CHAPTER XI.
"LOST IN THE NIGHT, AND THE LIGHT OF THE SEA."
Around the high-leaping flames of a fresh pile of pine-boughs, that flashed their lustre on the hanging crystals and the hollow depths of the cavern by the sea, the Italians who had freed her were gathered when the night had fallen.
They stood in a half-circle about the great pyramid of fire, whose heavy aromatic scent rolled out down the vaulted space; the light and shadow played upon their bronzed faces, on the metal of the rifles, on those muzzles they leaned their hands, and in the darkness of their eyes that were lustrous with longing rage, and impatient joy. Joy for the sweetness of the surpassing hope that the past day had brought, Palermo won Naples would follow, their sail once loosened to the touch, they would be with the Thousand of Marsala, with the deliverers of Sicily. Rage against a prisoner set in their midst, a prisoner who had been false to Italy, and false to the woman whom they loved, as soldier and servant, noble and minstrel alike, loved Mary Stuart. The quiet was unbroken even by a loud-drawn breath; the sound of the flame consuming the lithe limbs of the wood was the only thing that stirred it. They waited for her judgment, and they had known that judgment inexorable as those given from the stone justice seat in the early ages of her own city of the Violet Crown. With his arms bound behind him, whilst they stood around him, ready to spring at a word upon him and sheathe their steel in his body with the fierce swift justice of the south, they held captive the man who had sold her to Giulio Villaflor.
To this end had his high ambitions come!
He had known that, soon or late, his sin of treachery would surely find him out; would reach him though he were housed within kings' palaces; would strike him down even amidst those gods of gold and silver for which he had bartered his brethren. Yet the vengeance he had looked for had been the concrete vengeance, for his outraged oath, of his forsaken order; of that body politic to which he had sworn the secret vows of his implicit obedience; and even this vengeance, in the oversight of that intelligence which deems itself safe enough and sure enough to play with all, and remain true to none, he had held lightly. Rulers who wore the purple of power had been scarcely less false to such oaths than he, and he had thought that for him as for them the blow might be temporised with, warded off, bought off, until he like them, should have risen too high for even that unerring and invisible hand to reach. Bat now, by the men whom he had scorned with all the scorn of his astute abilities, as the mere raw material that may be turned to the statesman's successes, the fools of patriotic visions and rude honesties, of childish faith, and of barbarían warfare; by these he had been baffled, checked, vanquished, meshed in the intrícate web of his own treacheries; by these he had been conquered and dragged down, to stand in his dishonour before the one glance which had power to make that dishonour worse to him than a thousand pangs of death. To this end had his life come!
An end more bitter to him it could never have reached, if his limbs had swung in the hot air of Naples from the hangman's chains. The hooting lips and ravenous eyes of the million of upturned faces of a railing populace would have been powerless to bríng home to him his shame, as one regard bent on him, brought it now.
For, beyond the undulating wave of flame, and with that gulf of fire and of shadow parting them, the gaze of Idalia rested on him.
At her side Erceldoune stood. His head was bent, his eyes were on the ground, and his arms were folded on his breast; he knew that if he looked up or unloosed his hand, he should break the word that he had passed to leave their vengeance with her, he should forestall the death-stroke that the soldiers of the Revolution waited there to strike.
She faced them in the hush of the silence; so intense that through the cavern the far-off chiming of the waters on the shore could be fainly heard. The warm glow of the pine-flames, like the red sun that burns on the Nile, fell about her in a splendour of hot tawny gold. Her eyes were dark and dreaming, as with the memories and secrets of innumerable ages, like the unfathomable lustre of the eyes that poets give to Cleopatra; her mouth was grave and weary as with the langour of past and deadly pain; her brow was in shadow, as though the shade of the thorn-crown of those who suffer for the people still was there, yet on her face there was a light beyond that which the burning sea-pines shed; it was the light of the dawn of freedom.
She never spoke; but her gaze rested on the man who had betrayed her into captivity—who had spoken falsely against her honour, who had given her beauty to the scourge, her freedom to the chains of her enemies; and he who was no coward, but bold and sure, and of self-control passing those of most men, closed his own eyes involuntarily, as though the lightning smote them, and cowered downward like a shrinking dog.
For what that long, deep, silent gaze had quoted against him was wrong far heavier than that against her own life; wrong against all manhood, as in him stained; against all human nature, as by him shared; against all bonds that bind man to man, as by his treachery dissevered; against all liberty sought for by the nations, as, by his false adoption of its fair name, prostituted.
It was this which that one unvarying gaze spoke to him; and there was soul enough left in him to make him know its deepest meaning, and take its deepest agony.
"A traitor!"
Her lips had never spoken the word; but its shame ate into his heart as it ate into the heart of Iscaríot. In that one moment the austere, the divine, the supreme majesty that lies in Truth was revealed to him, and blinded him as the blaze of the heavens blinded Saul of Tarsus. In that one moment he knew what he had denied all hís years through—that men who, for it, render their lives desolate and barren, and, for it, die unloved and forsaken of the world, may know in life and in death a beauty that never comes to the multitudes who grasp at gold, at power, at the sweetness of lascivious ease, and at the wide fools' paradise of lies.
The Italiana who stood around him, leaning on their loaded rifles, while ever and again upon him turned the waiting savage brilliance of their glances, gave an impatient movement that shook the clangour from their arms out in a shríll echo.
"His sentence, Eccellenza!"
They were thirsty to deal him a traitor*s due; to lead him out yonder on to the starlit sand, and, with one volley fired on the still night air, give him the death that all deserters meet, and see this justice done ere their boat should be thrust through the foam, and their oars should cleave the waters apart, and their vessel should be reached, that would bear them southward to where the Sicilies lay.
She made them no reply. Still with her eyes fixed on him she stood with the light that was like the after-glow of Egypt full upon her. To him she ceased to be the woman he had loved and coveted; she seemed to him transfigured; with that mystery of thought, with that infinitude of reproach, with that passionless scorn, and with that passionless pity on her face, she looked to him like the avenging shape of the honour he had sold, of the land he had betrayed, of the freedom he had surrendered, of the cause he had forsaken. The rebuke of her regard was not hers, but the rebuke of the peoples, weary and abandoned by the leader who bartered them for gold; the scorn of her gaze was not hers, but the scorn of the martyrs of liberty, who through all ages perish willingly, if with their bodies they can purchase one ray of higher light for the world which knows them not until too late.
By her he saw how vile he had become.
By her he saw how high he might have reached.
She had her vengeance.
The impatient fíre of the same demand ran afresh through the revolutionists around him:
"His sentence, Eccellenza!"
He never heard. He had passed through all the bitterness of death; it was her look that killed him.
The cry rose louder: "His sentence!"
Then at last she answered them:
"Loose him, and let him go."
A sullen furious yell of dissent that not even their loyalty to her could still, rolled through the vault.
"A traitor dies! A traitor dies!"
By his crime they claimed their justice.
A heavy sigh parted her lips; then the full sweet melody of her voice carne on the clamour like music that moves men to tears.
"A traitor he is! And for that you would deal him death! Nay, think me not gentler than you. I meant to deliver him up to your hands. I bade him be brought to my judgment, that your vengeance might strike him, and lay him dead at my feet. I am no holier than you. There was an hour in which I longed for his life with that thirst you know now; there was an hour in which I would have taken it, and not spared, though his mother had prayed to me. Ah, friends! such hours come to all. But now, the darkness has passed. I see clearer. Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave—give it as the chastisement of crime? Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet! It is a vast, dim, exhaustless pity to all the world. And would you summon it as your hardest cruelty to sin?"
They were silent; she stirred their souls—she had not bound their passions.
"A traitor merits death," they muttered.
"Merits it! Not so. The martyr, the liberator, the seeker of truth, may deserve its peace; how has the traitor won them? You deem yourselves just; your justice errs. If you would give him justice, make him live. Live to know fear lest every wind among the leaves may whisper of his secret; live to feel the look of a young child's eyes a shame to him; live to envy every peasant whose bread has not been bought with tainted coin; live to hear ever in his path the stealing step of haunting retribution; live to see his brethren pass by him as a thing accurst; live to listen in his age to white-haired men, who once had been his comrades, tell to the youth about them the unforgotten story of his shame. Make him live thus if you would have justice."
They answered nothing; a shudder ran through them as they heard.
"And—if you have as I—a deliverance that forbids you even so much harshness, still let him live, and bury his transgression in your hearts. Say to him as I say;—'your sin was great, go forth and sin no more.'"
Then, as the words left her lips, she moved to him from out the fire-glow, and stooped, and severed the bonds that bound him, and lefb him free; and none dared touch that which she had made sacred, but stood mute, and afraid, as those who stand ín the presence of a soul that is greater than their own. And the man who had sinned against her, fell at her feet.
"Oh, God! If I had known you as I know you now!"
"You never had betrayed me. No!—Live, then, to be true to greater things than I."
While the night was still young, a ship glided southward through the wide white radiance of the moon. The waters stretched, one calm and gleaming sheet of violet hues; from the fast-retreating shore a fair wind came, bearing the fragrance of a thousand hills and plains, of golden fruits and flowers of snow, and passion-blossoms of purple, and the scarlet heart of ripe pomegranates; through the silence sounded the cool fresh ripple of the waves as the vessel left her track upon the phosphor-silver, and above, from a million stars, a purer day seemed to dawn on all the aromatic perfumes of the air, and all the dim unmeasured freedom of the seas. And she, who went to freedom, looked, and looked, and looked, as though never could her sight rest long enough upon the limitless radiance, nor her lips drink enough in of the sweet fresh delicious treasure that the waters gave and the winds brought;—the treasure of her liberty,
"You come to my kingdom!" she said softly, while her dreaming eyes met her lover's.
And he who had cleaved to her with that surpassing love which calumny but strengthens, and fire but purifies, which fear cannot enter and death cannot appal, drew her beauty closer to his breast:
"My kingdom is here!"
And the ship swept on through the stillness of the hushed hours, through the glory of the light, to glide out through the eternal sea-gates of the old Roman world, and pass into the cloudless warmth of Eastern skies, where already through the voluptuous night the star of morning rose.
THE END.