftentimes too mercilessly dealt, too lightly counted, recoiled back on her. She learned what it could be to bear, this thing that men call love, this deadly gambling of heart, and thought, and sense, which casts all stakes in fate upon the venture of another's life; she, who had watched that madness so often and so long, with calm, contemptuous gaze, and tempted youth, and manhood, and age into it with a sorceress' guile, heedíng the wreck she made no more than Circe heeded those who went down beneath the waves because her white arms waved them to that fatal sea. She loved him now with a great love; passionate, with the fire that slept in her, yet puré so far aa remorse could bum it pure, and harrowed deep with a contrition that would have purchased freedom, and peace, and joy for him had it been possible, at any cost, at every sacrifíce.
The stillness was intense; the solitude absolute as in a desert, no living thing was near, and had a peopled city been around in place of that profound impenetrable desolation, none could have been summoned to them; she had become as one plague-stricken, she was hunted down by Church and King, she could not ask a draught of water from a peasant, or bid his help to bear her lover under a shealing's shelter, the very reeds and grasses trodden in their flight might tell their course and betray their resting-place, the very moments might be numbered in which she could even watch beside him here unpursued, unarrested. Though he perished before her sight, she could not reach for him even the succour of a beggar's wallet or a charcoal-burner's roof. The linen of the fishing-shirt had fallan open on his breast, and by the flickering light shed through the leaves she saw where the blows had fallen fast as hail upon his chest, that was strong as any corslet of steel, but blackened and beaten by them like the steel after a long close battle; his head had sunk back, he had reeled down senseless from exhaustion; through the crushed arums the slender stream of the blood still flowed till the snowy cups were filled with it as though they were purpled by wine; she had looked many a time on death, and death seemed to her on his face now, as it had done when beneath the mountain pines she had first seen the carrion birds waiting and hovering above his sightless eyes.
For the moment she had no strength, no consciousness to seek to save him; she knelt beside him, knowing nothing save that through her he too must be sacrificed; that for her this life also had been laid down, uncounting its own loss, yielding up its breath without reproach, forced nobly on to perish in her defence. She stooped over him, with that look in her eyes with which she had gazed down on the lifeless frame of Cario of Viana, only that now, beside remorse, there were a grief and a passion deeper yet than remorse alone.
That gaze, though he lay senseless under it, seemed to have power upon him still, as when first under the Carpathian sea-pines it had been bent on him in the glow and fulness of the noon, never again to be forgotten. His eyes, blind and seeing nothing but the swaying motion of the leaves, still instinctively looked upward seeking hers. A heavy sigh heaved his breast,—a sigh in which words brokenly rose to his lips and died.
"Leave me. Save yourself."
His one thought was still of her; his one instinct still was for her. A quiver shook her from head to foot, as fear, and danger, and the pressure of the poisoned steel against her bosom, had had no strength to shake her grand and fearless courage. He was faithful to her thus—to the last—and she had given him no recompense save this—to die for her.
Her head bowed its haughty royalty downward and downward until her brow rested on his breast, and her hands drew his within them against the beating of her heart.
"Oh, truest, noblest!" she murmured, "I know it now. I love you, if love be any worth."
Through the sickening delirium in which his mind was floating, through the darkness that closed on sight and sense, and seemed to him, as to her, the presaging shadows of dissolution, the words reached, the touch thrilled him, with an electric shock, a sweetness of hope so wild, so rich, so breathless, that it called him back to consciousness, as in priestly legends the touch of the anointed chrism has summoned the departing soul to earth.
He raised himself slightly with convulsivo strength, a living warmth flushed his bloodless features.
"Say it again!" he whispered, With that terrible doubt still in his look of one who fears the joy he touches will vanish mocking him. "Say it once more—once more!"
Through the mist before his vision, through the blackness of the forest shades, through the haze of flickeríng foliage, and watery moonlight, and stars thát seemed to stoop and touch the earth, he saw her eyes grow humid, lustrous, gentle with an infinite gentleness.
"Say that I love you? Yes—I say it now."
The words were low and slowly uttered; proud still, for in them she yielded far, but tender with a tenderness the deeper for that pride which stooped, not without lingering reluctance still, to own itself disarmed. The glory that shone one moment on his face she had never seen save in her youth's earliest dreams of the glory on the faces of the gods; for—let the world lie of her as it would—to none had she ever spoken as she spoke now to him, while her voice was sweet as sorcery and filled with unshed tears that would not gather in her eyes, but were dríven back to her heart in grief that mingled with the poignancy of softer thoughts and tenderness unloosed at last.
Then, at last, its ecstasy reached him, and he knew that it was truth—truth that rushed through him like the wild potency of some eastern drug, burning, blinding, lulling every sense like opium-mingled wine. He lifted himself from where he lay, he stretched his arms out to her, he strove with futile effort to strain his gaze through the mists of pain, to free his strength from the bonds of exhaustion; and once more it was in vain—once more he fell back, powerless, senseless, yet with his thoughts keeping their hold on their one memory of her, and still with that glow as of light upon his face. His lips moved faintly in words that scarcely stirred the grave-like silence of the deep oak-woods:
"O God!—if it be love—not pity—stoop down and kiss me once."
She was silent awhile, looking motionless upon him in the grey, fitful, shadowy haze, that was dusky and darkened by the massive canopy of foliage above; then—with a faint flush rising over the weary faimess of her face—lower and lower she drooped her imperial head, and let her lips rest in the answer that he prayed for on his own.