CHAPTER II.
"WHY MUST I 'NEATH THE LEAVES OF CORONAL PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON ON THY BROW?"
The earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the mountains stretched—the dawn of a southern summer, that almost touches the sunset of the past night—but under the dense shadows of the old woods that had sheltered the mystic rites of Gnostics and echoed with the Latín hymns to Pan, no light wandered. There was only a dim silvery haze that seemed to float over the whiteness of the tall-stemmed arum lilies and the foam-bells of the water that here and there glimmered under the rank vegetation, where it had broken from its hidden channels up to air and space. Not a sound disturbed the intense stillness; that the night waned and the world wakened, brought no change to the solitudes that men had forgotten, and only memories of dead-deserted gods still haunted in the places of their lost temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines' stems, and on whose fallen altars and whose shattered sculptures the lizard made her shelter and the wind-sown grasses seeded and took root. Of the once graceful marble beauty and the incense-steeped stones of sacrifice nothing remained but moss-grown shapeless fragments, buried beneath a pall of leaves by twice a thousand autumns. Yet the ancient sanctity still rested on the nameless, pathless woods; the breath of an earlier time, of a younger season of the earth, seemed to lie yet upon the untroubled forest ways; the whisper of the unseen waters hád a dream-like, unreal cadence; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and the a heavy gloom, there was a voluptuous yet mournful charm—the world seemed so far, the stars shone so near; there were the sweetness of rest and the oblivion of passion.
When her lips had touched his, life had seemed to return to him; he lay in a trance vague as a rapturous dream. He was powerless to answer her; he had no consciousness, save the one sense of a joy that in its intensity was half delirium; he had no remembrance, save that he held himself dying, and felt death, glorious, welcome as the richest life that ever poured its golden wine out in the sunlight of youth—felt like the lover who, slaughtered at his mistress's feet and learning by his fall her love, murmured with his latest words,
It was ordained to be so sweet, and best
Comes now, beneath thine eyes and on thy breast,
Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards! Care
Only to put aside thy beauteous hair
My blood will hurt.
Stretched there motionless, strengthless, seeing only the gaze of her eyes in the dimness, and feeling the depth of the solitude in which their lives were alone, as in the awful stillness of a desert, he knew not yet whether this was truth, or whether dying visions mocked him—whether this spiritual stillness round him, this madness of incredulous hope, this breath of whispered words that fanned his hair, this caress that burned one moment on his lips, were not the mere phantoms of vain desires dreaming of the joys denied to them for ever. For a while she let him lie thus, with his head sunk back against her heart, and his eyes alone speaking as they gazed up with their dog-like fidelity: she had no thought now that this was death which had come to him; she knew that he would live as surely as though with that answer to his prayer she had breathed back the certainty of existence upon his lips; and she knelt there silent and immovable, letting the moments drift on, forgetful alike of time, of danger, of flight, and of pursuit; remembering no more than if they had never been, alike the agony that was of the past, an4 the jeopardy that was still of the future. On the dauntless courage—the courage of Marathon that had revived in her—peril had frail and passing hold: and in the deep bosom of these untracked and classic woodlands all sense of mortal fear seemed lost in their profound peace, their nameless melancholy, their ethereal lulling charm.
At last, as though smitten suddenly with the sharp iron of recollection, she moved from him, rose, and went from the great oak shelter where he lay.
"Love! love! What have I to do with love?" she murmured, as she leaned her arms on the broken slab of the old stone altar, and let her head droop downward on them. A flood of memories, a tide of thought rushed on her from the years of her past; on the impulses of a gratitude touched to the core by the fealty and devotion of his defence, she had let words escape her that pride had silenced, and weightier chains fettered for so long, that she would have taken her oath no pity for him would ever shake, no yielding in herself would ever lead her to revoke, the decree of severance from her for ever, which she had uttered unfalteringly on the night by the Capri sea. It was done;—he knew now that she gave him back some measure at least of that passion wherewith he adored her. She gave him love—she who had held it with so superb a disdain as the dalliance of fools, or the sensualism of libertines; she who used the whole power of its empire but as a weapon, a mask, a snare, a means scorned in itself for ends nearer her heart and worthier the consecration of her thoughts than she deemed that any single life could ever become to her. For the first time—whatever calumny might say, or vain jealousy upbraid her with—for the first time the softness of this passion had touched her, and its caress been given by her. She had made a slave of its madness many a time, or lashed it into fury when she needed, as the priestesses of oriental altars tamed or enraged the beasts which they crowned with flowers only, later on, to lead them out to sacrifice. That she would ever render it back, that she would ever feel to it other emotion than a half contemptuous compassion, had seemed impossible to her for so long. Moreover, when of late some sense of its tenderness had stolen on her, some echo in her own heart been awakened to the strong vibrations of his, she had known that the bonds which bound her could never be loosened, and she had told herself that she had no title to, no fitness for, a noble and unsullied homage.
Where she leaned now against the ruined altar-stones, remorse, keen as though their love were guilt, weighed on her. He had justly won his right to all of joy, of honour, and of peace, that she could give the liberator and defender of her life; he had been willing to purchase liberty for her at loss of all things to himself; he had meríted the tenderness she had yielded to him by service which no gratitude rendered could repay:—and she knew that, in all likelihood, the sole reward her love would bring to him would be a violent death by shot or steel: a fate as merciless as the blow his Abruzzian foe had dealt at him that night. An exceeding bitterness came on her—a heart-sickness of regret. Why had not he come to her in the early years of her youth? Why had not this thing, since at last it reached her, been wakened in her while yet it would have sufficed to her, while yet it would have had no shadow cast upon it from the past, while yet no self-reproach, no weariness of doubt, no fever of reckless ambition, and no darkness of untold bondage, of fettered action, of dead memories, would have stretched between them? The poignancy of that cruel remembrance, "too late," which had passed over her when she had leaned against her prison casement, and seen him look upward in the tawny torrid heat of the monastic marshes, was with her now.
She had told him that he was dear to her, and she knew him to be so; knew that she could go to his side and promise him a love that should be no mockery and no treachery, but a living truth, deep and warm, and rooted fast in honour.
She had known many who, in other things, equalled or far surpassed him; she had known every splendour of intellect; every dignity of power, every brilliance of fascination in the men of every country who had been about her in so many changing throngs, but none amongst them had touched her as the singleness and the self-sacrifice of Erceldoune's devotion touched her, and none had roused in her the mingled pity and reverence which the hopelessness of his passion and the chivalry of his character had roused in her almost from the first moment of their intercourse. There was a bold free carelessness of manhood; there was a lofty fearless reading of honour and its bonds; there was a noble simplicity and an antique grandeur in the cast of his nature, that had won from her what she had never felt to those amongst her lovers who had charmed her with an intellect a thousand times more subtle, wooed her with a dominion infinitely more commanding than his could ever have been, even had the fortunes of his race never fallen as they had done, or the pursuits of a statesman's glories ever been possible to the untamed Border blood.
When in the gloom of the monastery's corridors, with a hundred human tigers thirsty for slaughter swarming from their dens, she had been guarded by his arms and shielded on his breast, his heart had wakened her own with its quick beating; when in the darkness of the night she had made him pledge his word to serve her by a death-shot if to give her freedom from dishonour otherwise were forbidden him, she had felt to this man, whose eyes answered hers in comprehension of that loathing of captivity, that disdain of the terrors of the grave, what was nearer akin to reverénce than the imperial temper of Idalia had ever yielded to any.
"He loves me! Yes, as no man, I think, loved me yet!" she thought. "But he loves me because he believes in me. How long should I reign with him if he knew?—if he knew?"
That was the iron weight on her, which made her whole frame sink with that fettered worn-out fatigue and desolation against the ivy-covered stones in the motionless musing that succeeded to the breathless, fearless intoxication of danger and of flight. It would not have been possible to her to do as many weaker and less truthful natures do—seek shelter in self-evasion, and turn the very nobility and trust of the man who loved her into the withes to bind him, and the band to blind him. It would not have been possible to her to stoop and touch his lips with hers, if on hers there were ever to be for him the shame of falsehood or the disgrace of subterfuge. When once she had answered him with that caress he prayed for, when once she had murmured to him, "I love you!" she had acknowledged to herself his right that there should never be one thing in her past or her present screened from him, one truth veiled, one act distorted. And on her, silence was bound; either way, withholding all or giving all the records of her past, she saw herself a traitress to her creed of truth and justice—a traitress alike to others and herself.
Lost in thought, and weakened now more than she knew by her captivity, by the scant coarse food and noxious air of her prison-house, and by the wild speed of the lengthened headlong midnight ride, she sat there in the still deep shadows of the oak glades, with the faint grey hue of the young day serving but to deepen into blacker sombreness the colonnades of trees. She had left him on the sudden sting of many memories—memories which made it deadly to her pride to have bent thus to passion and to pity—memories which recalled to her that she had no right to bind in with her own the fate of one who brought to her the loyalty of perfect faith in her nature, the defencelessness of perfect ignorance of her past. She had done him evil enough; she had saved his life once, only to chain it so to hers that its doom must be whatever her own became; for her he had risked liberty, existence, everything save honour, ungrudgingly, and with the lavish largesse of a princely giver, who would have held no gift as any worth, no suffering as any sacrifice; now—at the last—she had surrendered her love to him, and listened to his own. She knew that there were thousands who would tell him that this was the darkest evil of all that, through her, had befallen him. And at her heart ached a burning, endless, futile pain, rather for him than for herself, though for herself there was sharp anguish in the knowledge that the world would tell him all love rendered from her could be but a graceful lie to fool him to his peril, an eloquent simulation to cheat him into misery, a mockery, hollow as it was beguiling, to draw him downward, Circe-like, to his destruction.
Her head was sunk on her hands; her thoughts had drifted far in that vague, unreal musing which comes after long fasting and severe exertion; she was unconscious that he followed her wistfully with his gaze, like a dog, as she left him, and slowly, staggeringly, after a while, rose, steadying himself by the boles of the oak trunks, and came towards her with the dizziness of his wound still on him, but the ardent glow and the bewildered doubt of feverish joy warm on his face and eager in his glance, She was unconscious, even, that he was near till his hand touched her; then, as she started at the touch, she once again forgot that the world held any other than his life and hers. Stooping, he looked down into her eyes; a look so longing, so incredulous, so straining with hope and fear, as a man might give into the deep brown depths of fathomless waters in whose light he sees some long-lost priceless jewel gleaming.
"Is it true?"
As his voice quivered on the words he read its truth. Doubt was no longer with him as he gazed down on her face; but with a cry from his very heart, he drew her in his arms as he had held her against the onslaught of her foes; he gave back that one caress with breathless kisses on her lips and brow; he forgot danger, and pain, and all things upon earth, save that this woman he worshipped was bis in all her splendid grace, in all her sovereign loveliness; the world reeled round him—he felt blind, and drunk, and mad. And Idalia for the instant made him no resistance, but let her beauty lie in the arms that so well had shielded it, and let her head rest upon the breast that had been as a buckler rained on by a thousand blows between her and her enemies.
This trance of sweet forgetfulness, this momentary banishment of every bitter thing, she at least could give him, and he had earned his right to it. For the moment, also, she too shared it. She felt nothing but the softness, the silence, the voluptuous abandonment of the emotion so long contemptuously discredited and unswervingly repressed as owning any power to sway or move her heart.
Then slowly, and with her old reluctance to yield to so much weaknesé blent with a deeper and a keener pain, she drew herself gently from him.
"Do not thank me for my love. The world will tell you it is worthless, and can have no strength save to destroy."
For all answer he sank down at her feet, his arms about her still, his hands on hers, his eyes looking upward to her own with such a radiance in them as she had never seen in any human gaze.
"Destroy me as you will, so that you love me!"
Mad words;—she had heard many such, yet they had never borne the meaning to her that these bore to her now. A shudder passed over her as she heard, a chillness of icy cold She knew it might well be that nothing save ruin might come to him through her. She stooped towards him, and her lips quivered a little as the answer stole from them.
"Well,—many will tell you that no other fate can ever come to you from me."
"Whoever does will find his lie his last word."
"But—if I say so?"
"I have answered. Do what you will, since you have blessed me thus."
"Blessed you? God knows"
Slow tears welled into her eyes as she saw his own so full of longing eloquence, where he gazed at her in the faintness of the waking day that left the forest gloom and forest hush around them. His trust was sweet to her, and yet so bitter; sweet because she knew that her heart gave it the answer it believed and sought, bitter because she knew that her past could never merit it or meet it. She passed her hand softly over his forehead with a gesture that from her had deeper tenderness than far more passionate demonstrations from natures more yielding and less proud.
"What you have suffered for me!" she murmured. "What you have done and dared! You merít my whole life's dedication for such love—such service. And—that life is so little worthy of you."
The woman who so late had fronted Giulio Villa- flor with so superb a resistance, so defiant a disdain; the woman who had laughed at the threats and the prayers of her lovers, as of her foes. with so cold and so careless a contempt; the woman who had been tranquil before death, pitiless in power, victorious against outrage, and without mercy in fascination, felt abased, heart-stricken, smitten with a weary shame, before the loyal gaze of the man who held her life as the most valued and moat stainless gift the world could hold for him. To a nature integrally truthful and integrally noble, however warped by circumstance or error, the deadliest sting, the surest awakener of remorse, will always lie in the perfect faith of another's implicit confidence. Steeled to venom, careless of censure, and contemptuous of rebuke, it will bend, contrite and self-accursing, before the fidelity and clearness of one regard that vows a simple and unsullied belief through all and against all.
He doubted that he heard her rightly. To him it seemed that he had no earthly thíng or claim by which to win her; and he held his service in her cause no more deserving of her care than he held the wolf-hound's at her feet.
"Worthy of me?" he echoed, his voice still faint with exhaustion, but breathless with the incredulous joy that seemed to make tenfold strength flow back into !his limbs, tenfold force arm him steel-clad to save her. "Oh, my love, my life, my empress, my wife!—what am I that I should ever share one thought of yours!"
She started slightly; a flush of warmth passed over the paleness of her face; a half smile came on her lips, sad yet doubtful, wondering yet reverent.
"You would make me your wife—still?"
She spoke almost dreamily, with a touch of questioning doubt in her words as in her smile, while at the same time they returned to her something of that negligence of hauteur, something of that royalty of challenge, which were as inherent in her as though she had worn the crowns of empires.
He started to his feet, staggering with the weakness of his wound.
"You ask it? Do you not know that I feel mad with the mere licence only to touch your hand with mine? And—what insult do you think that I can dare to offer you!"
"None."
She looked at him full in the eyes, with a tenderness infínitely melancholy, a gaze intense in its calm unspoken thought.
"Then why"
She smiled slightly, with something of her old delicate irony, her own contemptuous, unsparing cynicism, which never was more unsparing than to herself.
"Why? Well,—you may have heard that I have no great belief in marriage, and little favour for it; and the answer was not sure, or would not have been, rather, if you were as other men. What do you know of me? Where have you lived, if you have not heard my name coupled with evil? Why should you deem so much scruple needful with a woman whom you found a conspirator in chains—a prisoner, degraded to the mercy of Monsignore Villaflor?"
A great darkness swept over her face as, she spoke her persecutor's name, though through the bitterness and mournfulness of all her speech there ran the vein of reckless, careless, satirical disdain, which had grown to be as her second nature in many things, and had so long been used as her surest veil to every deeper unacknowledged feeling.
The wistful uncertain pain which that tone had ever brought into his look was in it now, as he stooped towards her. He felt that he had no comprehension of her, but he was content—with that magnificent folly which is so noble in its rash unwisdom—that he loved her, and believed in her.
"I know nothing of your life—true. But make it one with mine, and I shall hold it as the divinest gift on earth; and if any dare calumniate it, they will find their reckoning with me. Oh, my love, my mistress, my idol! only give me the title to defend your honour against the whole world!"
The tears stood once more in her eyes as she heard the passionate prayer, to which the tremor in his voice gave a yet deeper pathos—a yet more imploring eagemess. She grew paler still as she heard; a sigh from her heart's depths ran through her. The more faith he lavished on her, the more sublimely mad the blindness of his chivalry, the more heavily self-rebuke smote her, the farther the iron entered into her soul, and the farther she stood in her own sight from any fitness with this man's noble simplicity of trust. She bent towards him, leaning her head one moment on his hands, where he stood above her—that bright-haired pride-crowned head, that had borne itself with such imperial courage above the massacre of Antina, above the priestly herd of the monastic hall, was lowered with the abasement of a brave and erring nature, struck to the core with self-chastisement, and refusing to accept one shade of worship of which it knew itself unworthy.
"Listen!" she said, softly, while a bitterness, that was to herself not to him, lent a strange thrill and force to the low-murmured words—"listen! I have said I love you—love you as I never thought to love—my noblest, bravest, best! But it is because I do, that I tell you I am unworthy of your generous faith—that I tell you there had better be separation between us now and for ever. I will not urge on you to leave me because while with me you share my danger. You are too brave to be insulted with such a plea; but I do say, forget that I have ever confessed you have grown dear to me, abandon every hope that I can bring you any happiness; do as I bade you when last we parted—hate me, scorn me, condemn me, if you will; do anything, save trust your happiness to me! There are many women who can lay bare their hearts to you like an open book, make one of them the holder of your honour, they alone merit it, and I am not amongst them. Who can know me as I know myself? Believe me, then, when I tell you the greatest cruelty I can do to you is to bestow on you my love."
He heard her silently; but not as he had heard her bid him leave her and condemn her the last night they had stood together above the sea at Capri. He knew now that she loved him; knowing that, he refused to take a decree of divorce between them, even from her lips; he claimed a title that he would never surrender, though through years he should vainly assert his right to it. The strong passíon and the staunch patience of his nature were welded together, persistent and invulnerable.
"Let me judge that," he said, simply. "If I preferred misery at your hands, rather than paradise at any other's, I should have the right to make the choice."
"Yes, and I the right to guard you from the fruits of your own madness. You love me with a love that needs an angel to be worthy it; and I—I have thought of late, that if those tyrants yonder had killed me under the worst tortures they could frame, they would have done on me no more than my just due; they would only fittingly have avenged all those who died by shot and steel through me."
"What is your life, then?"
His voice sank very low, his face was very colourless, as he leaned over her. Believe even her own witness against her he did not, would not; but he knew that some dark thread ran through her life's golden web—he knew that some deadly remorse underlay the brilliancy of her gifts and of her sway, and beyond these he knew nothing of it, no more than he knew of the track, and the spring, and the destiny of the unseen waters that wound their way beneath the herbage and the lilies at his feet, whether downward to nethermost depths of gloom, or outward to the fair freedom of the sea, none had told, or ever would tell.
"What is it?" sbe repeated, dreamily. "Well, beyond all, it is a long regret."
"Many regret who are but the prey of others."
"Perhaps; but my regret is—remorse."
"Well, may not even that oftentimes be noble?"
Sbe gave a gesture of dissent, while the smile that had in it more sadness than tears, though it had also her old careless satire in it, passed a moment over her face.
"You bade me once not ask you to turn sophist for my sake. Do not turn so now. You havé your own bold broad creeds of simple honour and dishonour; keep to them; men wander too far from them into subtle windings now."
His teeth clenched on his beard with an agony of impotent impatience.
"O God! do not trifle with philosophies! Answer me straightly, for the pity of Heaven; what is your life that you repent it thus?"
"I cannot tell you wholly. It is enough that it has forfeited all right to such a trust as yours."
"Nay, let me judge that, I say again. Let me judge fully—give me your confidence, your history; did I not swear to you that the worst trial would never chango my fealty? I love you, my sovereign, my sorceress! What matters it to me whence you come, what you bring?"
His voice, that had been grave with a gentle command as he spoke the first words, sank down to the hot, vehement, reckless utterance of a love that was ready to take, risk, suffer, and imperil all things so that only the sweetness of her lips closed once again on his, so that only the gift of her loveliness were yielded to him one hour.
She rose, and looked him once more in the eyes, with a serene, fathomless gaze, in that pity and that reverence which blent strangely and intricately in the feeling she bore towards this man who was at once her slave and her defender.
"No," she said, slowly; "it would matter nothing to you if you sought me as your mistress; but—as your wife? You told me once the stainlessness of your name was the only inheritance that you still held from your ancestors."
He gave a short, sharp sigh as though a knife had been plunged into the nerves that his wound had laid bare; her words bore but one significance to him. Ere she had time to resist, his arms were round her; he crushed her against his breast, he looked down into her eyes with a terrible longing prayer.
"Answer me; answer me yes or no, or you will kill me; and forgive me if the question is an outrage—you madden me till I must ask it. Is there any shame in your past that forbids you to hold and keep my honour?"
The last words sunk so low that they scarcely stirred the silence as they stole to her; for the moment she was silent; she longed for his sake to sever him from all communion with her, she desired for his sake to bid him leave for ever one who must wlthhold from him all he had the just right to seek in the records of her past; she hesitated ene instant whether she should not render herself up to his utmost abhorrence, that by this means, since none other could avail, he would be parted from her fate for evermore. Almost she chose the sacrifice; she had strength far passing that of women, and she had the generous self-abandonment of a nature which scomed self-pity, and—once bending to love—loved nobly. She was silent; then as she looked up and saw the gaze wherewith he watched that silence which wrote on her a condemnation deadlier to him than words could ever have uttered, her courage forsook her, she had no force to yield herself up to his hatred and his loathing; to let him believe this of her was to let him be made desolate by a lie, and all the regal temper of her race arose and refused to bear falsely the yoke of shame even to save him, even to do towards him what she deemed her duty and his defence. She lifted her head, and looked him once again fully in the eyes, calmly, unflinchingly, though a flush of warmth came over her face.
"Nothing—in your sense. But in mine much."
"Thank God!—thank God! Against the world, against all destiny, ay, even against yourself, you SHALL be mine!"
He had never heard the last words; the first sufficed to make the wild joy course like fire through his veins, to light the future with the glory of unutterable gladness, to give her to him then and for ever; his own, let all the earth stand against them, or let her own will forbid him her beauty and her tenderness as she would. The one agonised dread that had stifled him as with a hand of ice through the last moments was gone; he feared no other thing—not even death, since if that smote her it should stríke him with the same blow.
He would not release her from his embrace; he held her there, with the loosened trail of her hair floating over his chest and his ceaseless kisses on her lips; he forgot that every hour of their lives might be numbered, that they had just broken from a prison that might yawn afresh for them, and enclose them beyond hope ere even another day had passed; that he knew no more of her past now than he had known when first her hand had held the curled leaf filled with water to his parching lips in the Carpathian woods; he heeded nothing, remembered nothing, asked nothing, since her eyes had told him more surely yet than her words that no shame rested on her to divorce her in the sole sense in which he would accept shame to have the power to part them. It was neither the world's calumnious breath, nor the slander of rivalled lovers, that could have terrors for the man who had pierced his way to her through dungeon walls, and torn off her the leopard fangs of Giulio Villaflor, and fought his passage with her through levelled weapons, and the storm of blows, and the battle of the hot Italian night. It was not for libel or for lie that he would surrender her—he who had thrown his manhood and his life on one reckless venturo to secure her freedom, on one uncounted stake to touch her hand again.
While he had believed that he was no more to her than the hound beside them—nay, scarce so much—he had been content to hold his silence, to save her without thought of recompense, to obey her implicitly, and to hold her as high above him as the morning stars that, through the dawn, shone in the blue heights above the forest. But now that once he knew she loved him, it would have been easier to shake off a lion from his desert foe, when once the desert rage was at its height, than to force him to yield up the claim that her love gave him to Idalia.
"I knew it—I knew it!" he murmured, as he stooped his head over her, and wondered even yet whether this were aught but the sweet vain mockery of some mandragora-given dream. "Dishonour with you!—it were impossible. Ah God! why will you belie yourself with such self-condemnation?—you who are noblest among women—who chose death rather than that villain's touch?"
"Hush! that was nothing. I should have been false indeed to all the traditions of my race if I had had fear of that moment's pang which the Fagan world held the signal of reléase—which Christians alone have raised into a gígantic nameless terror. But"—she drew herself from his arms as she spoke, and stood with the dignity that had awed even the ruthless Prelate, blent with an infinitely gentler sadness than had ever been upon her—"do not cheat yourself with thinking that I have no errors on me. I have grave ones, dark ones. In your sense, it is true, there is nothing to part us; but in my own conscience there is much to make me unfit for ever for such love as you bestow. See! I tell you that those men died at Antina through my work; I tell you that many more lives than theirs have been lost, sent to their graves by me; I tell you that I have made all men who fell beneath my sway serve me for one end, not a mean one, indeed, but one to which I sacrificed everything and every one ruthlessly, and did more ruin than you ever dream, or I could ever measure. I tell you that the chief of my history must remain hidden from you—for a while, at least; perhaps for ever; and that if you had lived less in your wandering freedom and more in the intrigue of cities, you would have heard every evil, every danger, every unsparing sorcery, and every pitiless unscrupulousness attríbuted to my name, and—for the most part—rightly. Now, knowing this for the mere outline of a deadly truth, you can scarce call me 'noblest among women,' and you will be mad if into my hands you yield your future. Believe me, and fly from me while you may."
She stretched her hands out to him with a gesture of farewell, that had in it an exceeding tenderness! she loved him well enough to do for him what she had done for no other—save him from his own passions, spare him from herself.
He took her hands in his, and laid his lips on them in one long kiss; then lifted his head and raísed his eyes to her with a regard in which a feeling, far deeper than the mere voluptuous fervour of the senses, blent with a loyalty grave and calm as that of one who pledges his life, not lightly, but witting what he does—looked at her softly and thoughtfully.
"That is idle; I will never leave you now while there is breath in me. It may be that you have that which you repent of; few women have such sorcery as yours, and use it wholly blamelessly; but what I trust is, not your past but your nature, and what I ask is, not your secret but your love. It is too late to speak of our ever parting; I will make you mine in the teeth of all, even of your own will, now that once you have let me know that your heart is with me. And—do you not think that I have tenderness enough in me to pardon much, if there be ought to pardon? Do you not think that I have justice enough to hold you in higher honour for your noble truth than I could ever hold the pale, poor, feckless virtue that should have no stain because it had no glory, and had never fallen in any path because it followed coldly the straight one of self-interest? Idalia!—I can bring nothing worthy you, save a straight stroke to free you and a whole strength to love you; but since you have no scorn for those, take my future now and for ever—I trust you as no man ever trusted woman."
He spoke from his inmost soul—spoke with that vivid simple eloquence which came to him in moments of intense feeling; and it stirred her heart as none had ever stirred it; no qualities could have won the reverence of her wayward, dominant, and world-worn nature, as it was won by his chivalrous dignity of faíth, his absolute refusal of the ignoble soil of suspicion. It broke down her force; it moved her to a sudden sweetness and warmth of utterance that he had not heard since that moment when she had stooped and touched his lips with her caress.
"Ah, my love, my love!" she murmured; "it is not that. I will never forsake you; I will never betray you! It is that my past, that my presentBut, since you will it so, be it so. I will break my chains for you, and lay down my evil sway for ever. Cali me your wife if you will; no wife shall dare for any, what I will dare for your sake."