CHAPTER VIII.
"IS THERE NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE, NONE FOR PARDON LEFT?"
He let the blade slide back into its case.
"That is well," he said, simply, while the radiance of his conquest played all over his arched lips and his fair brow; then, without other words, he took his way across the stretch of sands, and many yards onward swept back a deep screen of ivy and acanthus that closed the mouth of a fissure in the rocks, and veiled it so darkly that no sign of the break in the great mass of stone was seen. He signed to her to enter: she obeyed him; having once made her election, it was not in her afterwards to pause, to waver, to retract; having submitted herself to his power for another's sake, she ceased to protest against that power's use. The screen of matted foliage fell behind her, shutting out the day; before her stretched the gloom of a long narrow arching passage-way, hollowed through the thickness of the cliff, half sea wrought and half pierced by men. She had come thither once ín bygone years when the great pleader, Fiesoli, had hidden there, proscribed for too fearless a defence of a political prísoner; she passed straight onward now through the thick darkness, her hand on her hound's mane to still his longing rage, her tyrant following in her steps, flushed with the wine of success, yet silenced by a vague and restless disquietude.
The length of the cavern wound like a tangled skein through the depth of stone, no light breaking through it, and the air waa chill, and close, and dank, like the air of a tomb; it was cramped and tortuous, andthe hard jagged surface of the rock bruised her as she went. Once he stretched out his hand to guide her; she shook it off as though it stung her, and passed on alone, more rapidly, and full as calmly as though she swept down some sun-lighted terrace amongst the roses of a golden summer-time.
"She will never fear! he thought; and to the heart of the man that unconquerable courage of a woman brought a sullen impatient wondering veneration. He was a coward—a coward at the mere gleam of steel, at the mere common, vulgar terrors of physical peril; but in her he had never known one pulse of fear. There was a pang of wistful, painful envy in his thoughts for that one greatness which nature gave to her and had denied to him.
At the far end of the vault a fitful ruddy light was gleaming; it came from a fire made of brushwood and the boughs of the maritime pine. Where the fire burned the passage opened out into a wider vault, divided into two or three arched chambers—natural caverns widened and heightened by art, and roughly made, by benches, and skins, and stands of arms, and beds of osiers covered with soldiers' rugs, into a camp-semblance of habitation. A rude place, yet not comfortless, and with a wild beauty of its own, as the flame flashed on the many colours of the riven stone, and the stalactites that hung above broke in the glow into a diamond brilliance. A place that had been once the subterranean way of a great castle, which had long crumbled down to dust upon the cliffs above; then the nest of roving pirates; lastly, the refuge of proscribed revolutionists, of men who suffered for liberty of speech, and were content to perish under the deathly chillness of their country's deepest night, so that through them the dawn might break for others later on. The sea-den was still as a grave, and well-nigh as lonely: only by the pine-logs sat a boy of sixteen or so, with his fair curls turning to a red gold in their dancing flames, and his Rafaelle-like face drooped, pale and weary, over them.
It was the lad Berto; left sentinel whilst his comrades spent the daybreak seeking a vessel down the shore. He was but a child; yet he had long put away childish things; when he had owned but four years he had seen two of his brethren fall side by side at the butchery of the Villa Carsini, on that awful day of June, and ere then had been borne in infancy, in a mountain flight in his mother's arms, and had kept as his first memory of life the echo of his own vain cries when her heart grew still under his eager caress, and there flowed from her breast a deep stream like the purple flood that wells forth when the grapes are pressed—for the Papal troops had shot down like a chaméis the woman who dared to love, and follow, and bear sons to a republican rebeL
He started, and rose with a sentinel's challenge; then, as he saw who came, bowed low; the weary sternness of his fair countenance never changed in boyish sport, or youthful laughter, or under the light of a girl's shy eyes; wrong had been stamped on him too early, and, if in his future, the purity and greatness of high aims should be marred in him by an unchangeable unrelenting chillness, like the chillness of St. Just, the evil would líe with the tyranny which had made the warmth of his rosy mouth die out on the ice of his mother's bosom.
Idalia moved forward to within the circle of the watch-fire, lighted as the sole means they had to illumine the gloom; there was a deadly calmness in the mechanical actions that sent a thrill through the child Berto as he watched her where she sank down on the log, covered with a shaggy ox-hide, that he had vacated. She seemed unconscious of his presence; and he knew that more than mere physical peril, which he had many a time seen her meet so carelessly, was upon her now.
Phaulcon touched him. " I will look to the fire, Bert ; go and sleep. You need it."
"Her Excellency permits?" asked the boy.
He spoke hesitatingly, reverentially. Beside the flower-hung waters of Verona he had known this woman, now a homeless fugitive, ride through the heat of conflict and dismount, and gather the spent balls under a raking enfilado, and heap them in her skirts, and mount him on her charger to bear them to the revolutionary soldiers, whilst she stayed on at her dangerous gleaning.
She looked at him pityingly, but there was that in the look which Berto had never seen but once—once, when a woman of the Northern leles had toiled wearily, begging her way, into Rome, to look on her son's face, and had reached in time to see the last earth thrown upon his coffin, whilst in the fair spring morning the French drums rolled a cruel music through the violet odours of the burial-place, and over the majesty and the shame of the great prostituted city.
"Yes, go," she said, briefly; "you need rest I will take your watch."
She drew his rifle to her, and leaned her hands upon its mouth.
The boy went, obedient; in one of the inner hollows that served as bed-chambers his couch of grass was spread; he had not lain down for three nights, and sleep sealed his eyes as soon as their lids were closed. Across the flame of the pine-logs the Greek watched her, irresolute; embarrassed by his own success. It was dark as midnight in the heart of the pierced sea-wall; the play of the rising and falling flames fell irregularly on the gloom: she sat motionless, as she had sat upon the shore, her clasped hands resting on the slanted rifle, the tawny splendour of the fire cast on the splendour of her face.
She thought no more of him; she thought alone of the man who would return to find her lost once more—the man she must forsake or must betray; whose body she must give to slaughter, or whose soul she must slay by abandonment. She looked down into the fantastic flicker of the resinous boughs as she had looked down into the ripple of the waters; and, as he watched her, the same shame which had moved him for his sins to her, when he heard of her as within the power of Giulio Villaflor, stirred in her companion: it ever slumbered in him; at times it woke and stung him, yet it never stayed him from his sacrifice of her to the needs of his own craft, the lusts of his own avarice. To serve himself, he had warped and misled the idealic ambitions, the fearless genius, the poet's faith, the hero's visions, that he had found in her in her earliest youth; to serve himself, he had taught the keenness of her intellect intrigue, fanned her worship of freedom into recklessness, snared her to evil through the noblest passions that beat in her, taught her to hold her beauty as a mask, a weapon, a lure, a purchase-coin; to serve himself, he had roused her bravery into defiance, her pride into unmerciful scorn, her wit into sceptic cruelty, and—when these were done—had gone further, and soiled the fairness of her life with the dusky imperishable stain of lip rumoured dishonour, and let the stain rest so that the world saw it as a reality; whilst she, knowing it false as foul, became too proud, too careless, and too callous to appeal against a world so credulous of evil, so incredulous of good, but took up in the haughty courage of an outraged dignity the outlawry which injustice contumeliously cast to her, and lived and fought, enjoyed and suffered, in grand contempt of all opinion, accepting as her sentence the yo contra todos, y todos contra yo, until such isolation and such contest became to her things of preference and triumph. He knew that he had done this guilt against her—partly in the cruelty of egotism that profited through her injury, partly in the blindness of partisanship that thought all means justified to secure its end, chiefly, beyond all, in a rankling jealousy of those possessions and that inheritance which had made her so rich in power and in gold, whilst he was penniless and an adventurer; jealousy that the lavishness of her gift, the generosity of her thought, never tempered, but inflamed. He knew that he had done this, and that of his own act he had turned the tenderness of her heart towards him into abhorrence, had changed the faith she had once borne him into the hatred of a proud woman for her oppressor, of a fearless temper for a coward, of a slandered honour for its traitor and its traducer. He knew that long before, in those bygone years when he had crowned her young head with the wild laurel-leaves of Livada, and wooed her with subtle words to the Delphian laurels of a perilous strife and a perilous fame, the Greek child had fastened her deep eyes on him as though he were a god, and believed in him as though the voice of Delphos spoke in his; and he knew that of his own act he had made the woman on whom he looked now, in the dusky ruby heat of the uncertain flame, scorn him with all the force of her imperious intellect, and alone withhold her lips from curses on him as the ruin of her life, because memories that he had outraged had still their sanctity for her—because to the oaths that he had broken she yet had remained faithful.
It had been wanton destruction he had wrought, it was irrevocable loss he had sustained; some sense of all he had forfeited and killed when he had become her worst traitor, and had made the eyes that once sought his in love cast on him their righteous scorn, smote him heavily and restlessly now, as they sat, with the burning of the watch-fire between them, alone in the cavernous gloom. In the whiteness and the immutability of her face there was a grandeur that awed him; despite the weariness and alteration of fatigue, of fasting, of endurance, it was the stern, noble, disdainful beauty of the Vassalis race that he hated, Greek in its type, Eastem in its calm. He thought of the great palace of the Vassalis stronghold, far eastward, crowning its mighty throne of cedar-covered hills, with the treasures of ages in its innumerable chambers, and its sun-lightened plains rich in vine and olive and date, and watered by a thousand winding streams deep and cool under lentiscus shadows; all that her great race had owned, and over which she had rule.
"If that had been mine—not hers—I would never have harmed her," he thought. "Wealth is the devil of the world."
The intense silence, the night-like darkness on which the white smoke floated mistily with an aromatic scent, were horribly oppressive to him; he had the nervous susceptibilities of a vivacious and womanish nature. He addressed her; she did not reply. He set food and wine beside her; she did not note them: she sat immovable; the intense strain on all physical and mental power brought its reaction; a dull stupor like that of opiates steeped her limbs, her sight, her brain, in its lifeless apathy.
He looked at her till he grew sick with the heat of the flames, with the blackness of the shadows, with the spice of the pine perfume, with dead memories that would come to him do what he would. He rose impetuously; he had been, on foot or in saddle many days and nights, eating scantily, sleeping still less; all his frame was aching, and his eyeballs were scorched with want of rest.
"You will not leave here?" he asked her, half imperiously, half hesitatingly, since, though he commanded; he yet feared her.
"No."
" You give me your word?"
"Yes."
"Then I will go seek for Veni He should be here ere now."
"Go."
The monosyllables were cold, impassive, unwavering; to her he could be now and hereafter but an assassin, whose crime had been frustrated by hazard, yet could be none the less vile because in its issue foiled. She obeyed him lest a worse thing should come unto the man he had already wronged, but she submitted herself to him in nought else.
He knew that, her promise given, twenty avenues of escape might open to her, and she would still profit by none; he had known her keep her word and redeem her bond at risk and cost that might well have extenuated her abandonment of both. He turned quickly from the watchfire, and went down into the shadow of the farther recesses, whence a steep cramped stairway, cut upwards through the rock, led, like the shaft of a mine, into the lowest chambers of the building high above on the crest of the cliff; the bell-tower of the fallen castle, bare and crumbling to ruin, deserted, except when, as now, some fugitive who knew its secrets sought its subterranean shelter. The stair was perpendicular and difficult of ascent; he thrust himself slowly up it and into the dull twilight, that by contrast looked clear as noon, of the basement square of the campanile. He had no fear that she would fail her promise, but he had fear—a certain superstitious fear—of that grave, colourless, magnificent face bent above the pine glow; he could not stay longer under the scourge of her unuttered scorn, under the mute reproach that her mere life was to him. He would not unchain her to freedom, but he feared her. He breathed more freely when he left the darkness of the cavern for the upper earth; he was fevered and fatigued, and timorous of the danger round them as any long-chased stag; and he cast himself down to rest a while on the thick soft lichens covering the tower stones, close beside the mouth of the shaft, up which every faintest sound from the hollow den below came to him as distinct upon the rarifíed air as up the passage of an auricular tube.
Alone, by the blazing tumbled heap of pine wood, her attitude never changed; the light played on the metal of the rifle, in the red-brown of the hound's eyes, on the scarlet and the gold of her soiled and torn masque dress; beyond, on every side, stretched the dense Rembrandt shade of the vault; her eyes never stirred from the one spot in the embers, which they looked at without knowing what they saw.
"It is but just," she thought, with that stern, unsparing, self-judgment which was strong in her, as her disdain was strong for the judgments of the world. "I never paused for any destruction; it is but just that I must destroy the only life I prize."
And as she thought her eyes filled with a great misery; justice on herself it might be, but how unjust upon the guiltless!—upon this man who spent his heart, his honour, his very existence on her, only by her to be betrayed or be forsaken.
Through all the varied dangers of her past, her courage, her genius, her instinct, her prowess had borne her out, even when at loss and with sacrifice, unscathed and unconquered; here at last no one of these availed her, but she was bound, powerless and paralysed, under the net of circumstance. Before this she had never been vanquished, now she was chained down beyond escape beneath the weight of an intolerable oppression.
The pine-ember's glowing crimson on the grey ash dust seemed to stand out like letters of flame-writing of fire that glowed around upon the blackness of the shadows, and seemed as though it repeated in a thousand shapes the words that had fettered all her life. Words uttered so long ago under the great dim oak glades of Greece, while the stars burned down, through the solemn woods, and the moan of classic waters stole through the stillness of the night. Words that she had thought bound her by holy withes to noble thoughts, to sacred aims, to patriot souls, to the ransom of the nations, to the armies of the truth. Words pledged with a child's faith, with a poet's enthusiasm, with a visionary's hope, with the all-belief of youth, and with the glow of ambitions too high for earth, too proud for heaven. Words dictated by lips that she had trusted then as though an angel's bidding spoke by them. Words that whilst she thought they but allied her to those who suffered the martyrdom of liberators, who fought for the freedom of speech, and creed, and act, and who were banded together for the deliverance of enchained peoples, fettered her, she knew too late, into the power of one man, into the obedience of evil.
She had taken her oath to Conrad Phaulcon and to his cause, whilst in the splendour of her dreams and the ignorance of her gracious youth she had held the one a stainless patriot, the other a glorifíed martyrdom; she had been trepanned through the truest beauty of her nature, blinded through the purest desires of her heart. The patriot was a knave, but the more perilous because also a coward; the cause was a lie, but the more perilous because it stole, and draped itself in, the toga of Gracchus, the garb of an eternal truth.
Slowly she had awakened to the sure agony through which all youth passes—the agony of disillusion. Slowly she had awakened to the knowledge that in giving herself to the service of liberty she had delivered herself into an unalterable thraldom; that the guide whom she had followed as she deemed to the fruition of idealised ambitions, and the attainment of a spotless fame, was but a false prophet with a tarnished glory only in his gift, was but an outlawed and necessitous Camorrist, who saw in her beauty, and her talent, and her wide wealth from the vast Eastern fief, so many means whereby to enrich himself and to ensnare all others. And when she had learned it, and felt its bitter falsehood eat into her very soul, he, lest she should break from him, had cast subtilely about her that poisonous film of imputed dishonour which, once breathed, never passes; he had done it ruthlessly, or rather, let others do it and never said them nay, which served as well. She had been sacrificed, true, but that had been of little account to him, since through it the gold, and the harvests, and the luxury of the Roumelian possessions were shared by him; his name alone, spoken with hers, had cast shadow enough to darken it. Then, when that last evil had been done against her, she had grown hardened to this world, which so easily believed against her; she had grown callous to this outlawry, which was pronounced against her through the errors of another. She was wronged; she did not stoop to appeal or to protest; the bravery of her nature was steeled into defiance, the independence of her Ufe accepted willingly an isolation which yet was a sovereignty; she had a wide vengeance in her power, and she took it—with too little mercy.
Those memoríes thronged on her as they had thronged on her foe in the loneliness of the sea-vault, whilst that vow of implicit obedience to his will, of unvarying association with his schemes, of eternal silence on his tie to her, and of eternal devotíon to the interests of his order, which had many a time aroused in her such passionate and contemptuous rebellion even whilst she repaid his betrayal by fidelity, now seemed to stand out before her in the fantastic lines of the hot embers.
That oath had coiled about her many a time, had stifled, and bruised, and worn, and stung her beneath all the pleasures of her abundant life, had made her the compelled accomplice of harm she strove to avert, had poisoned those enterprises and those perils which were to her the sweetest savour of her years, had bound her down into an abhorred fealty to a dastard, and had driven her to loathe the sight of those fair hills and stately palaces whose herítage had rendered her the envy of her tyrant. Now it wound round another life than hers. She would have accepted as retributive justice all that could have befallen herself, but here she could not suffer alone.
"How can I save him? How can I save him?" she thought unceasingly; save him, not alone from bodily peril and the fruit of bis own noble rashness, but from the curse of the love he bore ber.
All she could do for him, was to save his mortal life; all she could be faithful to him in, was to withhold from betraying him.
Time passed; she sat still there, her bands clasped round the rifle, her head drooped on its mouth, the flames now dying low to darkness, and now upleaping towards the black roof of the quarried rock. Motionless, with the tawny lustre of the fire on her, she looked like a statue of bronze, the outline of that attitude of írozen vitality» of mute despair, thrown out distinct in the ruddy líght against the darkness of the cavern around. A deadening insensibility stole on her; she thought, and thought, and thought, till thought grew an unmeaning chaos; the lengthened want of sleep brought on her the numbness of death by snow-drift; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, till a hand touched her, and a voice was in her ear.
"Oh, heaven what horror you gave me! I traced your footsteps on the sands down to the mouth of this den, or else"
The words died on Erceldoune's lips, arrested there by the look he saw upon her face as it was raised and turned to him. In a breathless, pitiless silence they looked upon each other, her head turned back over her shoulder in an intensity of terror that looked the terror of an infinite guilt, her whole frame shuddering from him, her haughty beauty changed into a shamed and shrinking thing of fear. He, who had prayed that the seas might cover him if once her eyes fell beneath his own, read worse than his death-sentence in that look. His arms, that had been stretched to her sank; out of his gaze, that had sought hers in such eager wonder, all the light died; over his face passed the stern, cold, dark shadow of doubt.
"You fear me—you!"
The words were few, but they bore to her ear a reproach beyond all others—a reproach too noble in its rebuke to quote the thousand claims upon her trust and honour that his acts had gained. They recalled her to herself—to the one memory left her-that he must be saved. Her head fell—she had not strength to look on him:—and she put him backward from her with a piteous gesture.
"I fear for you. Go—go—go! This place is death."
"Your place is mine. Why are you here?"
She answered nothing; she cowered there in the play of the fire's glow, whilst ever and again her glance sought the gloom of the cavera's recesses, as a hunted stag's seeks the haunts of the forest whence his hunters may spríng. She had said that she would keep truth both to her tyrant and to her saviour; she had said that she iwould never again touch with hers the hand of the man whom her caress would betray; she had no intent but to be faithful to both bonds. But she had not looked for the ordeal of the actual presence, of the visible torture, of him whom she had consented to forsake; she had no courage to face these; she had taken no thought of how to bid him know their divorce was absolute and eternal. She was usurped by the one knowledge of the jeopardy his life was in whilst near him was the criminal who before had sought it—the criminal she had sworn to screen.
His eyes softened with an infinite yearning as he saw her; it was not in him to harbour doubt whilst pity could be needed; his nature was long-suffering and blindly generous; he only remembered that this anguish was for his sake, and was beyond his aid. He forgot all else, with that noble oblivion of a mind that takes no thought for itself. He stooped and strove to lift her up to his embrace.
"Why have you left me? What is it on you? If danger, I share it; if evil, I pardon it."
She drew herself back before his arms could raise her, and let her head sínk lower and lower until her forehead touched his feet;—that dauntless brow that had never bent to monarchs or to prelates, nor drooped beneath threat or before peril.
"As you have loved me, loathe me. Go!"
Leaning over her, he heard the faintly whispered words; he started with a shiver that ran through all his limbs; the memory of the guilt imputed to her rolled back on him, like a great sudden wave of recollection, that broke down beneath it every other thought. "It is a traitress of whom we speak," it had been said to him; it looked the remorse of a traitress that abased her at his feet.
He stood above her, not raising her, not touching her, the unspeakable love and compassion in him straining to contest the doubt that froze his blood, the doubt that still seemed to his loyalty of soul so vile a crime against her. He was silent many moments, while the heavy throbs of his heart beat audibly on the stillness; cast there before him in the hot half-light, all her beauty of form tempted him with remorseless temptation. So that she were his, what matter what else she should be, guilty or guiltless, dishonoured or honoured, with death or with peace in her kiss, with cruelty or with mercy on her lips? All his soul went out to her in a great cry.
"Oh God! you are mine—you are mine! What do I ask else—or care?"
It was the baser strength of his passion that cried out in those burning words; their fire thrilled her, their echo awoke in her; yet with them the force, which had never before then failed her, revived. Here lay his danger—this danger, born of her own loveliness, that would abase him, and allure him, and destroy him; the danger, which filled her with one instinct alone, the instinct to tear him at all cost from the snake's nest which held his foe, to compel him at all hazards from herself, through whom his destruction came. She rose and locked her hands upon his arm, and pressed him forward out towards the mouth of the cavern.
"Go—go! This place is death for you."
"What!—and you are here?"
A smile passed over her face; the smile that is the resignation, the self-irony, of an absolute despair.
"He doubts at last!" she thought. "He can be saved through that."
And she had strength in her to hope from her soul that such doubt might wrong her deeply enough to spare this man some portion of his pang—might make her in his sight loathsome enough to be thrust out from every memory, cursed yet unregretted.
That smile stung him as scorpions sting; he crushed her in his arms, ere she could escape him, in the ferocity of an intense torture.
"You smile at my misery? Are you, then, the thing that they say—the beautiful, pitiless, glorious, infamous temptress, seducing men to your wíll that they may perish in your work, binding them by their passions that they may die at your bidding? Ah! my love, my love! only look in my eyes as an hour ago; and I will curse myself that I ever asked you such shame; only let your líps touch mine with their sweetness, and the whole world shall call you traitress, but I shall know you truth?"
The impetuous, wild words poured out unchecked, incoherent; he scarcely knew what he uttered, he only knew that the kiss of this woman would outweigh with him the witness of all mankind; they burned deep down into her heart, they brought the subtlety of temptation to her, insidious, sweet, and rank as honey-hidden poison. Her honour broken with one, her past withheld from the other; a bond ruptured, a silence kept; this only done, and the sweetness of liberty and the liberty of love were hers.
But she thrust it from her: here she had no pity for herself, and here she had pity—exhaustless and filled with an unsparing self-reproach—for this man, who out of the very nobility of his soul, the very guilelessness of his trust, fell thus beneath her feet, and hung his life upon her. She had been merciless to others, devoting them to her need, breaking them through their own weakness, with the unpitying contempt and rigour of intellectual disdain and of sensuous allurement; here she was merciless to herself; here she bent, and broke, and cast away all her own life without pause or compassion. That which she had done to others she did also to herself. She unloosed herself from his hold, and looked at him with the cold, unnatural tranquillity which had had its terror even for the Greek.
"Who has called me a traitress?"
His eager eyes gazed down with imploring appeal into her own; the ardent fealty that would have disbelieved the voice of Heaven against her glowed through the heavy shadows of pain and dread upon his face.
"A traitor himself—a liar who shall eat his lie in the dust. God forgive me that I uttered the word to you; but you speak to me strangely, you drive me beside myself;—doubt has not touched me agaínst you; I would not soil you with so much as suspicion. Oh! my loved one, your honour was safe with me;—do not think that one shaft of his told; that one moment of belief gave him triumph. He spoke infamy against you, it is true, and I swore to him to bring that infamy to your hearing, but never because it glanced by me as truth, never save only for this—to prove him and brand him in falsehood. You know me; as I love, so I trust, so I honour."
She stayed him with a gesture; she could bear no more. The swift, eloquent, generous words seemed thrust like daggers through her heart. The fearless light of faith upon his face made her blind as with the lustre of the noonday sun. This was the man she must forsake for ever whilst their lives should last—this was the love that she must change into eternal scorn of her as of a wanton, murderous, living lie! Her martyrdom grew greater than her strength.
"Who was this speaker?"
" Victor Vane; your guest, your friend."
"And he said?"
At the name her old superb irony flashed over her face, her od superb wrath gleamed in her glance, her lofty height rose erect as a palm, her eyes met his ín all the fulness of their regard.
"He said?" she repeated.
"What your look has answered enough."
"No. What does he bring to my charge ?"
"Vileness that my lips will never repeat. Half-truths wrung into whole lies, as only such men can wring them. Chiefly—he bade me ask you two things."
"They were?"
"Who it is that sought my life in the mountains, and what tie a Greek—Conrad Phaulcon—bears to you?"
A change passed over her face, like that change which steals all the living warmth and hue from features that the greyness of death is approaching. He saw it, and his voice carne in broken rapid breaths, imperious and imploring.
"Are they one—this Greek and my murderer?"
She answered him nothing; he saw a hot flush rise upward over her face and bosom—the flush of a bitter degradation.
A moan like a wounded animal's broke from him; he could not bear to live and see shame touch her! He stood above her, while the flicker of the fíre glowed duskily upon the dilated wondering misery of his eyes.
"Are they one? Answer me!"
She did not answer, nor did her look meet his.
"That man I showed you sleeping is this Greek!"
She held silence still.
"What! You screen him in his crime? What tie has he to you, then?"
Her teeth clenched tight as a vice to keep herself from utterance of the words that rushed to her tongue.
He stared blindly at her; he felt suffocating, drunk, mad; he stood beside this woman, whose every tress of hair he loved, whose mere touch could send the vivid joy like lightning through his veins, and he arraigned her as her judge for having union and collusion with his attempted slaughterer!
"What is he to you? Where is he now?" he panted. "You called him your worst foe. Do women shelter their foes' guilt thus? You would not let me take my justice on his life. What is his life to you?"
She looked at him with the rigid calm returned upon her face, impenetrable as a mask of stone.
"I said that there were things that you could never know. This is of them. I have withheld your justice from you; I have known your assassin, and kept the knowledge untold to you. I have erred against you—greatly. Think of me what you will, what you must."
The reply was spoken with a cruel mechanical precision: she moved from him and stooped above the pine-logs, seeking their heat. She felt as she had done when once, in a Livonian winter, the night-snows had overtaken and enshrouded her, and the life had begun to turn to ice in her veins.
Something in the very action bespoke a suffering so mute and so intense that it struck to his heart, still so closed to evil and so open to faith, so slow to give condemnation, so quick to render trust and pity. He threw himself beside her, drawing her hands against his breast, searching her eyes with the longing love, the bewildered incredulity, of his own.
"Think of you! What can I think? You are my mistress, my sovereign, my wife; you take my love and yield me yours; you have smiled in my eyes, and lain in my arms, and spoken of a lifetime passed together; and now—now—it is my murderer who is sacred to you and beloved by you—not I!"
As though the fire of the words stung her into sudden life, she turned swiftly, all the light and the fever, and the anguish of passion breaking one moment through the frozen tranquillity of her face.
"Not you? Ah! would it were not, my love, my love, my love!"
In the yearníng of the accent a tenderness unutterable broke out and burst all bonds; as he heard the darkness passed from his face—a glow like the morníng shone there.
"You love me thus! You cannot have betrayed me"
She stayed him; she knew that this glory of reawakening joy must be quenched in an eternal night.
"Wait. I love you. I cannot lie to you there. But that ends, now and always. I say, you have been sinned against heavily; I must sin also against you—sin without shame by forsaking you, sin with shame by life with you. I choose the least. We are divorced for ever. We must be as are the dead to one another. Forgive me, if you can; curse me, if you cannot Whatever you do—leave me, as though death were in my touch."
All the ardour, and the yearning, and the warmth had passed from her voice; it was sad as despair, and as inflexible.
He listened, watching her with a grave wonderíng pain and pity; he had his own construction of the meaning of her words, and the patience and the belief in him were infinite.
"Though death came by you, do you think that I would leave you?"
The great salt tears sprang into her aching eyes. She could have set the muzzle of the rifle to her forehead, and died there at his feet. She had a more merciless ordeal—to live and make herself loathsome in his sight.
"No; not for death," she answered him. "But—if dishonour came by me?"
His frame shook with a sudden shudder, but still she could not turn away the enduring tenderness that would not take even her own witness against her.
"You use cruel words," he said, while he stood above her with the dignity of a judge, with a great nobility in the pity of his gaze. "Hear me a while. I have learnt more of your past to-day; I think that I can imagine what I do not know of it. I think that you have been involved in evil, but through errors that had root in virtues. I think that many have betrayed you and attainted you through the very bravery and generosity of your nature. I think that you have been bound with criminals because you first held them to be patriots, and because your bond was sacred to you even when sworn to worthless men. Do I think aright!"
She heard in silence; her soul went out in honour and adoratíon to this man, who, from the truth and the virtue of his own heart, judged and divined ber life thus rightly, despite all weight of circumstance, all darkness of calumny. But she knew that to leave him to believe this was to bind her to him for evermore. Sbe knew that he must believe else than this ere he would be forced from allegiance to her.
"You think nobly, because you think by the light of your own heart," she said, in her teeth. "But it is not this that you were warned to think to-day! Your counsellor was nearer right. Believe him.
"Were you what he said, you would not tell me that. I judge you thus by the light of your own nature. You speak to me of divorce—of dishonour. You know the coward who attempted my life, and will not render him up to my justice. These are bítter things; yet I can see day through them. It may be that you have fallen, amongst much guilt, and yet are unstained amidst corruption. It may be that you shield a crime, because to expose it would be treachery in you. It may be that you elect to forsake me because you cannot reveal to me that full truth of your past which should be one of my marriage-ríghts. This is how I judge you. If I judge rightly—I said to you that you could not stretch my tenderness further than I would yield it. I say so now; trust only my love, it shall never fail you."
"Oh, God! cease, or you will kill me!"
She swayed forward and sank down at his feet, her brow and bosom bruised on the cold jagged floor of the cavern. She had exceeding strength, but she had not strength enough to hear those tender words and give them no response; to behold this limitless forgiveness stretched to her, and leave him to think her too callous, too abased, to return to it even gratitude and repentance; to know that, as he judged her, he struck to the very core of fact, and rendered her but sheer and rightful justice, yet that the acceptance of even this justice at his hands was denied her through an alien crime.
He stood above her, the great dew gathering on his forehead; the evidences against her that her accuser had uncoiled one by one in so close a sequence thronged on his memory; her attitude, her misery, her abasement, had so much of guilt in them, yet had so far too much of suffering to be the cruel, wanton, voluntary guilt of such a woman as her calumniator had declared her to be—to be guilt, sensual, tyrannous, and self-chosen.
He stooped to her, and his voice was so low that it was hardly heard above the beatings of his heart.
"I cannot tell; is it—not justice that you need, but pardon?"
She answered him nothing where she had sunk in that abandonment. The nobler his pardon, the darker was the wrong against him. She could have kissed his feet, and cried out to him for forgiveness, as though her own hand had done that murderous iniquity against him. She could better have borne his curse than she could bear his tenderness.
He touched her; his hand shook like a leaf. "Is it so? I can bear to know you are human by error; you shall be but dearer to me for the truth with which you redeem it."
She looked at him with a swift sudden movement that raised the full beauty of her face upward in the tawny flame-light; it was colourless, and líned with the marks of the damp stones, and had all its proud glory soiled and dimmed, yet it had the grandeur of an intense sacrifice, of an intense passion, in it.
"Ah, you are just and pitiful as a god! Give no pity, give no justice here. Only leave me—leave me» and never look upon my face again!"
"For what cause?"
"For the cause—that of my people—your murderer came."
He looked at her with a terrible incredulity, that was slowly hardening into the stern chill desolation of doubt that he had put from him so long with so leal an allegiance.
"Of your people! You called the Greek to me your deadliest foe?"
She was silent once more: the testimony of half the nations of the earth would have failed to weigh with him against her; but by her own blows the storm-proof fabric of his faith was swaying to its fall.
He laid his hands upon her shoulders, crushing under them the loose masses of her hair.
"First your foe, then your comrade—hated and sheltered—condemned by you, and screened by you. What is he to you, this man for whom you forswear yourself thus?"
She answered nothing; the red shadow of the fire gleamed upon her face, but it was not so dark or so hot as the flush of shame that scorched there. His hands held her like iron. The force of jealousy rose in him; the ferocity of bitter suspicion worked in him; against all witness he had disbelieved every accusation brought to stain her, but he could not disbelieve the meaning of that silence, of that humiliation, of that conscience-stricken abasement.
The patience, so long strained, broke at last.
"They say this brute was once dear to you? Is it true, since you cover his crime so fondly?"
She did not reply; her head was bent so that he could not look upon her countenance, but he could see the heaving of her breast with its rapid, laden breathing.
His hands grasped her with unconscious violence; he knew neither what he did or said; he knew only that she could not meet his eyes, that she could not answer his challenge.
"Is it true?—that you once loved him?"
She bowed her head; a faint, chill, deadly smile crossed her lips one moment, she smiled as men, lying broken on the wheel, have laughed.
A cry rang from him dawn the stillness of the vault; he staggered where he stood, and loosed her from his hold, and stretched his arms out mechanically, as though he had grown blind and sought support. The merciless light of certainty seemed to have stricken his sight as lightning strikes it; that hideous assurance of conviction had come on him, against which the mind is at once and for ever conscious no appeal is possible.
Had she denied it, by the trustful tenderness of his nature, the evil told against her would have passed, leaving no stain, no shadow even, of mistrust of her; but before that affirmation of her gesture, before that condemnation of her silence, it lay no more with him to choose between belief and disbelief. His faith fell, as a tree must fall when its roots are severed.
"There is one man—one man only—that your mistress ever loved."
The words seemed whispered by a thousand voices that rushed down the empty air; he had been betrayed by her that this criminal might be sheltered from his vengeance!
He knew it; in that horrible hush of stillness that fell between them, his heart stood still, his very life seemed to cease; it was out of her own mouth that he condemned her. His throat rattled, his words burst, scarcely with any human sound in them, from his parching lips.
"What! you kneel there and tell me this thing—you who swore to me that no kiss but mine ever touched you? What? you fooled me with love words that you might lead me off the scent of my vengeance; you turned a living lie to harbour a murderer? Such vileness is not in woman! You a slave of your senses!—a priestess of vice! Oh, God! Say the whole world is faLse, but not you!"
She held silence still. Her head dropped lower and lower, as though each word of that appeal were a hurled stone that beat her down lower and lower in her abasement.
He forced her upward in his arms with the unwitting violence of suffering, and strained her once more to his embrace, and covered with kisses her lips, her brow, her bosom.
"Say it—say it. Say the world lies and you are true, or—or—I shall end your life and mine!"
Her eyes, heavy with the mists of a great misery, fathomless and hopeless like the eyes of the Fates in Greek sculptures, gazed up to his.
"Do you dream I would stay your hand? It were best so—so I should be yours yet."
"Mine! What then?—you love me though you are my traitress!"
"One may have guilt and yet have love," she muttered, faintly.
He shuddered as he heard her; in the answer a subtle tempting coiled around him; the perfection of her earthly beauty might be his, though it were but the love of tbe wanton wherewith she loved him; the taint on her soul could not steal the fragrance from her lips, the voluptuous light from her eyes, the mortal glory from her loveliness. The baser passions of his soul longed for her, though every evil that swells the sum of human crime had place in her—though through her should come to him sin, and desolation, and dishonour. Yet—he was not theír slave; the greatness of his nature rose above them, and trampled out their tempting. He put her from his arms lest his strength should fail him, thrust her back from him so that her breath should be no more against his cheek, her heart throb no more on his own.
"Love that is faithless and shameful? What is that to me? If you have wronged my vilest foe, the woman I loved is dead."
Where she stood before him she bowed her head, as beneath words that had the weight of a righteous law! For this—that he rose higher than his passions' tempting, that he strangled the assailants of his senses, that infidelity to his enemy would have been as dark in his sight as infidelity to himself—she honoured him with a great reverence.
"Yes. She is dead," she answered him, with a strange dreamy repetition. "Where has she ever lived save in your visions! She is dead—go. Do not wait by her grave."
There was a terrible meaning in the hushed, hopeless words; across their calmness a single cry broke—a cry that had in it all the despair of a ruined life, of a breaking heart.
Then silence fell between them. She had no courage to look upon his face; she dared not read all that she knew was written there.
The drooping flames reached a dry bough of pine, and flared afresh with it, and rose up in a writhing column of light. As the flames darted into lustre they shed their hue on the fair head of the Greek stretched out from the deep gloom of the farther vault. He drew back swiftly, as the telltale glare searched for him, and fell upon his face.
Yet before he could reach the shelter of the inner den, the one he had wronged saw him, and, with the leap of a staghound, hurled himself upon him, and dragged him from the depths of the vault forward into the full light of the flames. The slight limbs of the Athenian had no force against the vengeance of the man who found in him at once hís murderer and her paramour; he was torn out from his lair and tossed upward, as a wrecker's hands may toss a beam of driftwood.
Erceldoune forced him downward into the circle of the burning pines, full in their light and full in her sight. He only knew that this was the man who had sought to assassinate him; that this was the man for whom and to whom she betrayed him.
Yet, beyond the memory of his vengeance, beyond the violence of his hatred, beyond the rage of jealousy in his soul, was a terrible pathos of wonder that looked out at her from the reproach of his eyes;—it was for a thing so vile as this she had betrayed him! it was for a life so infamous as this that she had given herself to guilt!
Reeling, swaying, striving, they wrestled breast to breast, strangers from the far ends of the earth, yet bound together by the kinships of wrong and of hate, while she, who had cast herself between them, strove to part them—strove to tear them asunder—strove with desperate strength to end their contest. Erceldoune flung her heavily off him.
"You stayed my hand once—not again. Stand there, and see the felon you harbour die as curs die!"
His face was black and swollen with the lust for blood that she had seen there when he had fought with the Neapolitan Churchman. Wound in one another, they struggled together, seeking each other's lives, with the breath of the flames hot upon them. The Greek's lips were white with fear, but they laughed as he glanced aside at her.
"You love to see men at each others' throats? You love to see tigers play? So, so, Miladi!—then look here."
He slipped loose with a swift, supple movement, and freed his right arm. There was the glisten of steel in the light; the blade quivered aloft to strike down straight through heart or lung; before it could fall, his wrist was caught in a grip that well-nigh snapped the bone, and wrenching the knife from his hand, flung it far away into the depths of the cavern, while the sinewy arms of the man he had wronged gathered him fresh into their deadly embrace. The slender southern limbs had no chance, the serpentine suppleness had no avail, the fox-like skill had no power, against the mighty frame and the ruthless will of the avenger who at last had tracked him; a shrill scream broke from him as the steel was twisted from his grasp, the numbness of dread overcame him as he was choked in the arms of his victim, and down into his looked the unbearable fíre of the eyes he had left for the carrion-birds to tear. A sickly horror, a fascination of terror, held him breathless and unresisting to the will of his foe; Erceldoune swung him upward, and held him, as though he were a dog, above his head, his own height towering in the glow of the flames.
"Oh, God!" he cried, in the blindness of his agony and of his hate. "Is there no death worse than what honest men die for this brute?"
She threw herself on him, she seized the loose folds of his linen dress, she held him so that he had no power to move unless he trod her down beneath his feet.
"Spare him!—for my sake, spare him!"
"For your sake! You dare plead by that plea to me?"
"Oh, Heaven, what matter what I plead by! Give me his life—give me his life!"
"The life of a murderer to the prayer of a wanton? A fit gift! Stand back, or I shall kill you with your paramour."
"Wait!—you do not know what you do! I saved your life from him—let that buy his life from you!"
He stood motionless, as though the words paralysed him; all the tempests of his passions suddenly arrested; all the wild justice of revenge, that had made him strong as lions are strong, turned worthless as at last he grasped its power in hÍs hands. The blow that struck him was memory—the memory of that death-hour when through her hands life had been given back to him.
By that hour he had sworn that she should ask what she would of him, and receive it. At last she claimed her debt; claimed by it the remission of her sins—claimed by it mercy to the companion of her guilt.
He stood motionless a moment, the leaden night-like shadows heavy as murder on his face and on his soul—then at her feet he dashed the Greek down, unharmed.
"What you ask by my honour—take by your shame."
And, without another look upon her face, he went out to the air, to the sea, to the day, ere his strength should fail him, and the stain of blood-guiltiness lie on his hands.