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 I D" A L I A 
 
 A ROMANCE 
 
 BY OUIDA, ast^ 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' L'NDliK TWO FLAGS," " STKAT1IMORK," "CHANDOs" 
 " PUCK," ETC. 
 
 A NEW EDITION 
 
 Eonion 
 CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 
SALLANTYNE AND HANSON, EDINBURGH 
 CHANDOS STREET, LONDON 
 
75-5 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 i. THE BORDER EAGLE 1 
 
 ii. HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD . . . .20 
 
 III. SOUFFRIR EN Koi . .- . . . .31 
 
 IV. 'N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS ?' . . .44 
 V. 'AN IGNIS-FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE 7 . . . 58 
 
 vi. THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA . . . 08 
 vi r. THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY . . .78 
 vin. i PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE' . . . .92 
 
 ix. HITTER TANNHAUSER ...... 109 
 
 x. THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE . .121 
 xi. FAIRY-GOLD . . . . . . .130 
 
 xii. DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND 150 
 
 XIII. <DlE QUALST MICH ALS TYRANN ; UND ICH? ICH 
 
 LIEB DICH NOCIl!' ..... 159 
 
 xiv. ' SHE SMILES THEM DOWN IMPERIALLY, AS VENUS 
 
 DID THE WAVES' . . . . .189 
 xv. THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE . .195 
 
 XVI. 'MONSIGNORE' 215 
 
 xvn. 'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS' . . . 225 
 * GRAVEST THOU ARCADY? BOLD is THY CRAVING. 
 
 I SHALL NOT CONTENT IT' . . . . 230 
 
 'THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD' . . 254 
 ' MORE GREAT IN MARTYRDOM THAN THRONED AS 
 
 CESAR'S MATE' 203 
 
 xxi. * THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT' , 275 
 xxn, THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHUBOH , , i ,298 
 
 437 
 
iv CONTENTS. 
 
 C'lAP. PAGB 
 
 XXIII. 'RlEN QUE TOl' . . '-., . 506 
 
 xxiv. LION AND LEOPARD 330 
 
 xxv. i STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME ERE I DIE' 361 
 xxvi. i WHY MUST I, 'NEATH THE LEAVES OF CORONAL, 
 
 PRESS ANY KlSS OF PARDON ON THY BROW? 7 373 
 
 xxvn. THE STORY OF THE PAST ... 389 
 xxviii. <BY MORNING TOUCHED WITH AUREOLE LIGHT; 
 
 BY SUNSET STRANDED' . . . .414 
 
 AXIX. BESIDE THE SEA 430 
 
 xxx. ' THE SERPENT'S VOICE LESS SUBTI/J THAN HER 
 
 Kiss' 444 
 
 xxxi. <LET IT WORK!' 465 
 
 xxxii. 'SHALL EVIL BE TUT GOOD?' .... 470 
 xxxiii. ' UNTO HIS LAST' 481 
 
 XXXIV. 'I GIVE MY BODY FOR EVER TO INHERIT PUNISH- 
 
 MENT, AND PINE* . . . . .505 
 
 XXXV. *I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS !' . 531 
 
 XXX IV. ' LOST IN THE NIGHT, AND THE LlGHT OF THE SEA' 5G1 
 
IDALIA 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 THE BORDER EAGLE. 
 
 IT was a summer day late in the year in the wild moorland 
 of the old Border. 
 
 An amber light was on the lochs, a soft mist on field and 
 fell ; the salmon waters were leaping down from rock to rock, 
 or boiling in the deep black pools beneath the birches ; the 
 deer were herding in the glens and wooded dips that sheltered 
 under the Cheviot range here, in the debatable land be- 
 tween the northern country and the Southrons, where 
 Bothwell had swept with his mad moss-troopers, ere the 
 Warden of the Marches let passion run riot for his fair 
 White Queen, and where Belted Will's Tower still rose 
 above its oaks, as when the bugle blast of the Howard 
 sounded from its turrets, and the archers were marshalled 
 against a night-raid of the Scots. On the distant seas, 
 which once had been dark with the galleys of jN^orse pirates, 
 nothing now was in sight but a fisherboat in the offing ; on 
 the heather-moors, which had once echoed with the beat of 
 horses' hoofs, as Douglas or Percy had scoured through the 
 gorse for a dashing Border fray, or a Hotspur piece of 
 derring-do, there was only now to be heard the flap of a 
 wild duck's wing as the flocks rose among the sedges ; and 
 the sole monarch of earth or sky was a solitary golden 
 eagle soaring upward to the sun. 
 
 With a single swoop the bird had come down from his 
 eerie among the rocks, as though be were about to drop 
 
 B 
 
a ID ALIA. 
 
 earthward ; then, lifting his head he had spread his pinion* 
 in the wind that was blowing strong and fresh from Scot 
 land through the heat of the August day, and sailed upward 
 glor^usly with slow majestic motion through the light. 
 Ear below him lay the white-crested waves gleaming afar 
 off, the purple stretch of the dark moors and marshes, the 
 black still tarns, the rounded masses of the woods ; higher 
 and higher, leaving earth beneath him, he rose in his royal 
 grandeur, fronting the sun, and soaring onward and upward 
 against the blue skies and the snowy piles of clouds, rejoic- 
 ing in his solitude, and kingly in his strength. 
 
 With his broad wings spread in the sun gleam, he swept 
 through the silent air, his eyes looking at the luminance 
 which blinds the eyes of men, his empire taken in the vast- 
 ness of the space that monarchs cannot gauge, and his 
 plumes stretched in all the glory of his godlike freedom, his 
 unchained liberty of life. Far beneath him, deep down 
 among the tangled mass of heather and brown moor grasses, 
 glistened the lean cruel steel of a barrel, like the shine of a 
 snake's back, pointing upward, while the eagle winged his 
 way aloft. There, in his proud kingship with the sun, how 
 could he note or know the steel tube scarce larger, from 
 his altitude, than a needle's length of his foe, hidden deep 
 among the gorse and reeds ? The sovereign bird rose higher 
 and higher still, in stately flight. One sharp sullen report 
 rang through the silence ; a single gray puff of smoke curled 
 up from the heather ; a death-cry echoed on the air, quiver- 
 ing with a human agony ; the eagle wheeled once round, a 
 dizzy, circle in the summer light, then dropped down through 
 the sunny air stricken and dead. 
 
 "Was it more murder when Caesar fell ? 
 
 The assassin rose from where he had knelt on one knee 
 among the gorse, while his retriever had started the wild- 
 fowl up from the sedges of a pool, and strode through 
 bracken and heath to the spot where his science had brought 
 down the eagle, at a distance and with an aim which marked 
 him as one of the first shots in Europe. A hundred yards 
 brought him to the place where his quarry had fallen, and 
 he thrust the heather aside with impatient movement. He 
 was keen in sport as a Shikari, and he had looked for no 
 rarer game to-day than the blackcocks or the snipes, or at 
 very best a heron from the marshes. 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 3 
 
 On the moor the king-bird lay, the pinions broken and 
 powerless, the breast-feathers wet and bathed in blood, the 
 piercing eyes, which loved the sun, blind and glazed with 
 film ; the life, a moment before strong, fearless, and rejoic- 
 ing in the light, was gone. A feeling, new and strange, carne 
 on his slayer as he stood there in the stillness of the 
 solitary moor, alone with the dead eagle lying at his feet. 
 He paused and leaned on his rifle, looking downward. 
 
 * God forgive me. I have taken a life better than my 
 own.' 
 
 The words were involuntary, and unlike enough to one 
 whose superb shot had become noted from the jungles of 
 Northern India to the ice plains of Norway ; from the 
 bear-haunts of the Danube to the tropic forests of the 
 Amazon. But he stood looking down on the mighty bird, 
 while the red blood welled through the blossoming furze, 
 with something that was almost remorse. It looked 
 strangely like slaughter in the still golden gleam of the 
 summer day. 
 
 If you wonder at it, wait until you see an eagle die on a 
 solitary moorland that was his kingdom by right divine, 
 with all the glorious liberty of life. 
 
 The skill which you would have challenged the first 
 marksman in Europe to have beaten will look, for a second 
 at least, oddly base, and treacherous, and cowardly, when 
 the lord of the air lies like carrion at your feet. 
 
 Knee-deep in the purple heather, the destroyer leant on 
 his gun, alone on the Scotch side of the Border, with the 
 Bea flashing like a line of silver light on his left, and the 
 bold sweep of the Cheviot Hills fronting him. The golden 
 eagle had fallen by no unworthy foe ; he was a man of very 
 lofty stature, and of powerful build and sinew, his muscles 
 close knit, and his frame like steeJ, as became one who was 
 in hard condition from year's end to year's end. His com- 
 plexion was a clear bronze, almost as dark as an Arab's, 
 though originally it had been fair enough ; his black sweep- 
 ing moustaches and beard were long, thick, and silken ; his 
 eyes large, and very thoughtful, the hue of the eagle's he 
 had shot. His features were bold, proud, and frank, while 
 his bearing had the distinction of blood, with the dash of a 
 soldier, the reposeful stateliness of the old regime, with the 
 alert keenness of a man used to rapid action, clear decision, 
 
4 ID ALIA. 
 
 coolness under danger, and the wiles of the world in all its 
 ways. Standing solitary there on the brown heath, his form 
 rose tail and martial enough for one of the night riders oi 
 Liddesdale, or the Knight of Snowdon himself, against the 
 purple haze and amber light. 
 
 In the days of Chevy Chase and Flodden Field his race 
 had been the proudest of the nobles on the Border-side 
 their massive keep reared in face of the Cheviots, the lands 
 their own, over miles of rock and gorse and forest, lords ot' 
 all the Marches stretching to the sea. Now all that be- 
 longed to him was that wild barren moorland, which gave 
 nothing but the blackcock and the ptarmigan which bred in 
 their wastes ; and a hunting-lodge, half in ruins, to the 
 westward, buried under hawthorn, birch, and ivy, a roost for 
 owls and a paradise for painters, 
 
 * A splendid shot, Erceldouue : I congratulate you ! * said 
 a voice behind him. 
 
 The slayer of the golden eagle turned in surprise ; these 
 moors, all barren and profitless though they were, were his, 
 and were rarely trodden by any step except his own. 
 
 ' Ah, your grace ! Good-day. How does the Border 
 come to be honoured by a visit from you ? ' 
 
 * Lost my way,' responded his Grace of Glencairne, an 
 inveterate sportsman and a hearty, florid, stalwart man of 
 sixty, clad in a Scotch plaid suit, and looking like a well-to- 
 do North-country farmer. ' "We're staying with Fitzallayne, 
 and came out after the black game ; lost all the rest some- 
 how, and know no more where we are than if we were at the 
 North Pole. You're a godsend. Let me introduce my 
 friends to you, Sir Fulke Erceldoune, Lord Polemore, Mr. 
 Victor Vane.' 
 
 The beggared gentleman raised his bonnet to the Duke's 
 friends with much such frank soldier-like courtesy as that 
 with which the Border lords, whose bJood was in his veins, 
 received Chatelherault and Hamilton in the wild free davs 
 of old. 
 
 e Shot an eagle, Erceldoune ? By George ! what a bird ! ' 
 cried the Duke, gazing down amazed and admiring on the 
 murdered monarch. 
 
 * I envy you indeed,' said his companion whom he had 
 named as Victor Vane. 'I have shot most things men 
 and other birds of prey but I never killed an eagle, rot 
 even in the Hartz or the E 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 5 
 
 Erceldoune glanced at him. 
 
 * They are rare, and when they do appear we shoot them 
 to insure their scarcity. Perhaps the eagle you would wish 
 to kill is the eagle with two heads ? What sport have you 
 had, Duke? ' 
 
 1 Very bad. Birds wild as the . But G-od bless 
 
 my soul, your bag's full ! I say, we're nearly famished -, 
 can't you let us have something to eat at your place 
 yonder ? ' 
 
 * "With pleasure, sir, if your Grace can honour an owl's 
 roost, and put up with a plain meal of cold game,' said 
 Erceldoune, as he thrust the dead king, with all his pomp 
 of plumage torn and blood-stained, into his bag with the 
 black-cocks, ptarmigan, wild duck, and snipes. 
 
 ' My dear fellow, I'll thank you for a crust ; I'm. literally 
 starving,' cried the nobleman, who was pining so wearily 
 for his luncheon that the words l cold game ' sounded to 
 him like paradise. ' And, by the way, if you've any of 
 your father's Madeira left, you might feast an emperor 
 there wasn't such a wine connoisseur in Europe as Regency 
 Erceldoune.' 
 
 A shadow swept over the face of the golden eagle's foe 
 as he whistled his dogs, and led the way for his guests over 
 the moor, talking with the Duke. Vane caught the look, 
 and smiled to himself ; he thought it was because the 
 ruined gentleman shrank from taking them to his beggared 
 home and his unluxurious table : he erred for once. Such 
 a petty pride was wholly impossible to the bold Border 
 blood of Erceldoune ; he would have taken them to a 
 garret quite as cordially as to a mansion ; he would have 
 given them, Arab-like, the half of all he had with frank 
 hospitality, if that all had been only an oaten cake, and 
 would never have done himself such mean dishonour as to 
 measure his worth by the weight of his plate, the number 
 of his wines, or the costliness of his soups. 
 
 True the world, he knew well enough, only appraised 
 men by the wealth that was in their pockets ; but the 
 world's dictum was not his deity, and with its social heart- 
 burnings his own wandering, athletic, adventurous, and 
 hardy life l:ad never had much to do. He loved the saddle 
 better than the drawing-rooms, and mountain and moorland 
 better than the lust of fame or gold. 
 
6 ID ALIA. 
 
 It was not more than half a mile to the King's Best, as 
 the sole relic of the feudal glories of the Border lords was 
 named, from an old tradition dating back to one of Mal- 
 colm of Scotland's hunting raids ; the place would have 
 maddened an architect or a lover of new stucco, but it 
 would have enraptured an archaeologist or an artist. One 
 half of it was in ruins a mass of ivy and gray crumbling' 
 stone ; the other half was of all styles of architecture, ' 
 from the round quaint tower of the Saxons, to the fantas- 
 tic, peaked, and oriel-windowed Elizabethan. Birds made 
 their nests in most of the chimneys, holly and hawthorn 
 grew out .of the clefts in the walls, the terraces were moss- 
 grown, and the escutcheon above the gateway was lost in 
 a profusion of scarlet-leaved creepers. But there were a 
 picturesqueness, a charm, a lingering grandeur which it 
 had still ; it spoke of a dead race, and it had poems in 
 every ruin, with the sun on its blazoned casements, and 
 the herons keeping guard by its deserted weed-grown 
 moat. 
 
 ' Grod bless my soul ! How the place has gone to rack 
 and ruin since I was here twenty years ago ! ? cried the 
 Duke heedlessly and honestly, in blank amazement, as he 
 stared about him. 
 
 Erceldoune smiled slightly. 
 
 t Our fortunes have gone to " rack and ruin," Duke.' 
 
 ' Ah, to be sure yes, to be sure ! Sad thing ! sad thing ! 
 No fault of yours, though, Erceldoune. Your father 
 shouldn't have been able to touch the entail. He was a 
 Well, well, he's gone to his account now/ said his Grace, 
 pulling himself up short, with a perception that he was on 
 dangerous ground, but continuing to gaze about him witli 
 a blank naivete of astonishment. Men used to call him a 
 ' sexagenarian school-boy;' it was too harsh, for the Duke 
 was a thoroughly good man of business, and a manly and 
 honest friend ; but it was true that the simplicity and can- 
 dour of boyhood clung very oddly to him. ; and a courtier 
 or a fine gentleman his Grace of Grlencairne had never be- 
 come, though he was not without a frank dignity of hia 
 own when roused to it. 
 
 By an arched side-door, through a long corridor, they 
 passed into a room in the southern and still habitable por- 
 tion of the house; a long lofty room, lighted at the end 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 7 
 
 with two magnificent painted windows, panelled with cedar 
 picked out with, gold, hung with some half-dozen rare pic- 
 tures, a Titian, two Watteaux, a Teniers, a Van Tol, and a 
 Memlinz, covered with a rich crimson carpeting, now much 
 worn, and with some gold and silver racing and hunting 
 cups on the buffet. The chamber was the relic of the 
 lavish and princely splendour which scarce thirty years ago 
 had been at its height in the King's Rest. 
 
 ' Ah, dear me, dear me ! ' murmured the Duke, throwing 
 himself into a f auteuil. ' This is the old supper-room. To 
 be sure; how well I remember G-eorge IV. sitting just 
 there where you stand ! Lord, how fond he was of your 
 Father birds of a feather ! Well, well, we might be wild, 
 wicked dogs we were, sir ; but we had witty times of it. 
 Eegency Erceldoune was a very brilliant man, though he 
 might be a ' 
 
 Erceldoune, with brief courtesy to the Duke, rang the 
 bell impatiently to order luncheon, and turned to the other 
 men. 
 
 ' I hope your sport and our moorland air may have given 
 you an appetite, for Border larders were never very well 
 stocked, you know, except when the laird made a raid ; 
 and, unhappily, there is no " lifting," nowadays, to add to 
 our stock.' 
 
 ' My dear sir,' laughed Vane, dropping his glass, through 
 which he had been glancing at the Van Tol, ' half a cold 
 grouse when one is starving is worth all the delicacies of a 
 carerne when one is not in extremis. I am delighted to 
 make acquaintance with your highly picturesque and me- 
 diaeval abode ; a landscape-painter would be in raptures 
 over it, if you might wish it a trifle more waterproof.' 
 
 There was a certain dash of condescension and the sus* 
 picion of a sneer in the light careless words ; if they were 
 intended to wound, however, they missed their mark. 
 
 c Starving on the moors would not be so very terrific to 
 you if you had been six days in the saddle on a handful of 
 maize, as has chanced to me in the Pampas and the Cor- 
 dilleras,' said Erceldoune curtly. There is nothing your 
 
 * mightly hunter before the Lord,' who is known from the 
 Libyan to La Plata, holds in more profound contempt than 
 
 * small miseries.' 
 
 * Eh ? What ? Were you talking about your father's 
 
8 ID ALIA. 
 
 dinners ? ' broke in his Grace, who, lost in his reveries as 
 his eyes travelled over the familiar chamber, was not very 
 clear what was said. ' They were the best in Europe. 1 
 have seen Yarmouth, and Alvanley, and Talleyrand, and 
 Charles Dix, and the best epicures we ever had, round that 
 table ; I was a very young fellow then, and the dinners 
 were splendid, Erceldoune. He liked to outdo the king, 
 you know, and the king liked to be outdone by him. I 
 don't believe he'd have gone quite the pace he did if it 
 hadn't been for Greorge.' 
 
 Erceldoune moved inlpatiently ; these latter royal memo- 
 ries connected with the King's Ilest were no honour to him ; 
 there were so many brands of an extravagant vice, and 
 a madman's ostentation, that had made him penniless, and 
 bought a sovereign's smile with disgrace. 
 
 ' I daresay, sir. I never knew any use that monarchs 
 were yet, save in some form or another to tax their sub- 
 jects.' 
 
 Grlencairne laughed. He had not seen much of the man 
 who was now his host, but what he had seen he liked. 
 The Duke abhorred the atmosphere of adulation in which, 
 being a Duke, he was compelled to dwell, and Ercel- 
 doune's utter incapability of subservience or flattery re- 
 freshed him. 
 
 At that moment luncheon was served. The promised 
 cold game in abundance, with some prime venison, some 
 potted char, and a pile of superb strawberries; plain 
 enough, and all the produce of the moorlands round, but 
 accompanied by pure claret, and served on antique and 
 massive plate which had been in the King's E/est for 
 centuries, and was saved out of the total wreck of the 
 Erceldoune fortunes, and at which Lord Polemore looked 
 envyingly ; he was of the new creation, and would have 
 given half his broad lands and vast incomes to have bought 
 that ' high and honourable aiicientness' which was the only 
 thing gold could not purchase for him. 
 
 ' You have a feast for the gods, Erceldoune. If this be 
 Border penury, commend me to it,' cried Grlencairne, as he 
 attacked the haunch with a hearty and absorbed attention ; 
 like Louis Seize, he would have eaten in the reporters' box 
 at the Assembly while Sulleau was falling under twenty 
 sword -thrusts for his sake, and the Swiss Gruard were 
 perishing in the Cour Eoyale. 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 9 
 
 ' I am sure we are infinitely indebted/ murmured Pole- 
 more languidly, gazing at a Venetian goblet given to an 
 Erceldoune by the Queen Regent, Mary of Cruise. 
 
 ' Nay, it is I who am the debtor to a most happy hazard. 
 Try this wine,' said Erceldoune, with that stately courtesy 
 which was blent with his frank, bref, soldier-like manners ; 
 sociality was not his nature, but cordial hospitality was. 
 
 The Duke looked up. 
 
 * Eh ! Tokay ? What, the very wine Leopold gave your 
 father? Tiny bottles all cobwebbed ? That's it ! The real 
 imperial growth ; can't get it for money. Ah, how much 
 have you got of it left ? ' 
 
 c But little only a dozen or so, I believe ; but of what 
 there is I would ask the pleasure of your Grace's ac- 
 ceptance, if the wine find favour with you,' 
 
 ' Favour with me ? Hear the man. Why, it's Leopold's 
 own growth, I tell you,' cried his Grace. ' As for giving it 
 away, thank you a thousand times, but I couldn't I 
 wouldn't rob you of it for anything.' 
 
 ' Indeed I beg you will, my dear Duke/ said Erceldoune, 
 with a slight smile. ' To a rich man you may refuse what 
 you like, but to a poor man you must leave the pleasure of 
 giving when he can.' 
 
 ' lleally, on my soul, you're very good,' said the Duke, 
 whose heart was longing after the imperial vintage. I 
 thank you heartily, my dear fellow ; but you're too gene- 
 rous, Erceldoune ! give your head away, like all your race 
 like all your race ! If your ancestors had had their hands 
 a little less free at giving, and their heads a little longer at 
 their expenditure, you wouldn't have this place all tumble- 
 down as it is about you now.' 
 
 ' Generosity, if I can ever make claim to it, will not im- 
 peril me. Who has nothing can lose nothing/ said Ercel- 
 doune briefly. He did not feel particularly grateful for this 
 discussion of his own fortunes and his father's follies before 
 two strangers, and Vane, noticing this by tact or by chance, 
 glided in with a question admiringly relative to a small gold 
 salver singularly carved and filigreed. 
 
 4 No, you are quite right, it is not European,' answered 
 his host, glad to turn the Duke's remarks off himself, the 
 person he liked least to hear talked of, of any in the world. 
 4 It is Mexican. An Erceldoune who was in Cuba at the 
 
10 ID ALIA. 
 
 lime Cortes sailed, and who went with him through all the 
 Aztec conquest, brought it home from the famous treasures 
 of Ayaxacotl. He bored a hole in it and slung it round his 
 neck in the passage of the JSToche Triste ; there is the mark 
 now.' 
 
 * Very curious,' murmured Polemore, with a sharp twinge 
 of jealousy ; he felt it hard that this man, living in an owl's 
 roost on a barren moor, should have had ancestors who were 
 nobles and soldiers in the great Castilian conquest, while he, 
 a viscount and a millionaire, could not even tell who his 
 fathers were at that era, but knew they had been wool- 
 carders, drawers, butterers, cordwainers, or something 
 horrible and unmentionable. 
 
 ' Out with Cortes ! ' echoed Vane. ' Then we have a link 
 in common, Sir Fulke. I have some Mexican trifles that 
 one of our family, who was a friend of Velasquez de Leon, 
 brought from the conquest. So a Vane and an Erceldoune 
 fought side by side at Otumba and in the temple of Huit- 
 zitopotchli? We must be friends after such an augury.' 
 
 Erceldoune bowed in silence, neither accepting nor de- 
 clining the proffered alliance. 
 
 The sunlight poured through the scarlet creepers round 
 the oriel windows into the chamber, on to the red pile of 
 the fruit in its glossy leaves, the rich-hued plumage of the 
 dead birds where they were hastily flung down, the gold and 
 antique plate that was in strange contrast with the 
 simplicity of the fare served on it ; and on the dark martial 
 head of the Border laird, where he sat with his great hounds 
 couched about him in attitudes for Land seer. He looked, on 
 the whole, more to belong to those daring, dauntless, fiery, 
 steelclad Cavaliers of the Cross, who passed with Cortes 
 through the dark belt of porphyry into the sunlit valley of 
 the Venice of the West, than to the present unheroic, un- 
 adventurous, unmoved, unadmiring age. Near him sat 
 Victor Vane, a man of not more than thirty years, rather 
 under the middle size and slightty built ; in his bearing easy 
 and aristocratic, in feature, although not by any means 
 handsome, very attractive, with blue eyes that were always 
 smiling with pleasant sunshine, hair of the lightest hue that 
 glanced like silk, and a mouth as delicate as a woman's, that 
 would have made him almost effeminate but for the long 
 amber moustaches that shaded it, while hia face, though 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. II 
 
 very fair, was perfectly colourless, which lent to it the 
 delicacy, but also the coldness, of marble. 
 
 As the two men sat together host and guest antago- 
 nism seemed more likely between them than alliance ; and 
 ; in such antagonism, it if arose, it would have been hard to 
 say which would be the victor. In a fair and open fight, 
 hand to hand, the blood of the Northern Countrie would be 
 sure of conquest, and Erceldoune would gain it with the 
 same ease and the same strength as that with which those 
 in whose veins it had run before him charged ' through and 
 through a stand of pikes,' and stood the shock of the 
 English lances ; but in a combat of finesse, in a duel of in- 
 trigue, where the hands were tied from a bold stroke, and 
 all the intricate moves were made in the dark, it would be a 
 thousand to one that the bright and delicate Southron 
 stiletto would be too subtle for the straight stroke and 
 dauntless chivalry of the stalwart Border steel. 
 
 At that moment a despatch was handed to Erceldoune by 
 the single servant who lived in the King's Eest, and served 
 him when he was there. The letter was sealed with the 
 royal arms, and marked ' On her Majesty's Service.' Its 
 contents were but two lines : 
 
 ' Sir Eulke Erceldoune on service immediately. Report 
 to-morrow by 11 A.M. at E.O.' 
 
 'Erom the Office?' asked the Duke, as his host tossed 
 the despatch aside. 
 
 * Yes. On service immediately. East Europe, I daresay.' 
 
 ' Ah, the Cabinet brewing more mischief with their con- 
 founded pedagogue's pettifogging, I will bet ! ' cried his 
 Grace. (The existing Government was his pet foe.) * When 
 are you ordered ? ' 
 
 1 To-morrow. I shall take the night-express, so I shall 
 not need to leave here till midnight,' answered Erceldoune, 
 to set at rest any fears his guests might feel that they de- 
 tained him. '1 wish they had sent Buller or Phil Yaughan ; 
 I wanted a month more of the deer and the blackcock ! but 
 I must console myself with the big game in Wallachia, if I 
 can find time.' 
 
 " You serve her Majesty ? ' inquired Yane, who knew it 
 well enough, as he knew all the State messengers in 
 Europe. 
 
 'The E. O. rather,' laughed Erceldoune, 'Salaried to 
 
12 IDALIA. 
 
 keep in saddle! Paid to post up and down the world with 
 a State-bag honoured with havanas, and a despatch-box 
 marked " Immediate," and filled with char, chocolate, or 
 
 caviare 
 
 ' Come, come, Erceldoune, that's too bad ! ' laughed the 
 Duke. 
 
 ' Not a whit, sir ! I went out to New York last year 
 with royal bags imposing enough to contain the freedom of 
 Canada, or instructions to open an American war, but which 
 had nothing in the world in them save a dinner-service for 
 his Excellency, and some French novels and Paris perfumes 
 for the First Secretary.' 
 
 The Duke laughed. 
 
 ' Well that will hardly be the case now. Matters arg 
 getting very serious eastward ; everywhere over there the 
 people are ripe for revolt ; I expect Venetia, and Galicia, 
 and Croatia, and all the rest of them, are meditating a 
 rising together. I happen to know those bags you take out 
 will contain very important declarations from us ; the 
 Cabinet intend to send instructions to invite Turkey, com- 
 mand her rather, to ' 
 
 ' My dear Duke, it is not for me to know what I take 
 out ; it is sufficient that I deliver it safely/ laughed Ercel- 
 doune, to check the outpourings of his Grace's garrulous 
 tongue. ' I am no politician and diplomatist, as you know 
 well. I prefer hard riding to soft lying, in either sense of 
 the word.' 
 
 ' Wish everybody else did,' said the Duke. ' If men 
 would keep to their own concerns and live as they ought, 
 with plenty of sport and fresh air, everything would go 
 smoothly enough. There'd be no marring or meddling 
 then ; as for this Cabinet, it's just what Clarendon said 
 of Bristol : " For puzzling and spoiling a thing, there was 
 never his equal." If the despatches you will carry to 
 Moldavia don't embroil Europe, it won't be his fault, but 
 there'll be sure to be a postscript to 'em all, meaning, 
 " N.B. In no case will we fight ! " 
 
 ' Who is severe now, Duke ? On my honour, you will 
 make me feel as if I were Discord incarnate flying over 
 Europe with her firebrand. I never took so poetic a side 
 of the service before.' 
 
 He strove to arrest the reckless course of incautious 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 13 
 
 revelations of the intentions in high places ; but it was 
 useless. The Scotch Duke was off on the Foreign Office 
 ill-deeds, and no power could have stopped him ; no power 
 did until he had fairly talked himself hoarse, when he drank 
 a deep glass of claret, and rose, with reiterated thanks for 
 his impromptu entertainment as sincere as they were 
 voluble, and with cordial invitation to his castle of Benith- 
 mar, a stately pile upon the Clyde. 
 
 ' And I hope you will allow me also to return your hos- 
 pitalities in kind,' said Vane with his brightest smile. 
 ' Since you have the mania of peregrinomanie, as Gruy Patin 
 calls it, and are always going up and down Europe, you 
 must pass continually through Paris. I can only hope, 
 both there and in Naples, you will very soon allow me 
 the pleasure of showing you how much I hold myself the 
 debtor both for the hospitality of to-day and the acquain- 
 tance to which it has been so fortunate for me as to 
 lead. 1 
 
 Erceldoune bent his head, and thanked him courteously 
 but briefly he had no love for honeyed speeches and 
 offered them, as a modern substitute for the stirrup-cup, 
 some cigars of purest flavour, brought over by himself 
 from the West Indies. 
 
 1 How does Mr. Vane come in your Grace's society?' he 
 asked the Duke, as he accompanied them across his own 
 moor to put them en route for Lord Fitzallayne's, the two 
 others having fallen slightly behind them. 
 
 1 How eh ? Why, I don't know because he's staying 
 at Fitz's, to be sure.' 
 
 ' Staying there ! ' 
 
 ' Tes. Fitz swears by him, and all the women are in love 
 with him, though he's a pale insignificant face, to my think- 
 ing. What do you know of him ? Anything against him, 
 eh?' 
 
 1 Sufficiently about him. to advise you, if you will allow 
 me, not to let him glean, from you the private intentions 
 and correspondence of the ministry, or any instructions 
 they may have given their representatives abroad. Only 
 talk to him on such matters generally ; say no more to him 
 than what the public knows.' 
 
 ' What ? Ah, indeed ! I apprehend you. I thank you, 
 sir I thank you/ said his Grace hurriedly, conscious that 
 
14 IDALIA. 
 
 he had been somewhat indiscreet, but curious as any old 
 gossip in a Breton knitting and spinning gossipr y. l But 
 he stands very well; he comes of good blood, I think. 
 He is a gentleman; you meet him at the best courts 
 abroad. 3 
 6 Possibly.' 
 
 < Then what the deuce is there against him ? ' 
 ' I am not aware that I said there was anything. Sim- 
 ply I know his character ; I know he is an adventurer a 
 political adventurer associated with the ultra parties in 
 Jtaly and 'Hungary. I do not think his social status is 
 anything very remarkable, and I repeat my advice do not 
 take him into political confidence.' 
 
 * If the man can't be trusted, the man's a blackguard.' 
 
 * My dear Duke. la haute politique will not admit of such 
 simplifications. A. man may be a great man, a great minis- 
 ter, a great patriot, but all the same he may be, politically 
 speaking, a great cheat. Indeed, is there a statesman who 
 is not one ? ' 
 
 ' True, true uncomfortably true,' growled his G-race. 
 ' But of Victor Vane what's there against him ? What 
 do you know what would you imply ? ' 
 
 ' I " imply " nothing ; it is the most cowardly word in the 
 language. I know very little, and that little 1 have said to 
 place your G-race on your guard ; and it is no secret Mr. 
 Vane is well known abroad to be the determinate foe of 
 Austria, and to be widely involved in political intrigues. 
 Of his career I know no farther ; and of what I have said, 
 he is welcome to hear every word,' said Erceldoune, with 
 a dash of decision and impatience, while he paused and 
 pointed to a road running round a bend of gray gorse- 
 covered rock beside a brown, and rapid moor-stream, which 
 would lead them to a short cut across the fells home- 
 wards. 
 
 There they parted in the bright warm August afternoon 
 as the sun began to sink towards the westward ; his guests 
 soon lost to sight behind the wild woodland growth of the 
 half savage glen, while the last of the Border lords turned 
 backwards to his solitary and ruined homestead, sweeping 
 over the heather with the easy swinging step of the bred 
 mountaineer, followed by his brace of staghounds and two 
 lack-and-tan setters. 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 15 
 
 'Salaried to keep in saddle ! Paid to post up and down 
 Europe ! ' he had said with a certain disdain ; for Ercel- 
 doune was nothing more or ]ess than a Queen's messenger 
 a State courier, bound to serve at a State summons ; 
 holding himself in readiness for E/ussia or Teheran, for 
 ice-fields or sun-scorched tropics, for the swamps of 
 Mexico or the rose-plains of Persia, at a second's notice. 
 But he suited the life, and the life suited him ; for he was 
 a keen sportsman, and the first rider in Europe ; was 
 equally at his ease in an Arab camp and a Paris cafe in 
 a Polish snow-storm, with the wolves baying in wrath 
 and famine about the sieigh, and in the chancellerie of a 
 British plenipotentiary over the dainty dishes of a Eirst 
 Secretary's dinner ; and had an iron constitution, a frame 
 steeled to all changes of climate or inroads of fatigue, and 
 that coelness under close peril, and utter indifference to 
 personal indulgence, which made him renowned in the 
 messenger service, and as much at home in the Desert as 
 a Sheikh. Indeed, the Desert life could not have been 
 bolder, and freer, and simpler than that which Erceldoune 
 had led from his boyhood, partly from nature, partly from 
 habit ; he had as much of the barbaric chief in him as 
 he had of the man of the world. 
 
 Hii father ".Regency Erceldoune, as he was called, from 
 his alliance with ' the mad Prince and Poynings' had been 
 a gambler, a debauchee, and a drunkard, though a gentle- 
 man with it all. Such orgies as Greorge Eex had at the 
 Cross Deep, his friend and favourite had at King's Best, 
 mad, witty, riotous, and shameless as the worst days of 
 lascivious E/onie. Lands and money went in them till 
 there were neither left ; and his son, brought to them, and 
 taught them while he was nothing but a child, had sickened 
 of the vice in which he was steeped as thoroughly as, had 
 he been brought up by precisians, he would have craved 
 and loved it. He saw men levelled with brutes, and made 
 far more bestial than the beasts ; and his nature reared it- 
 self out of the slough, and refused the slavery of sensu- 
 ality. If he were too early contaminated, he was all the 
 earlier revolted. 
 
 When he was twenty-two his father died, and he was 
 left the last Master of King's Eest (by the old title long 
 dropped in desuetude), with some miles of moorland and 
 
1 6 ID ALT A. 
 
 a beggared fortune, not a single relative, and not a- chance 
 of a career. A certain wild and witty peer, who had been 
 prominent in the orgies of the B/oissy of the Border say- 
 ing nothing to him, for the Erceldoune stock was famous 
 for a pride which perished rather than bend got him 
 offered a messenger ship ; and his first meeting with officials 
 at the Foreign Office was characteristic, and had not a 
 little influence on his career. In the Board-room, at the 
 hour when he was being received by those sleepy and 
 solemn personages the Heads of a Department, there 
 lounged in a minister, as celebrated for his cheery and 
 facetious humour as for his successful and indomitable 
 statesmanship, for his off-hand good-nature as for his 
 foreign policies. The Heads bowed submissive before my 
 lord ; my lord gave his rapid lucid orders, and as he was 
 lounging out again put up his eye-glass at Erceldoune. 
 
 I Messengership ? We've too many messengers already,' 
 I to said, cutting in two the reply of the Board to his in- 
 terrogation. ' Only ride over one another's way, and lose 
 half the bags among them. "Who are you, sir ?*' 
 
 * Eulke Erceldoune,' said the Border lord, with no birth- 
 right but some barren acres of heather, returning the great 
 minister's stare as calmly and as haughtily ; insolence ho 
 would not have brooked from an emperor. 
 
 ' Erceldoune! God bless my soul, your father and I 
 were like brothers once,' said his lordship, breaking off his 
 sharp autocratic cross-examination for the sansfaqou good- 
 hearted familiarity of tone most usual and congenial to 
 him. ' Not a very holy fraternity either monks of Med- 
 menham ! Who sent you up for a niessengership Lord 
 Longbourn ? Ah, very happy to appoint you ! Go in for 
 your examination as soon as you like.' 
 
 * I thank you, my lord, no. You have said you " have 
 too many messengers already." ' 
 
 The minister stared a minute, and then laughed. 
 
 ' Pooh, pooh ! Never mind what I said. If you're like 
 what your father was, you won't complain of a sinecure.' 
 
 The boy-master of King's Eest bowed to the cabinet 
 counsellor. 
 
 I 1 am not what he was ; and I do not take money from 
 the State, if the State do not need my services. I did not 
 come here to seek a pension.' 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE. 17 
 
 The groat statesman stared at him a second with a blank 
 Amazement ; his condescension had never met with such a 
 rebuff and such a scruple in all his length of years and of 
 office. The grave and reverend Heads, that bent to the 
 earth in docility and servility before the Foreign Secretary, 
 azed at the offender with such horror of reprobation as 
 ;he members of the Inquisition might have bestowed on a 
 blasphemer who had reviled the Host and rebelled against 
 the Holy See. Erceldoune stood his ground calmly and 
 indifferently ; he had said simply what he meant, and in 
 the pride of his youth and his ruin, he was grandly care- 
 less whether he had closed the door of every career upon 
 himself, and condemned himself to starve for life on his 
 profitless acres of tarn and gorse. 
 
 The minister looked at him with his keen blue eyes, 
 reading the boy through and through ; then a rich humour " 
 lighted up their glittering azure light, and he laughed aloud 
 a mellow, ringing, Irish mirth, that startled all the 
 drowsy echoes and pompous stillness of Downing-street. 
 
 1 Yoii hit hard and straight, my young Sir Fulke. Yery 
 dangerous habit, sir, and very expensive get rid of it. 
 Go before the commissioners to-morrow, and pass your 
 examination. I'll give you an attacheship, if you like it 
 better ; but I don't think you'll do for diplomacy. I shall 
 see you again. Grood-day to you.' 
 
 The minister nodded, and left the Board-room with as 
 much dash and lightness in his step when he ran down- 
 stairs as if he were still a Harrow boy ; and in that two 
 minutes' interview in the Foreign Office, Erceldoune had 
 made a friend for life in one who if he had a short poli- 
 tical memory, and took up policies or treaties, and dropped 
 them again with a charming facility and inconstancy, as oc- 
 casion needed was adored by every man he employed, 
 and was as loyal to his personal friendships as he was 
 staunch to his personal promises. <, 
 
 True to his word, he gave Erceldoune his choice of an 
 attacheship, a messengership, a commission, or one of those 
 fashionable and cosy appointments in Downing-street 
 where younger sons and patrician proteges yawn, make 
 their race-books, discuss the points of demireps and 
 rosieres, circulate the last epigram round the town, manu- 
 facture new and sublimated liqueur recipes, and play at 
 
 u 
 
1 8 ID ALIA. 
 
 baccarat or chicken-hazard in public service. Erceldoune 
 took the messengership, from a motive which strongly 
 coloured his character and career even then honour. 
 
 His father, deep in a morass of embarrassments, had lived 
 like a prince of the blood ; his son had taken, in sheer re- 
 vulsion, an utter abhorrence of all debt. He had been 
 steeped in desolate vices and lawless principles from his 
 earliest years ; and the mere wildness of men of his own 
 years looked childish, and was without charm, beside the 
 orgies through which he had passed his novitiate while yet 
 in his youngest boyhood. He had seen men of richest wit, 
 highest powers, brightest talents, noblest blood, suddenly 
 disappear into darkness and oblivion, to drag on an outlawed 
 life in some wretched continental town, through that 
 deadly curse of usury, which had given their heritage to the 
 Hebrews, and let them glitter leaders of fashion for a 
 decade, only to seize their lives more surely at the last ; 
 and he had sworn never to give his own life over to the 
 keeping of that vampire, which lulls us into an opium-like 
 dream for one short hour, to drain our best blood drop by 
 drop with its brute fangs and its insatiate thirst. Had he 
 gone into the army, where his own wishes would have led 
 him, or had he taken one of the diplomatic or civil fashion- 
 able appointments offered him, the circles into which he 
 would have been thrown must have flung him into debt, 
 and into every temptation to it, however he might have re- 
 sisted ; he must have lived as those about him lived ; the 
 mere bare necessities of his position would have entailed 
 embarrassments from which the liberty of his nature re- 
 volted as from a galley-slave's fetters. In Erceldoune's 
 creed, a landless gentleman was worthy of his blood so 
 long as he was free no longer. 
 
 Therefore he entered the messenger service; and, on the 
 whole, the life which he hadnowledf or about a score of years 
 suited him as well as any save a soldier's could have 
 dons. The constant travel, the hard riding, the frequent 
 peril, the life of cities alternating with the life of adventure 
 these were to his taste. And while in the capitals of 
 Europe there was not a woman who could beguile, or a 
 man who could fool him 1 ; the Mexican guachos found in him 
 a rider fleet and fearless as themselves; the French Zephyrs 
 knew in him a volunteer, fiery and elastic as any their bat* 
 
THE BORDER EAGLE, IQ 
 
 talions held ; the fishers of Scandinavia had lived with 
 him through many a blinding, icy, midnight sea- storm ; 
 the Circassians had feasted and loved him in their mighty 
 mountain strongholds ; and the Bedaweens welcomed as 
 one of themselves the Erank, who rode as they rode, with- 
 out heeding the scorch of the brazen skies and sands ; who 
 could bring down a vulture on the wing whirling right 
 betwixt his sight and the burning sun, a black speck on the ( 
 yellow glare ; who could live like themselves, if needs be, 
 on a draught of water and a handful of maize or of dates, 
 and who cared for no better bed than their desert solitudes, 
 with his saddle beneath his head, and the desert stars 
 shining above. 
 
 Love he had known little of ; no human life had ever 
 become necessary to his, or ever obtained the slightest 
 sway over, or hold upon, his own ; in this he was ex- 
 ceptionally fortunate. What were dear to him were those 
 profitless, useless moorland wastes of heath and heron- 
 creeks, of yellow gorse, and brown still pools, the sole 
 relics of his barren Border heritage, and which self-denial 
 and renunciation had kept free from claim or burden. 
 
 The sun was shining full on the King's Hest as he re- 
 turned, and he leaned over the low gate of the stable en- 
 trance, looking at the ivy-hidden ruins, which were all which 
 remained to him of the possessions of a race that had once 
 been as great as the Hamilton, the Douglas, or the Graeme, 
 and of which an empty title alone was left him, as though to 
 make his poverty and its decay more marked. These did not 
 often weigh on him ; he cared little for riches, or for what 
 they brought ; and in tho adventure and the vigour of a stir- 
 ring wandering life there were a richness of colouring and a 
 fulness of sensation which, together with a certain simpli- 
 city of taste and habit that was natural to himself, pre- 
 vented the pale hues and narrow lines, of impoverished 
 fortunes from having place or note. But now the Duke's 
 words had recalled them ; and he looked at the King's 
 Best with more of melancholy than his dauntless and virile 
 nature often knew. There, over the lofty gateway, where 
 the banner of a great feudal line had floated, the scarlet 
 leaves of the Virginian parasite alone were given to the 
 wind. In the moat, where on many a summer night the 
 night riders had thundered over the bridge to scour hill 
 
 c 2 
 
20 I&ALtA. 
 
 and dale with the "Warden of the Marches, there were 
 but the hoot of the heron, the nests of the water-rat, and 
 the thick growth of sedges and water-lilies. In the 
 chambers where James IY. had feasted, and Mary Stuart 
 rested, and Charles Edward found his loyallest friends and 
 safest refuge, the blue sky shone through the open rafters, 
 and the tattered tapestry trembled on the walls, and the 
 fox and the bat made their coverts ; the grand entrance, 
 the massive bastions, the stately towers which had been 
 there when the bold Border chieftains rode out to join the 
 marching of the clans had vanished like the glories of 
 Alnaschar's dream, all that remained to tell their place a 
 mound of lichen-covered [ruin, with the feathery grasses 
 waving in the breeze it was the funeral pile of a dead 
 race. 
 
 And the 'last of their blood, the last of their title, stood 
 looking at it in the light of the setting sun with a pang at 
 his heart. 
 
 * "Well ! better so than built up with dishonoured gold ! 
 The power and the pomp are gone, but the name at least is 
 .stainless,' thought Fulke Erceldoune, as he looked away 
 from the dark and shattered ruins of his heritage across 
 the moorland, golden with its gorse, and toward the 
 free and sunlit distance of the seas, stretching far and 
 wide. 
 
 CHAPTEB II. 
 
 HAYITO BfcOKEtf HIS BREAD. 
 
 did you think of that man ? ' said Lord Pole- 
 to Victor Vane that evening over his coffee in the 
 drawing-rooms, out of the Duke's hearing. 
 
 ^ ' Think of him ? think of him ? "Well ! I think he will 
 &ie a violent death.' 
 
 ' Grood gracious ! * said the peer, with a little shiver. 
 
 ' I never analyse ! * laughed Victor softly. ' I think so 
 Because I think so. He will get shot in a duel, perhaps, 
 
HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 21 
 
 for saying some barbaric truth or other in the teeth of 
 policy/ 
 
 * Who is that you are prophesying for with such charm- 
 ingly horrible romance ? ' asked a very pretty woman. 
 
 'Pellow we met on the moor,' answered Polemore. 
 * Queer fellow ! Beggar, you know holes in the carpets, 
 rats in the rooms and yet, on my honour, Vbiiice goblets 
 and Mexican gold ! absurd ! ' 
 
 'What! a beggar with holes in his coat and rats in 
 his pockets with .Venice glass and Mexican ingots ! ' 
 cried the beautiful blonde, who had been listening lan- 
 
 fo, no ! Not tJiat sort of beggar, you know,' interposed 
 the peer. ' Man that lives in a lot of ruins. Messenger 
 fellow lunched with him to-day. Wretched place 5 only 
 fit for bats ; no household, no cook, no anything ; odious 
 dungeon ! And yet, on my word, if the fellow isn't ridi- 
 culous enough to serve up his dry bread on gold salvers, 
 and pour his small beer into Cinque Cento glasses ! ' 
 
 ' Come ! we had very fair wine considering it was a Bar- 
 mecide's feast/ laughed Yane. 
 
 * Height of absurdity, you know ! ' went on Polemore, 
 waxing almost eloquent under the spurs of the twinges of 
 envy he had felt while at luncheon. * Eancy, Lady Augusta! 
 here's a man nothing but a courier, he says himself, always 
 racing up and down Europe with bags ; so hard up that he 
 has to shoot for himself everything that he eats, and living 
 in a wretched rat-hole I wouldn't turn a dog into ; yet 
 keeps gold and silver things fit for a prince, and tells you 
 bombastical stories about his ancestors having been 
 caciques of Mexico! For my part, I don't doubt he 
 stole them all ! ' 
 
 ' Bravo ! Bravissimo ! ' laughed Victor Vane. ' And 
 what is much more, Lady Augusta, this Border savage 
 wears deer-skins in the rough, " lifts " cattle when the 
 moon's dark, and has a fricassee of young children boiling 
 in a cauldron. Quite a V antique, you see ! " 
 
 * But who is the creature ? ' asked the lady, a little be- 
 wildered, a little interested, and a good deal amused. 
 
 ' O let me see ah ! he calls himself Fulke Erceldoune/ 
 said Polemore, with an air of never having heard the title, 
 and of having strong reasons for believing it a false one. 
 
22 ID ALIA. 
 
 A man standing near turned at the name. 
 
 ' Fulke ? You are talking of Fulke Erceldoune ? Best 
 fellow in the world, and has the handsomest strain of 
 blacktan G-ordon setters, bred on the Regent and Rake 
 cross, going anywhere.' 
 
 1 ah do you know him, then ? ' murmured Polernore, 
 a little discomfited. 
 
 'Rather! First steeple-chaser in the two countries; 
 tremendous pots always on him. Know him ! ask the 
 Shire men. Saved my life, by the way, last year fished 
 me out of the Grulf of Spezzia, when I was all but spent ; 
 awful tempest at the time ; very nearly drowned himself. 
 Is he here, do you say ? ' 
 
 ' He's at that wretched rat-hole of his,' grumbled Pole- 
 more, sorely in wrath. 
 
 t King's Rest ? Didn't know that. Gro and see him to- 
 morrow.' 
 
 ' What remarkably conflicting statements ! ' murmured 
 Lady Augusta with languid amusement. ' A beggar and 
 a savage ! a preux chevalier and a paladin of chivalry ! 
 Singular combination this what is it? Eulke Ercel- 
 doune.' 
 
 ' Kay,' laughed Yane, 'it was a combination common 
 enough in the old days of chivalry, and our friend seems 
 to me better suited to the Cinque Cento than the present 
 century. Just the sort of man to have been a Knight 
 Templar with Coeur de Lion, or an adventurer with Pizarro, 
 with no capital and no credit but his Toledo blade.' 
 
 1 Trash ! ' said the absent man's defender, with impatient 
 disdain that almost roused him into energy, ' Erceldoune is 
 a splendid fellow, Lady Augusta. I only wish you could 
 see him ride to hounds. In saddle ; in sport ; on a 
 yatch-deck in a storm ; with any big game you like pigs, 
 bisons, tigers ; swimming in the Turkish waters in mid- 
 winter ; potting lions with the Kabyles and the Zouaves 
 put him where you will, he's never at a loss, never beaten, 
 and can do more than twenty men put together. Dash 
 and science, you know ; when you get the two together, 
 they always win. As for money all the good old names 
 ure impoverished now, and it's the traders only who have 
 ny gilding.' 
 
 With which fling at Polemore whose fathers were of 
 
HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 23 
 
 the Cottonocracy the champion, something disgusted at 
 having been entrapped into such a near approach to any. 
 thing like interest and excitement, turned away, and began 
 to murmur pretty nothings, in the silkiest and sleepiest of 
 tones, into the ear of a Parisian marquise. 
 
 * Extreme readiness to break your neck, and extreme 
 aptitude for animal slaughter, always appear to be the 
 English criterion of your capabilities and your cardinal 
 virtues/ murmured Yane, with his low light laugh, while 
 Polemore, sulkily aggrieved, muttered to himself : 
 
 ' Man that's a beggar to keep Mexican things and have 
 his bare bones served up on gold dishes ridiculous, pre- 
 posterous ! If he's so poor, he must be in debt ; and if he's 
 in debt he ought to sell them, out of common honesty. 
 Cheats his creditors clearly cheats his creditors ! ' 
 
 And so having broken his bread and eaten his salt 
 they talked of him : there are a few rude nomad Arab 
 virtues that have died out with civilization ; and the Sheikh 
 will keep faith and return your hospitalities better than 
 Society. 
 
 That evening, a Dalmatian, who was the body servant of 
 Victor Vane, a very polished and confidentially useful 
 person, rode over to the little station nearest Lord Fitz- 
 allayne's, and sent a telegram, which he read from a slip of 
 paper, to Paris. It ran thus, save that it was in a polyglot 
 jumble of languages which would have defied any transla- 
 tion without a key : 
 
 ' The Border Eagle flies eastward. Clip the last feather 
 of the wing. Only La Picciola. Idalia or pearls of lead, 
 as you like. Take no steps till beyond the King's. Then 
 
 make sure, even if "White coats in full muster ; 
 
 Crescent horns up ; Perfide, as usual, brags but won't 
 draw. N.B. The Eagle will give you beak and talons.' 
 
 Which, simply translated, meant 
 
 1 Erceldoune, Queen's courier, will take the P. 0. bags 
 into the Principalities. Relieve him of the last despatches 
 he has with him. "We only want the smallest bag. I 
 leave you to choose how to manage this; either with a 
 successful intrigue or a sure rifle-shct. Do not stop Lira 
 till he is beyond Turin. Secure the papers, even if you 
 have to take his life to get them. The Austrians are in 
 atrong force everywhere , matters in Turkey, as regards 
 
24 ID ALIA. 
 
 the Principalities, are against us ; England, as usual, bullies, 
 but will not be drawn into a war. N.B. This Erceldoune 
 will give you trouble and fight hard.' 
 
 And being translated by the recipient in all its 
 intricacies of implication and command, would mean far 
 more. 
 
 The tired telegraph clerk, who yawned and did nothing 
 all day long in the little out-of -the- world Border station, 
 save when he sent a message for the lodge to town, 
 rubbed his heavy eyes, stared, told off the jumbled Babel 
 of phrases with bewildered brain, and would barely have 
 telegraphed them all in due order and alphabet but for the 
 dextrous care of the Dalmatian. 
 
 While the message was being spelled out, the night-ex- 
 press dashed into the station, with red lamps gleaming 
 through the late moonless night, and its white steam cloud 
 flung far out on the gloom, flashing on its way from Edin- 
 burgh across the Border land. A tall man, dressed in a 
 dark loose coat of soft Canadian furs, with a great cheeroot 
 in his mouth, ran up the station stairs and threw down 
 his gold. 
 
 ' First class to town ; all right.' 
 
 He took his ticket, flung open a door of an unoccupied 
 carriage, and he threw himself into a seat with the rapidity 
 of one used never to idle time and never to be kept waiting 
 by others., and the train, with a clash and a clang, darted 
 out into the darkness, plunging down into the gloom as 
 into the yawning mouth of Avernus, its track faintly told 
 by the wraith-like smoke of the wreathing steam and the 
 scarlet gleam of the signal-lamps. 
 
 The Dalmatian had looked after him with some 
 curiosity. 
 
 1 "Who is that ? ' he asked the clerk. 
 
 ' Erceldoune, of the King's Best. He is a Queen's 
 messenger, you know, always rushing about at unearthly 
 times, like a Wandering Jew. I say, what the dickens is 
 that word ? Arabic, ain't it ? ' 
 
 The Dalmatian, with a smile, looked after the train, then 
 turned and spelt out the words. 
 
 ' Such gibberish ! If that ain't a rum start somehow or 
 other, I'm a Dutchman,' thought the telegraphist, with a 
 yawn, returning to his ciog.eared, green-covered shilling 
 
HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 2 5 
 
 novel, relating the pungent adventures o a soiled dove of 
 St. John's-wood, and showing beyond all doubt if any- 
 body ever doubted it yet that virtue, after starving on 
 three-halfpence a shirt, will be rewarded with pneumonia 
 and the parish shell, while vice eats her truffles, drinks her 
 wines, and retires with fashionable toilets, and a competence, 
 to turn repentant and respectable at leisure. Meanwhile, 
 the night-express rushed on through silent hills and sleep- 
 ing hamlets, over dark water-pools and through bright 
 gaslit cities, and above head the electric message flashed, 
 outstripping steam, and flying, like a courier of the air, 
 toward France before the man it menaced. 
 
 With noon on the morrow the best-known messenger in 
 the service reported himself at the Foreign Office, received 
 despatches for Paris, Turin, and Jassy, and started with 
 the F. O. bags, as usual, express. 
 
 Had any prophet told him that, as he lay back in the 
 mail-train, with a curled silver Eastern pipe coming out of 
 his waving beard, and papers of critical European import 
 in the white bags lying at his feet, Chance was drifting 
 him at its wanton caprice as idly and as waywardly as the 
 feathery smoke it floated down on the wind, Erceldoune 
 would have contemptuously denied that Chance could ever 
 affect a life justly balanced and rightly held in rein. He 
 would have said Chance was a deity for women, fatalists, 
 and fools ; a Fetish worshipped by the blind. The Border 
 chiefs of the King's Rest had believed in the might of a 
 strong arm and in the justice cleft by a long two-edged 
 sword, and had left weaklings to bow to Hazard : and the 
 spirit of their creed was still his. 
 
 Yet he might have read a lesson from the death of the 
 moorland eagle ; one chance shot from the barrel hid in 
 the heather, and power, strength, liberty, keen sight, and 
 lordly sovereignty of solitude were over, and the king-bird 
 reeled and fell ! 
 
 But to draw the parable would not have been at all like 
 his vigorous nature ; a State courier has not much habi- 
 tude or taste for oriental metaphors and highly-spiced 
 romances, and he had too much of the soldier, the 
 Shikari, the man of the world and Arab combined, to leave 
 him anything whatever of the poet or the dreamer. Men 
 of action may have grave, but they never have visionary 
 
26 IDALIA. 
 
 thoughts, and life with Erceldoune was too gallant, strong, 
 and rapid a stream- ever in incessant motion, though calm 
 enough, as deep waters mostly are to leave him leisure 
 or inclination to loiter lingeringly or dreamily upon its 
 banks. Reflection was habitual to him, imagination was 
 alien to him. 
 
 By midnight he reached Paris, and left his despatches 
 at the English Embassy. There was no intense pressure 
 of haste to get Turin- wards so long as he was in the far 
 Eastern Principalities by the Friday, and he waited for the 
 early mail to the South, instead of taking a special one, as 
 he would otherwise have done, to get across the Alps. If 
 a few hours were left under his own control in a city, 
 Erceldoune never slept them away ; he slept in a railway- 
 carriage, a travelling-carriage, on deck, in a desert, on a 
 raft rushing down some broad river that made the only 
 highway through Bulgarian or Eounielian forests any- 
 where where novelty, discomfort, exposure, or danger 
 would have been likely to banish sleep from most men ; 
 but in a city he neglected it with an independence of that 
 necessity of life which is characteristic of the present day. 
 There is a cafe, whether in the Rue Lafitte, Eivoli, Castig- 
 lione, or La Paix, matters not ; here in the great gilded 
 salon, with its innumerable mirrors and consoles and little 
 oval tables, or in the little cabinets, with their rosewood 
 and gilding, and green velvet and rose satin, if there be a 
 bouquet to be tossed down on the marble slab, and the long 
 eyes of a Laura or Aglae to flash over the wines, while a 
 pretty painted fan taps an impatient rataplan or gives a 
 soft blow on the ear may be found after midnight a 
 choice but heterogeneous gathering. Secretaries of all the 
 legations, Queen's messengers, Charivari writers, Eastern 
 travellers, great feuilletomstes, great artistes, princes if 
 they have any wit beneath their purples, authors of any or 
 all nations all, in a word, that is raciest, wittiest, and, in 
 their own sense, most select in Paris, are to be met with 
 at the Cafe Minuit, if you be of the initiated. If you be 
 not, you may enter the cafe of course, since it is open to 
 ail the world, and sup there off what you will, but you 
 will still remain virtually outside it. 
 
 Erceldoune was well known here : it is in such republics 
 only that a- man is welcomed for what he is, and what he 
 
HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 27 
 
 has done not for what he is worth. He was as renowned 
 in Paris, because he was so utterly unlike the Parisians, as 
 he was renowned in the East because he so closely re- 
 sembled the Arabs ; and he entered the Cafe Miiiuit for 
 the few hours which lay between his arrival at the Embassy 
 and his departure for Turin. 
 
 None of his own special set had dropped in just then ; 
 indeed, there were but few of them, in Paris. As he sat at 
 his accustomed table, glancing through a. journal, and 
 with the light from the gaselier above shed full on his face 
 a face better in unison with drooping desert-palms, and a 
 gleaming stand of rifles, and the dusky glow of a deep sun- 
 set on Niger or on Nile, for its setting and background, 
 than with the gilt arabesques and florid hues and \\iiite ' 
 gaslight of a Erench cafe a new-comer, who had entered 
 shortly afterward and seated himself at the same table, 
 addressed him on some topic of the hour, and pushed him 
 an open case of some dainty scented cigarettes. 
 
 Erceldoune courteously declined them; he always smoked 
 his own Turkish tobacco, and would as soon have used cos- 
 nietiques as perfumed cigars; and answering the remark, 
 looked at the speaker. He was accustomed to read men 
 thoroughly and rapidly, even if they carried their passports 
 in cipher. What he saw opposite him was a magnificently- 
 made man, with a face of most picturesque and brilliant 
 beauty, of a purely modern type, with the eyes long, dark, 
 and melting, and features perfectly cut as any cameo's a 
 man who might have sat to a painter for Lainoral d'Egmont, 
 or for one of Era Moreale's reckless nobly-born Eree 
 Lances ; and might have passed for five-and-thirty at the 
 most, till he who should have looked closely at the lines 
 in the rich reckless beauty, and caught a certain look in the 
 lustrous half-veiled eyes, would have allotted him, justly, 
 fifteen full years more. 
 
 Erceldoune gave him one glance, and though there was 
 little doubt about bis type and his order, he had known 
 men of both by the hundreds. 
 
 4 Paris is rather empty, monsieur? Sapristi! The asphalte 
 in August would be too much for a salamander,' pursued 
 the stranger, over his bouillabaisse. He spoke excellent 
 French, with a mellifluous southern accent, not of 
 France. 
 
28 IDALIA. 
 
 Erceldoune assented. Like all travellers or men used to 
 the world, he liked a stranger full as well as a friend for a 
 companion perhaps rather the better ; but he was natu- 
 rally silent, and seldom spoke much, save when strongly 
 moved or much prepossessed by those whom he conversed 
 with ; then he would be eloquent enough, but that was 
 rare. 
 
 * Thousands come to Paris this time of the year, but 
 only to pass through it, as I daresay you are doing your- 
 self, monsieur ? ' went on the Greek, if such he were, as 
 Erceldoune judged him by the eyes and the features, 
 worthy of Phidias's chisel, rarely seen without some 
 Hellenic blood. 
 
 'For the season the city is tolerably full ; travellers 
 keep it so, as you say,' answered Erceldoune, who was 
 never to be entrapped into talking of himself. 
 
 ' It is a great mistake for people to travel in flocks, like 
 swallows and sheep/ said his vivacious neighbour, whose 
 manners were very careless, graceful, and thoroughly 
 polished, if they had a dash of the Bohemian, the Ad- 
 venturer, and the Free Lance. ' A terrible mistake ! 
 Overcrowds the inns, the steamers, and the railway 
 carriages ; thins the soups, doubles the price of wines, and 
 teaches guides to look on themselves as luxuries, to be paid 
 for accordingly ; makes a Nile sunset ridiculous by being 
 witnessed by a mob ; and turns Luxor and Jupiter Ammon 
 into dust and prose by having a tribe of donkeys and 
 dragomen rattled over their stones ! A fearful mistake ! 
 Jf you are social and gregarious, stay in a city ; but if you 
 are speculative and Ishmaelesque, travel in solitude. Eh, 
 monsieur ? ' 
 
 ' If you can find it. But you have to travel far to get 
 into solitudes in these days. Have you seen this evening's 
 'Times!' 
 
 1 A thousand thanks ! "Wonderful thing, your Times ! 
 I Does the work in England that secret police do in Vienna, 
 spies and bayonets do here, and confetti to the populace 
 and galleys to the patriots do in Borne.' 
 
 ' Scarcely ! The Times would rather say It prevents Eng- 
 land's having need of any of those continental arguments/ 
 ^aid Erceldoune, as he tossed the brandy into his coffee. 
 
 The other laughed, as from under his lashes he flashed o 
 
HAVING BROKEN HIS BREAD. 29 
 
 fiwift glance at the Queen's messenger. He would hare 
 preferred it if there had been less decision about the broad, 
 bold, frank brow, and less power in the length of limbs 
 stretched out, and the supple wrist as it lay resting on the 
 marble slab of the cafe table. 
 
 ' Basta ! G-overnments should give the people plenty to 
 eat and plenty to laugh at ; they would never be troubled 
 with insurrections then, or hear anything more about 
 " liberty ! " A sleek, well-fed, happy fellow never turned 
 patriot yet ; he who takes a dagger for his country only 
 takes it because he has no loaf of bread to cut with it, or 
 feels inclined to slit his own throat ! Make corn and meat 
 cheap, and you may play tyrant as you like.' 
 
 4 A sound policy, and a very simple one.' 
 
 * All sound things are simple, monsieur ! It is the sham 
 and rotten ones that want an intricate scaffolding to keep 
 them from falling ; the perfect arch stands without girders. 
 " Panem et Circenses " will always be the first article of 
 good governments ; when the people are in good humour 
 they never seethe into malcontents.' 
 
 ' Then I suppose you would hold that cheap provisions 
 and low taxes would make us hear no more of the present 
 cry of "nationalities"?' His companion was piquant in 
 his discourse and polished in his style, but he did not 
 particularly admire him; and when he did not admire 
 people, he had a way of holding them at arm's length. 
 
 '"Nationalities"? Ridiculous prejudices ! Myths that 
 would die to-morrow, only ministers like to keep a handy 
 reason on the shelf to make a raid on their neighbour, or 
 steal an inch or two of frontier when the spirit moves 
 them,' laughed the other, and his laugh was a soft silvery 
 chime, very pleasant to the ear. ' Pooh ! a man's nationali- 
 ties are where he gets the best wage and the cheapest meat, 
 specially in these prosaic profoundly-practical times, when, 
 there is no chivalry, no dash, no colour; when the common- 
 place thrives ; when we turn Egyptian mummies into 
 railway fuel, and find Pharaoh's dust make a roaring fire ; 
 when we make crocuses into veratrin for our sore throats, 
 and violets into sweetmeats for our eating ! A detestable 
 age, truly. Fancy the barbarism of crystallising and 
 crunching a violet ! The flower of Cleuience Isaure, and 
 all the poets after her, condemned to the degradation of 
 
30 1DAL1A. 
 
 becoming a bonbon! Can anything bo more typical of 
 the prosaic atrocity of this age ? Impossible.' 
 
 '"With such acute feelings, you must find the dinner- 
 card excessively restricted. With so much sympathy for 
 a violet, what must be your philanthropy for a pheasant ! ' 
 said Erceldoune quietly, who was not disposed to pursue 
 the Monody of a Violet in the Cafe Minuit, though the 
 man to a certain extent amused him. 
 
 At that moment the foreigner rose a little hastily, left 
 his ice-cream unfinished, and, with a gay, graceful adieu, 
 went out of the salon, which was now filling. 
 
 'A handsome fellow, and talks well,' thought Ercel- 
 doune, wringing the amber Moselle from his long 
 moustaches, when he was left alone at the marble table in 
 the heat, and light, and movement of the glittering cafe. 
 ' I know the fraternity well enough, and he is one of the 
 best of the members, I dare say. He did not waste much 
 of his science on me ; he saw it would be profitless work. 
 On my word, the wit and ability and good manners those 
 men fritter away in their order would make them invaluable 
 in a chancellerie and fit them for any State office in the 
 world.' 
 
 The first secretary of the English Legation and a French 
 diplomatist entered and claimed his attention at that 
 instant ; and he gave no more thought to the champion of 
 the crystallised violets, whom, justly or wrongly, as it 
 might chance, he had classed with the renowned Legion 
 of Chevaliers d'Industrie, and whose somewhat abrupt 
 departure he had attributed either to his own lack of 
 promise as a plausible subject for experimentalising upon, 
 or to the appearance on the scene of some mouchard of 
 the Secret Bureau, whom the vivacious bewailer of the 
 fate of sugared flowers in this age of prose did not care 
 to encounter. 
 
 Erceldoune thought no more of him then and thencefor- 
 ward ; he would have thought more had the mirrors of the 
 Cafe Minuit been Paracelsus's or Agrippa's mirours of 
 granimarye. 
 
 The long console glass, with its curled gas-branches and 
 its rose-hued draperies, and its reflex of the gilding, the 
 glitter, the silver, the damask, the fruit, the wines, and 
 the crowds of the Paris cafe, would have been darkened 
 
EN R01. 31 
 
 with night-shadows and deep forest foliage, and the 
 tumult of close struggles for life or death, and the 
 twilight hush of cloistered aisles, and the rich glow of 
 Eastern waters, and the silent gloom of ancient G-od- 
 forgotten cities; and from out the waving, shadowy, 
 changing darkness of all, there would have looked a 
 woman's face, with fathomless, luminous eyes, and hair 
 with a golden light upon it, and a proud, weary, sorceress 
 smile on the lips ; the face of a temptress or of an 
 8-ngel. 
 
 But the mirror had no magic of the future ; the glass 
 reflected nothing save the gas-jets of the ormolu sconces ; 
 and Fnlke- Erceldoune sat there in Paris that night, drink- 
 ing his iced Rhine wines, and smoking his curled Arabian 
 meerschaum, knowing nothing of what lay before him a 
 blind wanderer in the twilight, a traveller in strange 
 countries, as we are at best in life. 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 SOTJPFEIR EN ROT. 
 
 forbid that the Principalities should be better 
 governed ; they would be like all the rest of the world in 
 no time. They may be ruinous to themselves very pro- 
 bably, and a nest of internecine discord for Eastern 
 Europe ; but they are delightful for the stranger, and th6 
 bird of passage should surely have one solitude left wherein 
 ' to find rest ; regions where the refined tortures of the post 
 I cannot reach ; where debts can be defied and forgotten 
 across the stretch of those dense pine-woods, which sever 
 /you from the rest of mankind ; where the only highway to 
 ; your quarters is a rapid surging river, with a timber-raft 
 drifting down it ; where, whirled along by gipsy horses 
 and gipsy drivers through vast wooded tracks, you halt 
 and wake with a pleasant wonder to find yourself in the 
 broad streets and squares of a populous city, of which, 
 though you are not more geographically ignorant than 
 your brethren, you had not the haziest notion, and whose 
 
32 ID ALT A. 
 
 very name you do not know when you hear it waking, at 
 the cessation of the horses' gallop and the gipsy Jehu? 
 shouts, to open your eyes upon the clear Moldavian or 
 Wallachian night, with the sound of music from some 
 open casement above. Regions such as these are the 
 Principalities and who would not keep them so ? from 
 the Danube to the Dneister, from the Straits of Otranto 
 to the Euxine, for the refuge of necessitous wanderers 
 who have an inconvenient connection, a tiresome run upon 
 them from the public, or a simple desire for a paradise 
 where a woman will not follow them, where letters will 
 not come, where the game districts are unbeaten, and the 
 deep woods and wild valleys as yet unsketched and 
 unsung. 
 
 Through the Principalities, Erceldoune travelled in as 
 brief a time, from the early dawn when he had left Paris, 
 as mail trains, express specials, rapid relays of horses, and 
 swift river passages could take him, across Tyrol and 
 Yenetia, 'Alps and Carpathians, Danube and Drave, calling 
 at Belgrade with despatches, and pushing straight on for 
 Moldavia. Every mile of that wild and unworn way was 
 as familiar to the Queen's messenger as the journey 
 between London and Paris is familiar to other men. 
 Where steam had not yet penetrated, and there was no 
 choice but between posting and the saddle, he usually 
 rode ; if the roads were level, and the route unsightly, he 
 would take the luxurious rest of a ' Messenger's carriage/ 
 and post through the nights and days ; but, by preference, 
 hard riding carried him over most of his ground, with 
 pace and -stay that none in the service could equal, and 
 which had made the Arabs, when their horses swept beside 
 his through the eastern sunlight, toss their lances aloft, 
 and shout ' Fazzia! Fazzia! ' with applause to the Griaour. 
 He rode so now, when, having passed direct from Belgrade 
 ticross the lower angle of Transylvania, and crossed the 
 Carpathian range, he found himself fairly set toward 
 Moldavia, with only a hundred miles or so more left 
 between him and Jassy, which was his destination. 
 
 The Principality was in a ferment; Church and civil 
 power were in conflict and rivalry: England, France, 
 Austria, and Russia were all disturbing themselves after 
 the affairs of this out-of-the-way nook, conceiving that 
 
SOVFFRIR EN ROI. 33 
 
 with Greece in insurrection, and Italy in a transition state ; 
 and Poland quivering afresh beneath her bonds, even 
 Moldavia might be the match to a European conflagration, 
 and open up the scarce-healed Eastern question ; and an 
 English envoy was then at Jassy, charged with a special 
 mission, to whom the despatches which Erceldoune bore 
 carried special instructions, touching on delicate matters 
 of moment to the affairs of central and eastern Europe, 
 and to the part which would be played by Great Britain 
 in the event of the freedom of the Southern States, and 
 the success of the liberal party in Athens, Hungary, or 
 Venetia. This one bag with the arms of England on the 
 seal, and the all-important instructions within, was all 
 that he carried now, slung round his neck and across his 
 chest by an undressed belt of chamois ^leather. He was 
 wholly alone ; his mountain guides he had dismissed at 
 the foot of the Carpathians, for he had gone through the 
 most dangerous defiles and thief -invested passes all over 
 the world, caring for no other defence than lay in his 
 holster pistols. He had been stopped two or three times, 
 once by the ' Bail-up ! ' of Tasmanian bushrangers, once by 
 a Ghoorka gang in Northern India, once by a chieftain 
 who levied black mail in the rocky fastnesses of Macedonia 
 but his shots had always cleared him a passage through, 
 and he had ridden on with no more loss than the waste of 
 powder and ball. He was too well known, moreover, in 
 both hemispheres, to be molested, and the boldest hill- 
 robbers would have cared as little to come to close quarters 
 with one whose strength had become proverbial, as to get 
 themselves into trouble by tampering with the State courier 
 of a great power. 
 
 It had been a splendid day in the young autumn, and ifc 
 was just upon its close as he went through the forests, his 
 mare, a pure-bred sorrel, scarcely touching the ground, as 
 she swept along, swift as a greyhound or a lapwing. The 
 air was heavily scented with the fragrance of the firs ; the 
 last lingering rays of light slanted here and there across 
 the moss through dark fanlike boughs, cone-laden*; aisles 
 of pines stretched in endless and innumerable lines of 
 paths scarce ever trodden save by the wolf, or the wild 
 boar, or the charcoal-burner, barely more human than the 
 brute; and, in the rear, to the westward, towered the 
 
34 IDALIA 
 
 Carpathians, with their black rugged sides reared in the 
 purple sunset, the guard of the Magyar fatherland. 
 
 Now and then, at rare intervals, a little hamlet buried 
 in the recesses of the forest, whose few wretched women 
 wore the Turkish yashmak, spoke of Moldavia, or he came 
 on a camp of naked wild-eyed gipsies of the country ; but 
 as evening closed in, and Erceldoune advanced into a narrow 
 rocky defile, the nearest passage through dense pine soli- 
 tudes, even these signs of human life in its most brutalised 
 phase ceased wholly. There was only the rapid ring of 
 uis mare's hoofs, given back by a thousand hollow echoes, 
 as he swept down the ravine, with high precipitous walls 
 of rock rising on either side, while the river thundered 
 and foamed beside him, and the trees closing abovehead 
 made it well-nigh dark as night, though beyond, the sran- 
 mits of the Hungarian range were still lit by the last rays 
 of the sun gleaming golden on eternal snows. Sitting 
 down in his saddle, with his eyes glancing, rapid and un- 
 erring as a soldier's, on either side where the shelving rocks 
 sloped upward in the gloom, Erceldoune dashed along the 
 defile at a pace such as the blood horses of the desert 
 reach the surging of the torrent at his side, the winds 
 rising loud and stormy among the black pine boughs above, 
 the intense stillness and solitude around, that are only 
 felt in the depths of a forest or the hush of a mountain- 
 side. 
 
 These were what he loved in his life : these nights and 
 days of loneliness, of action, of freedom, alone with all that 
 was wildest and grandest in nature, under no law but the 
 setting and rising of the sun, riding onward, without check 
 or pause, a fresh horse ready saddled when the jaded one 
 drooped and slackened ; these were what suited the pas- 
 sionate need of liberty, the zest to do and dare, the eagle- 
 love of solitude ingrained in his Border blood, and as latent 
 in him as in the chieftains of his name when they had 
 borne fire and sword far away into stout Northumberland, 
 or harried the Marches in their King's defiance. 
 
 The pressure of his knees sufficing for her guidance 
 without curb or spur, the sorrel scoured the winding ra- 
 vine, fleet and sure of foot, as though the rocky and irre- 
 gular ground had been a level stretch of sward, her ears 
 pointed, her pace like the wind, all the blood and mettle 
 
SOUFFR1R 3N R01. 35 
 
 there were in her roused; she knew her master in her 
 rider. Dashing onward through the gloom thus, suddenly 
 his hand checked her ; his eyes had seen what hers had not. 
 Thrown back on her haunches in the midst of her breath- 
 less gallop, she reared in snorting terror ; any other she 
 might have hurled senseless to the earth ; he sat as mo- 
 tionless as though horse and man were cast together in 
 bronze. 
 
 Across the narrow and precipitous path lay the felled 
 trunk of a pine, blocking the way. She rose erect, and 
 stood so for a second, her rider in his saddle firm as on a 
 rock a sculptor would have given ten years of his life to 
 have caught and fixed that magnificent attitude ; then down 
 she came with a crash on her fore feet, while from the 
 black barricade of the levelled pine, through the thick 
 screen of stiffened branches, came the gleam of half a 
 dozen rifles, the long lean barrels glistening in the twilight. 
 
 The brigands lay in ambush waiting him ; and the hoarse 
 shout of arrest was pealed back by the echoes. 
 
 ' Tour papers or we fire ! ' 
 
 And the steel muzzles covered him front and rear, while 
 the challenge rang out down the vault of the hollowed 
 rocks. 
 
 Swiftly as lightning his eyes swept over the levelled 
 rifles and numbered them eight against one ; rapidly as 
 the wind he drew his pistol from his holster and fired 
 among them ; a shrill shriek pierced the air, a man reeled 
 headlong down into the gorge of the river foaming below, 
 and without breath, without pause, Erceldoune put the 
 bay at the leap, trusting the rest to her hunter's blood, 
 and facing the levelled death-dealers full in the front. 
 The gallant beast deserved his faith ; she rose point-blank 
 at the barricade, and leapt with one mighty bound the 
 great pine barrier and the glittering line of steel. She 
 landed safe a second, and he would have raced onward, 
 distancing all shot and defying all pursuit ; but with a yell 
 that rang from rock to rock, the murderous barrels she 
 had oveiieapt and cleared covered her afresh ; the sharp 
 crack of the shots echoed through the pass, three balls 
 pierced her breast and flanks, bedding themselves where 
 the life lay, and with a scream of piteous agony she threw 
 her head upward, swayed to and fro an instant, and fell 
 
 2 D 
 
36 tDALtA. 
 
 beneath Mm dead. He sprang from the saddle ere her 
 weight could crush hin^ and, with hi back against &** 
 Jedge of granite, turned at bay; hope he had not, succour 
 there could he none in those dcamft mountain solitudes, 
 those wastes of rast unpeopled pine-woods ; in that hour 
 ^e had but one thoughtto sell his life dearly, and to de- 
 serve his country's trust. 
 
 The echoes of the conflict rang in quick succession on 
 the stifhieaa, thundered back by the reverberations of the 
 hflls ; it was hot dose, mortal work in that narrow choked 
 defile; Ercddoune, with his back against the granite, and 
 his dead bay at his feet between him and his foes, had the 
 strength and the fury of a legion, now that his wrath was 
 up in afl its might, and the blood-thirst wakened in him, 
 ;: . --_ :"_. -,..-, :: : 
 
 atttsade. He laughed aloud : 
 'Blunderers, why Jcift you hit through the lungs? * 
 
 A: . . - . _____ ij . .. _. .7 : i-rT : . LL.T ; :::? ".-.-_ T "..: :i 1. ":;.- r :."! = -:- i 
 it, mud the man who had shot him fell with a crash a 
 bullet through his brain. He could not load again, his 
 arm was broken ; and the hoarse yell of men, infuriated to 
 
 t :_*_:! __ J ___ __J - j "*- -*.- ___ J __ -- 1. 1... 
 
 his iminiiipaK were numbered, as one cry alone grated on 
 the night air from many Takes : in Romaic, in French, in 
 Yenetjan, in Hungarian raried tongues, but one summons 
 
 TourKfe! Peath, or surrender!' 
 
 Tfcere was a moment's hush and pause ; they waited for 
 their menace to do their work, without the bloodshed that 
 they rfiirked, from caution and from wisdom, rather than 
 from humanity; and at that instant 
 
 one break in the black pine roofing aborehead, poured its 
 Light through the pass. Eoond him in a half -circle, broken 
 from ilM^r barricade *^ ambn?h now that his fire was 
 
 , pressed his assassins, their frees masked by the 
 drawn orer them, their rifles corenng him with piti- 
 less purpose. "With his right aim hanging powedesa, and 
 She mare lying at his feet, the sole barrier between him 
 and the crast-fire krefled at him, stood Ereddoune, reared 
 to IDS foil height, motionless as though he woe a statue. 
 "Death, or surrender! ' 
 
 i hissed through the silence with a deadly 
 
SOUPFRIR EN ROL 
 
 meaning, a hoarse snarl, such as the hounds give when the 
 stag holds them too long at bay. Erceldoune stood erect. 
 Ids eyes glancing calmly down on the semicircle of the 
 long shining lines of steel, each of whose hollow tabes 
 carried his death-warrant; a look upon his face before 
 which the boldest, though they held his life in their hands 
 and at their merer, quailed ; he knew how he should save 
 his trust and his papers, though he knew that his Kf e must 
 pay the forfeit. He cahnly watched the levelled rifles, 
 an! a half smile passed over his face ; they had brought 
 eight against one it was a distinction, at least, to take so 
 much killing. 
 
 The devil will never give in !* swore with savage Hun- 
 garian oaths the farthest of the band. ' 8ei*e him, and 
 
 bind him we don't want his blood! ' 
 
 'Take the papers, and gag him. Carl i right ; we want 
 them, not him,' muttered another, in whose southern Ger- 
 man the-keen ear of him whose life they balanced caught 
 the foreign accent of a Gallican. 
 
 One who seemed the leader of the gang laughed a roll- 
 ing, mellow, harmonious laugh, which thriOed through the 
 blood of Erceldoune as menace and challenge had never 
 done ; he had heard it a few nights before in the gasfit 
 salon of the Parisian cafe. 
 
 'Basta^basta! " Too many words, my masters." Kill 
 the Border Eagle, and strip him afterwards! His beak 
 won't peck when he's shot down.' 
 
 'Stop, stop!' muttered a milder Sicilian. 'Give him 
 his choice ; we only want the despatches.' 
 
 ' The papers, then, or we fire ! ' 
 
 The moon shone clearer and whiter down into the ra- 
 vine, while they pressed nearer and nearer, till the half- 
 circle of steel glittered close against him within a yard of 
 his breast ; and the Greek who in the Cafe Minuit had 
 lamented so softly the prosaic fate of the violet bonbons 
 >t of all. He stood quietly; with no change 
 in his attitude, and his broken wrist dripping blood on the 
 stone at his feet ; the dark scorn of fiery passions had 
 red on his face, stormy, dangerous, menacing as the 
 wrath that lightens up a lion's eyes, while on his lips was 
 a laugh a laugh for the coward caution of his assassins, 
 the womanish cruelty which compassed him with sue}* 
 
J$ ID ALIA. 
 
 timorous might of numbers, fearing one man unarmed and 
 wounded. 
 
 ' Death, or surrender ! ' 
 
 The cry echoed again, loud and hoarse now as the 
 hounds' hay, "baffled and getting furious for blood. 
 
 His back was reared against the rock; his Jeft arm 
 pressed against his breast, holding to him the seals that 
 were his trust ; his eyes looked down upon them steadily 
 as he answered : 
 
 ' Fire ! ' 
 
 And while his voice, calm and unfaltering, gave the word 
 of command for his own death-volley, with a swift sudden 
 gesture, unlocked for and unarrested by them, he lifted 
 his left hand, and hurled far away through the gloom, till 
 they sank with a loud splash into the bed of the swollen 
 rushing river, the white bag of the English despatches 
 lost for ever in the deep gorge, and whirled on in.to dark- 
 ness with the passage of foaming waters, where no spy 
 could reach and no foe could rob them. 
 
 Then, as the ravenous yell of baffled force and infuriated 
 passion shook the echoes of the hills, the report of the 
 rifles rang through the night with sullen murderous peal, 
 and Erceldoune fell as one dead. 
 
 All was still in the heart of the forest. 
 
 The snowy summits of the Carpathians gleamed white 
 in the moonlight ; the cry of the wild dog or the growl of 
 the wild boar, the screech of the owl or the rush of the 
 bat's wing, alone broke the silence ; above the dark silent 
 earth the skies were cloudless, and studded with countless 
 stars, whose radiance glistened here and there through 
 dense black shadow, on moss, and boulders, and cavernous 
 gorges, and torrents plunging downwards through the 
 night. In the narrow channel of the defile, with gnarled 
 pines above and waters roaring in their pent-up bed below, 
 there lay the stiffened corpse of the mare, and across her 
 body, bathed in her blood and in his own, with his head 
 fallen back, and his face turned upwards as the starlight 
 fell upon it, was stretched the Queen's messenger, where 
 they had left him for dead. 
 
 The night had passed on, and the hours stole apace, till 
 the stars had grown large in the heavens, and the morning 
 
SOUFFRIR EN R01. 39 
 
 planet risen in the east before the dawn ; and he had lain 
 there, as lifeless and motionless as the sorrel beneath him, 
 through all the watches of the night which parted the sun- 
 set of one day from the daybreak of the next. His right 
 arm, broken and nerveless, was flung across the neck of 
 the mare, as though his last thought as he fell had been of 
 the brute friend whom he had lost, and who had died for 
 him ; the blood had poured from a deep chest wound, till 
 the black velvet of his riding-coat was soaked through and 
 through, and the mosses and the grasses were dyed with 
 the stream that bore his life away ; his face was stern, yet 
 serene, like many faces of the dead upon a battle-field, and 
 only a deep-drawn laboured breath, that quivered at long 
 intervals through all his frame, showed that existence haa 
 not wholly ceased with the murderous volley which had 
 brought him to the earth, as his own shot had brought the 
 kingly fearless strength of the golden eagle reeling down- 
 wards to his feet. Either the aim of his assassins had 
 been uncertain from the fury with which they had levelled 
 and fired when they had seen their errand baffled, and the 
 despatches flung beyond all reach into the mountain-gorge, 
 or they had been blinded by the flickering shadows of the 
 moon, and the lust of their vengeance on him, for two 
 shots alone had touched him out of the five which had 
 been fired at him. One ball had pierced his breast, and 
 brought him down senseless, and to all semblance lifeless ; 
 it had been aimed by the leader of the band, who had 
 trifled with his ice and mourned over the conserve of 
 violets in Paris a few nights before. The other bullet, 
 which had struck him in the chest, and would have cut its 
 way straight through the lungs, had been turned aside by 
 the solid silver of his meerschaum, in whose bowl the ball 
 was bedded, though the force of its concussion would have 
 stretched him insensible without a wound. He had fallen 
 AS one dead, and they had left him for such in the narrow 
 defile, hastening themselves to leave the pine-forest far 
 behind them, and put the range of the Carpathians be- 
 tween them and Moldavia, taking their own wounded with 
 them, and plunging into the recesses of the woods, where 
 all pursuit could be baffled, all detection defied. Whether 
 they were mountain-banditti, or masked nobles, or insur- 
 gent conspirators, those vast solitudes would never reveal, 
 
40 IDALIA. 
 
 since the cTead would tell no tales and bear no witness ; his 
 assassination, if ever known, would be traced, they deemed, 
 to gipsies or charcoal-burners, while the odds were a million 
 to one that the fate of the English State courier would 
 never be heard of, but remain in the shroud of an impene- 
 trable mystery, while he lay in the lonely and untrodden 
 ravine, til the bears and the vultures left his bones to 
 whiten unburied when they had sated their hunger on the 
 sinewy limbs of the man who had fallen to avoid the sur- 
 render of his honour and his trust. 
 
 Darkness closes thus over the fate of many ; he is ' miss- 
 ing, ' and we know no more. 
 
 Nearly lifeless thus, Erceldoune had remained through 
 the long hours where his assassins had left him ; about 
 him only the shrieking of the owls, the sough of the winds 
 among the pines, and the distant roar of the beasts of 
 prey, to whom his enemies had trusted for the completion 
 and the burial of their work. Weaker men would have 
 succumbed to less danger than he had often brooked and 
 passed through scathless ; and even now the athletic 
 strength within him refused to perish. The flowing of the 
 blood had stopped ; a laboured sigh now and then gave 
 sign of vitality, though not of consciousness ; then, as the 
 night was waning, a shudder ran through all his frame, and 
 his eyes unclosed, looking upward, without light or sense, 
 to- the starlit vault above. 
 
 He remembered nothing. 
 
 The deep skies and ' the stars in their courses ' whirled 
 giddily above him ; the pine-boughs flickered in phantom 
 shapes before his sight ; the sounds of the winds and of the 
 falling torrents smote dully on his ear ; he had no sense but 
 of suffocation from the congealed blood upon his chest, 
 and the sharp agony of every breath ; he wondered dimly, 
 dreamily, who he was and where he lay. An intense thirst 
 parched his throat and oppressed his lungs a thirst he 
 suffered from without knowing what the torture could be 
 and the plunge and splash of the cascades in the gorge 
 below filled his brain with vague thronging images of cool 
 gtill lakes, of rushing brooks, of deep brown tarns among 
 his native moorlands, and through them all he stood ever 
 up to the lips in the cold delicious waters, yet ever power- 
 less to stoop and taste one drop. The sweep of a night* 
 
SOUFFRIR EN ROI. 41 
 
 bird's wing touched his forehead as it flew low under the 
 drooped pine-branches ; at the touch consciousness slowly 
 and confusedly awoke ; the night ceased to whirl round 
 him in a chaos of shadow; the planets grew clear and 
 familiar, and looked down on him from the dizzy ^ mists 
 circling above. By sheer instinct, he sought to raise his 
 right hand ; it was powerless, and as he stretched out his 
 left arm, he felt the chill stiffened body of his lost mare, 
 and the grasses wet with her blood and his own; then 
 thought and recollection awoke from the mists of death, 
 and he remembered all. 
 
 He knew that he was lying there wounded unto death, 
 beyond all appeal for aid, all hope of succour, powerless 
 to drive from him the frailest insect that with the morning 
 light should begin the fell work of corruption and de- 
 struction ; alone in his last hour in the desolation of the 
 Carpathians, with no companion save the beast of prey, 
 no watcher but the carrion kite. 
 
 Dread of death he had never known ; there was no such 
 coward weakness in him now, in his worst extremity, when 
 he knew that he was dying in the best years of his man- 
 hood, slaughtered by the baseness of treacherous assassi- 
 nation, alone in the pent defile where his murder had been 
 planned, and where no human step would ever come, ex- 
 cept it were that of some mountain plunderer, who would 
 strip off the linen and the velvet that the birds of prey 
 would have left untouched, while his bones should lie there 
 through summer drought and winter storm unburied, un- 
 lamented, unavenged. Fear was not on him, even now in 
 his dying hour, but a mortal sense of loneliness that his 
 life had never known stole over him as he wakened in the 
 hush of the forest-night, paralysed, powerless, strength- 
 less, felled in his full force, slain, like the golden eagle, 
 by a single shot. The heavens, studded with their stars, 
 looked chill and pitiless ; the rocks towered upwards in 
 the moonlight, shutting him out from all the peopled slum- 
 bering world ; no sound smote the stillness, save the dis- 
 tant sullen moan of the brutes seeking their prey, and the 
 winds sweeping and wailing through the endless aisles of 
 pines. He died in solitude. 
 
 The night wore on ; a profound and awful silence reigned 
 around, only broken by the growl of wolves or the scream 
 
4* IDALIA. 
 
 of foxes from their distant haunts ; the ravening cry borne 
 on the blast of those who, with each second which passed 
 away, might scent blood from afar off, and track it in their 
 hunger, and come down to rend, and tear, and devour, 
 finishing the work of slaughter. He heard that sullen bay 
 all through the night where he lay, across the dead mare, 
 motionless ; he could not have stirred a limb, though the 
 fangs of the wild boar had been at his throat, or the 
 wolves in a troop been upon him. Hope or thought of 
 succour he had none ; he was in the deep heart of the 
 mountains, where none could come ; and he knew too well 
 the lore of desert and camp not to know that all chance 
 of life was over, that his last hour was here, and that if 
 the vulture and the bear did not track him out, he would 
 die of the loss of blood alone ; or that if his frame bore 
 up against the exhaustion of his wounds through the day 
 which would soon dawn, he would perish but the more 
 slowly and the more agonisingly of famine and of thirst. 
 
 Time wore on ; the stars grew large as the morning drew 
 near, and his eyes gazed upward at them where he lay in 
 the pass of the defile ; a thousand nights on southern seas, 
 in tropic lands, in eastern aisles of palm, through phos- 
 phor-glittering waters while his ship cleft her way, through 
 the white gleam of snow steppes while the sleigh bells 
 chimed, through the torchlit glades of forests while the 
 Grerman boar or the French stag was hunted to his lair, 
 drifted to memory as the moon shone down on him through 
 the break in the massed pine-boughs ; for he had ever 
 loved the mere sense and strength of life ; all 
 
 * the wild joys of living, the leaping from rock to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool river shock 
 Of a plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.' 
 
 And he knew that this glory was dead in him for ever ; 
 and that when those stars rose on another night, and shed 
 their brightness upon earth and ocean, forest and sea, his 
 eyes would be blind to their light and behold them no 
 more, since he should be stricken out from the world 
 of the living. 
 
 At last it seemed that an eternity had come and gone 
 the day reached him, dawning from the splendour of 
 Asia far away- 
 
SOUFFRIR EN ROL 43 
 
 Tlie light streamed in the east, the darkness of the sha- 
 lows was broken by the first rays of warmth, the night- 
 birds fled to their roost, and above the clouds rose the sun, 
 bathing the sleeping world in its golden gladness, and 
 shining full on the snow peaks of the mountains. The 
 forest life awoke ; the song of countless birds rose on the 
 silence, the bum of myriad insects murmured beneath the 
 grasses, the waters of innumerable torrents glistened in 
 the sunbeams ; and, alone in the waking and rejoicing 
 world, he lay, dying. 
 
 About him, where never sunlight c*ame, were dank 
 grasses, and the gloomy foliage of pines, but abovehead, 
 far aloft throught the walls of granite, was the blue and 
 cloudless sky of a summer dawn. His eyes looked upward 
 to it heavily, and with the film gathering fast over them ; 
 in his physical anguish, in his [sore extremity, there were 
 still beauty and solace in the day. 
 
 Tet as he gazed, the heavens were darkened, the sunlit 
 morning became more loathsome than all the solitude and 
 darkness of the night ; wakened in the dawn and poised in 
 air, drawn thither by the scent of blood, he saw the flocks 
 of carrion-birds, the allies whom the assassins trusted to 
 destroy all trace of their work, the keepers of the vigil of 
 the dead. Cleaving the air and wheeling in the light, they 
 gathered there, vulture and kite, raven and rock- eagle, 
 coming with the sunrise to their carrion feast, sweeping 
 downward into the defile with shrill and hideous clamour 
 till they alit beside him, in their ravenous greed, upon the 
 body of the mare, striking their beaks into her eyes and 
 whetting their taste in her flesh, rending and lacerating 
 and disputing their prey. 
 
 Thus he had seen them, many a time, making their feast 
 on the lion or camel of the East ; and a sickness of loath- 
 ing came upon him, and a horror unutterable; bound 
 in the bonds of death, and powerless to lift his arm 
 against them, he must wait, half living and half dead, 
 while these hungry hordes tore at his heart. 
 
 A cry broke from him loud and terrible a shout for 
 help, where help there could be none. Its echo pealing 
 from the rocks, scared and scattered the ravening birds one 
 instant from their lust ; they wheeled and circled in tho 
 sunlit air, then settled once more on their spoil. 
 
44 ID ALIA. 
 
 A single vulture, driven from the rest, poised above him, 
 waiting. Looking upward, he saw the bird, with its dark 
 wings outstretched, sailing in rings round and round in the 
 sunlight glare, impatient and athirst, its glittering eyes 
 fixed on him the watcher and the harbinger of death. 
 
 By tfye sheer force of animal instinct, strength for the 
 moment was restored ; he sprang up to drive from off him 
 the murderous beak that would seek his life blood, the 
 carrion-greed that would wrench out his eyes while yet 
 they saw the day ! He leapt forward, striking wildly and 
 blindly at the black shadow of the hovering bird ; at 
 the action the wound opened, the haemorrhage broke out 
 afresh he fell back senseless. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 'N'ETES VOTJS PAS DU PAEADIS?* 
 
 in the silent heart of the Carpathian woods two 
 had heard that shout of mortal extremity. 
 
 They were but a woman and a wolf-hound, resting toge- 
 ther under the shade of the pines higher up, where the 
 head of the torrent tumbled and splashed from rock to 
 rock, its sheet of foam glittering in the warmth of the 
 risen day. They heard it ; and the woman rose with a 
 stag-like grace of terror, blent with a haughty challenge of 
 such weakness, and the dog, with its bristling mane erect, 
 and his head lifted in the air, woke the echoes with a deep- 
 mouthed bay. Both listened all was still ; then she laid 
 her hand on the hound's shaggy coat, and gave him a 
 single word of command. He waited, sniffing the scent 
 borne to him on the wind, then, with his muzzle to the 
 earth, sprang off; she followed him, the lights and shadows 
 from the pine-boughs above flung, flickering and golden, 
 on her uncovered hair ; a woman fair as the morning, with 
 the free imperial step of the forest deer, and the beauty 
 of the classic and glorious south ; the beauty of Aspasia of 
 Athens, of Lucrezia of Rome. 
 
 A few short seconds, and the hound plunged down intq 
 
VOUS PAS >U PARADISE 45 
 
 tlie pass, baying loud in fear and f ury, as though he tracked 
 the trail of the crime. The birds new up with whirling 
 tumult from their meal, and wheeled aloft, scared and 
 scattered ; the vulture that had her talons tangled in the 
 hair of the fallen man, and was stretching her plumed 
 throat to deal her first aim at his sightless eyes, taking 
 wing slowly, leaving her prey reluctantly. The woman 
 fell on her knees beside him where he lay across the body 
 of his slaughtered mare, as lifeless to all semblance as the 
 animal. 
 
 She knew that she was in the presence of crime, and she 
 believed herself in that of death ; this man had been slain 
 foully in the heart of the forest, and she was alone, in the 
 mountain ravine that had seen the guilt done and the blow 
 dealt, alone with one whom his enemies had left to perish 
 and lie unburied for the hawks and crows to tear. The 
 night had witnessed the sin and shrouded it ; she and the 
 sunny light of day had tracked and. found [it. And the 
 sickness of its guilt was on her in all its ghastliness, in all 
 its secret craven vileness. 
 
 One thought alone seemed left her ; was she too late, or 
 could this human life, even in its last hour, be saved, be 
 called back, even though it had ebbed away ? 
 
 She felt for the beating of his heart ; a quick shudder 
 ran through all her frame her hand was wet with the 
 blood that had soaked through linen and velvet, and flowed 
 in its deep stream from his breast. Yet she did not 
 shrink, but pressed it there, seeking for the throbbing of 
 the life ; the pulse beat slowly, faintly still, beneath her 
 touch he lived even now. The carrion-birds were poised 
 on the boughs, or settled on the rocky ledges, waiting for 
 the prey which soon or late must come to them; the 
 hound was tearing up the moss with his muzzle to the 
 earth. She called him to her ; the dog was her friend, her 
 guard, her slave he came reluctantly, looking backward 
 at the mosses he had uprooted in his thirst for the scent 
 they gave ; she drew him to her, and signed him to look at 
 the dying man where he was stretched across his horse ; 
 then pointed to the westward with some words in Silesian. 
 The hound looked upward an instant with earnest, 
 eloquent eyes, trying to read her will then, at his full 
 speed, obeyed her, and went down the ravine ; she had 
 
46 IDALIA. 
 
 sent from her her sole defender, while, for aught she knew 
 the murderers of the man she sought to save might return to 
 the scene of their outrage, and deal with her as they had 
 dealt with him. But cowardice was scarcely more in her 
 blood than in his to whose succour she had come with the 
 light of the morning, and whose face was turned upward 
 white and rigid, in mute appeal, in voiceless witness, stern 
 as one who has fallen in fierce contest, but calm as though 
 he lay in the tranquillity of sleep. She gazed at him thus, 
 till hot tears gathered in her eyes, and fell upon his fore- 
 head ; he was a stranger, and not of her land ; she knew 
 not how his death had been dealt, nor in what cause he had 
 fallen, whence he came, nor what bis life had been ; but 
 his face touched to the heart all of pity there was in her, 
 where he lay blind and unconscious in the glory of the sun, 
 though many had said that pity was a thing unknown to 
 her. The falling of her tears upon his brow, or the touch 
 of her hand as it swept back the hair from his temples, 
 and fanned his temples with a fragrant bough of pine to 
 freshen the sultry heat of the noonday, awoke him to some 
 returning life ; a heavy sigh heaved his chest, he stirred 
 wearily, and his lips moved without sound. She knew 
 what he must need all of comfort or of aid that she 
 could give and folding one of the broad dock leaves cup- 
 shape, she filled it at the bed of the torrent, and, raising 
 his head, held the cold water to his parched and colourless 
 lips. 
 
 Unconsciously, instinctively, he drank and drank, slaking 
 the intolerable thirst; she filled it three times at the 
 channel of the river, and he drained in new existence from 
 that green forest-cup, from that fresh and icy water, held 
 to him by his ministering angel. Then his head sank back, 
 lying against her, resting on her arm ; his eyes had not un- 
 closed, he was senseless still, save that he was vaguely 
 conscious of a sense of coolness, languor, rest, and peace ; 
 and the vultures on the rocks above looked down with 
 ravenous impatience, waiting till the watcher should weary 
 of her vigil, and their prey be their own again. 
 
 She would not have left him now though she should have 
 died with him. She knew the lawless brutality of the 
 mountain hordes of gipsies and of plunderers well enough 
 to know that in all likelihood those who had left him for 
 
'N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS ?> 47 
 
 dead might return to strip him of all that was o value on 
 his person, and would slay her, without remorse or mercy, 
 lest she should bear testimony to them and to their work ; 
 but to desert him and leave him to the lust of the carrion- 
 birds and the torrid heat of the noon never passed in 
 thought even before her whatever fate should come of 
 it, she had cast in her lot with his. 
 
 The sun fell through the tracery of firs upon the rushing 
 water, the mosses red with blood, the black flock of the 
 waiting birds, and the motionless form of Erceldoune, 
 stretched across his slaughtered horse, his head resting, as 
 if in the serenity of sleep, upon the bosom of the woman 
 who had saved him, while above bent the magnificence of 
 her face, with a golden light on its mournful splendour, and 
 the softness of compassion in the lustre of the eyes that 
 watched him in his unconsciousness. 
 
 Time wore on, the sun rose to noon height, the heat 
 grew more intense, and they were still alone ; he lay as in 
 a trance still, but with that vague sense of coolness and of 
 peace, all that he knew or sought to know ; once his eyes 
 unclosed, weary and blind, and saw, as in a vision, the face 
 as of an angel above him. He had not strength to rouse, 
 power to wonder, consciousness to know or ask whether he 
 slept, or dreamed, or beheld but the phantom of his own 
 brain ; but his eyes gazed upward at the loveliness that 
 looked down on him, with the warmth of the morning on 
 it, and it pierced through the mists of death and the chaos 
 of unconsciousness, and sank into his sight and heart, never 
 again to be forgotten. "While the sun was in its zenith and 
 the day rolled onward, he was conscious, through all his 
 anguish, despite all his stupor, of the fragrance of leaves 
 that fanned his brow and stirred the heated air with 
 soothing movement, of the gentle murmur of river- waters 
 sounding through the stillness, and ever when his eyes 
 unclosed and looked upward on the radiance of the day 
 of the face that he saw in the luminance of the light, even 
 as the face of a guardian angel. And he knew no more 
 in the dulness of lulled pain, in the languor of profound 
 exhaustion. 
 
 The loud bay of a hound broke the silence when noon 
 long had passed, the rapid rush of the dog's feet scoured 
 over the rocks above and down the winding path ; he had 
 
48 I&ALIA. 
 
 known that he had been bidden to seek succour, and "had 
 left those he first met no peace till they had followed him 
 two Moldavian peasants, herdsmen or stable-helpers, 
 who had understood the meaning of the hound's impatient 
 bark and whine. 
 
 At the sound of their steps she moved from the wounded 
 man, and rose with the grace which made her every action 
 beautiful as the wild antelope's, imperial as a sovereign's 
 in her court. 
 
 The Moldavians listened with profound reverence while 
 she spoke, and without pause or question hastened to obey 
 her command ; deeds of violence were not so rare at the 
 foot of the Carpathians, in the heart of the Principalities, 
 as to excite either the horror or the wonder of the passive 
 serfs ; they went without a word to their work, wrenched 
 down the long boughs of the pines, stripped them, lashed 
 the bare poles together, and covered them with lesser 
 branches of the firs, overstrewn in turn by the yielding 
 velvet moss of the forest, till they had formed a rude 
 stretcher, rough in form but fragrant and easy ; then they 
 laid him on it, lifting him with kindly gentleness. At the 
 first movement which raised him, and the sharp agony it 
 caused, careful and not untender though it was, he fainted; 
 they might have taken him where they would ; he knew 
 nothing. The Moldavians prepared to raise the litter on 
 their shoulders, then looked to her : 
 6 Home, your Excellency ? ' 
 
 She started, and stood silent ; then over the light and 
 beauty of her face swept a shadow, as of better memory. 
 
 < j~ o no ! ' she answered them, in their own Moldavian 
 tongue. ' G-o to the Convent of Monastica ; it is nearer, 
 
 and they will tend him better there. If any can save him, 
 
 \'the Sisters will.' 
 
 I JT ' And we are to tell them ?' 
 
 > ' Tell them where you found this stranger, lying as one 
 dead, and powerless to say who are his assassins ; do not give 
 my name, or speak of me ; that he is wounded, and alone, 
 and in need, will be enough to gain him care and pity at 
 Monastica. "When you have left him in safety at the con- 
 vent, come back here ; you shall bury the horse, it shall 
 not be food for vultures. Now go each moment is pre- 
 cious. I shall know with what fidelity you serve him, and 
 shall reward you as you do it well/ 
 
4 N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS ?' 49 
 
 Yet, though she had bidden them go, she stood still, 
 looking down on the litter where Erceldoune lay ; she had 
 saved this man's life at peril of her own, yet they would 
 probably never meet again ; she had redeemed him from 
 amid the dead, yet he would have no memory of her, no 
 knowledge that she had been with him in the hour of his ex- 
 tremity, and rescued him from his grave. Her eyes dwelt 
 on him in a silent farewell, and a certain tenderness came 
 over all her face as she bowed her head, while her lips 
 moved with the words of a Greek prayer and benediction 
 over the life of which she knew nothing, yet which in some 
 sense had been made her own by every law of gratitude 
 for a great deliverance. 
 
 Then she signed to the bearers to raise the litter and go 
 onward. They wound slowly with their burden up the 
 narrow pass, and she sank down on the fallen trunk levelled 
 by his assassins for their barricade, her rich dress sweeping 
 the blood-stained mosses, her head resting on her hands 
 that were twisted in the lustrous masses of her hair ; her 
 eyes, with their mournful brilliance, their luminance 
 fathomless as that of tropic skies by night, gazing into the 
 depths of the torrent foaming below in its black bed ; and 
 at her side the Silesian hound, his mane erect, his hea<l 
 uplifted, his feet pawing the turf, as though he scented 
 the blood-trail and panted for command to hunt the evil- 
 doers to their lair. 
 
 A small antique chamber, with grav walls and snow- 
 white draperies ; an ebony crucifix with a marble Christ 
 hanging above an altar draped with velvet, and broidered 
 with gold, and fragrant with lilies in silver cups ; a painted 
 G-othic window through which were seen stretches of green 
 pine-woods and golden haze beyond ; and an intense still- 
 ness through which pealed, softly and subdued, the chant 
 of the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, these were 
 what Erceldoune opened his eyes upon, and saw, and 
 heard, when he awoke from a long trance that had been 
 death itself for aught he knew, and through which he had 
 only been conscious of burning torture, of intolerable pain, 
 of mellow strains of music floating through his brain, and 
 of one face of divinest beauty bent above him while he lay 
 bound in bonrls of iron, in swathes of fire. For 
 
 JB 
 
$0 IDALIA. 
 
 he had been delirious for many days in the Convent of 
 Monastica. 
 
 His life had hung on a thread: the ball was in his breast, 
 and the fever of his wounds, combined with the weakness 
 consequent on loss of blood, had kept him in sharpest- 
 peril through all the rest of that sultry autumn. But the 
 bullet had missed his lungs, and the intense vitality and 
 resistance in him. brought him through all which would 
 have slain at a blow a weaklier and less hardily trained 
 frame. The skill in leechcraft of the Sisters of Monastica 
 was proverbial in the Principalities ; women, who loved him 
 could not have tended him more tenderly and unweariedly 
 than did those high-born, recluses who had sought the 
 solitudes of the dense Moldavian pine-forests, in a con- 
 ventional community different to those of anv other country. 
 He was saved, and awoke one sunlight evening, conscious 
 and calm, gazing dreamily and wonderiugly at the dead 
 Christ on the altar, and the narrow-arched window, with 
 its glimpse of plain and forest through the slit, while the 
 Agnus Dei pealed on the stillness of the chamber. He 
 thought himself dreaming still. 
 
 To his bedside came a nun, pale, gentle, with dovelike 
 eyes, a woman no longer young. Erceldoime looked at 
 her dimly ; the past was a blank, yet unfamiliar as the 
 chamber was to him, and unreal his own personality, he 
 vaguely desired and missed what he had seen throughout 
 his delirium what he did not behold on awaking. And 
 the first words he spoke were : ' "Where is she ?' 
 
 The Sister shook her head, looking on him with a com- 
 passionate welcoming smile. 
 
 ' I cannot understand my son. I can speak a little 
 French, but you must not talk yet, you are too weak.' 
 
 All European languages, most of the Eastern, had been 
 as familiar to him as his own. He repeated his question 
 impatiently in the nun's tongue. 
 
 ' Where is she ? ' 
 
 * Who, my son ? ' 
 
 * Who ? A woman or an angel who has been with me 
 always.' 
 
 ( ]S r one have been with you, my son, save myself and 
 those of rny order.' 
 
 He made a faint intolerant sign of dissent ; and his eyes 
 wandered over the place where he lay, in weary search, miss* 
 
*N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADISE 51 
 
 ing in consciousness and in reality the face which had been 
 ever before him in delirium. 
 
 * Where am I, then ? ' 
 
 ' In our convent at Monastica. You were found all but 
 lifeless in the forest by two peasants, who brought you 
 hither. You have been in sore peril, my son, but, by the 
 blessing of the most holy Mother of God, we have wrought 
 your cure. But keep silence, and rest now, you are very weak.' 
 
 'Weak? ir 
 
 He repeated the word in marvelling incredulity ; he who 
 had stood face to face with the lion in the sultry African 
 night, and measured his strength with the desert king's, 
 and prevailed, he who from his childish years upward, 
 through a long, and daring, and adventurous life, had never 
 known his force to fail, his power to desert him, was 
 unable to realise that he could be laid low and powerless as 
 any reed levelled by the wind ! Instinctively he lifted his 
 right arm to raise himself that right arm which had 
 never failed him yet in battle, in storm, in the death-grapple, 
 or in any blow dealt in love of justice, in hatred of dis- 
 honour it fell nerveless and broken. Then he realised 
 that his strength was gone ; and for the sole time in his life, 
 Erceldoune could have turned his face to the wall and wept 
 like a woman. 
 
 ' I remember/ he said faintly. ' I remember now. The 
 cowards shot me down, and she saved me. Tell them I de- 
 stroyed " the papers; " but ' 
 
 The words died away unintelligible to the nun, his head 
 fell back, and his eyes closed : he felt how utter was his 
 weakness. He lay exhausted, his thoughts wandering over 
 all that past of peril which had long been a blank to him, 
 and which now slowly and by degrees returned to memory, 
 striving to realise what manner of thing this could be, this 
 calamity of stricken strength which his life had never before 
 dreaded or conceived. Sweeping like fire through his blood, 
 and filling his frame as with fresh life, there came with 
 consciousness recollection of the murderous gang who had 
 stretched him there, and fierce natural thirst for vengeance 
 on his cowardly foes, for the hour of reckoning when he 
 should rise and deal with that craven womanish brute v 
 whose gentle mellow laugh had bidden them t kill the 
 Border Eagle,' and whose shot bad brought him to the earth. 
 
 2 
 
52 ID ALIA. 
 
 A fair and open antagonist Erceldoune would honour, 
 and forgive frankly and generously from his heart ; but to 
 the coward treachery that struck him in the dark, he swore 
 that death itself should not be more pitiless or more inex- 
 orable than his wrath. 
 
 The shadows lengthened through the painted window, the 
 music ceased from the convent chapel, the nun left him, and 
 knelt before the altar lost in prayer. It was intensely still, 
 no sound was upon the air save that, from the distance, the 
 bells of one of the Moldavian monasteries were chiming the 
 vespers; it was a pause as strange in his strong, rapid, 
 varied, richly-coloured life of action and adventure as that 
 which we feel when we enter the shaded silent aisles of some 
 cathedral, and the doors close behind us, shutting out all the 
 accustomed crowds, the busy whirl, and the swift press, and 
 the hot sunlight of the city we have left without. He had 
 never known in all the years of his existence that profound 
 exhaustion, that death-like prostration, in which all vitality 
 seems suspended, and in which a lulled, dreamy, listless 
 meditation is all of which we are left capable : he knew 
 them now, as he lay gazing at the altar, with its dead Christ 
 and its white river-lilies, and the bowed form of the kneeling 
 nun, while all sense of pain, of weakness, of thirst for the 
 just vengeance he would rise and reach, drifted from him, 
 merged and lost in one memory. A memory luminous, 
 angel-like, as are the imaginations which fill the mind of 
 painters with shapes divine and visions of beauty, but 
 such as had never entered the life or the thoughts of this 
 man till now, when, in the sunset stillness of the lonely 
 oratory at Monastica, he saw ever before him, with the 
 depths of an unspeakable compassion in her fathomless 
 eyes, the face of the woman who had saved him. Where 
 was she? 
 
 He questioned ceaselessly for many days each of the 
 order who came to his bedside and tended him with skilled 
 care, and brought him fruits and sherbet, and prayed for 
 him at the altar, where the lilies were placed fresh with 
 every dawn, and the dead God looked down with serene and 
 mournful smile. He insisted that a woman had come to 
 him in the defile when he lay there dying, and had given 
 him water, and had saved him. They thought his persist- 
 ence the remembrance of some delirious hallucination, soie 
 
'N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS ? ' 53 
 
 dream which haunted him, and which he could not sever 
 from reality. He saw the Moldavian serfs, who came each 
 day during his danger to the convent for news of him ; and, 
 while he rewarded them, interrogated them as to how and 
 where they had discovered him. They answered that a dog 
 had led them to where he lay, and that they had seen that 
 he was all bat lifeless, and had made a litter of pine boughs 
 and brought him to the gates of Monastica for succour. 
 When he pressed them, and insisted that a woman had 
 been the first to rescue him, the Moldavians shook their 
 heads ; tliey had found him, and had brought him hither. 
 They had barely more intelligence than that of a kindly 
 good-humoured animal, and adhered doggedly to their 
 statement ; it was useless to question them ; Erceldoune 
 bade them to be given half the gold pieces in his travel- 
 ling belt, and let them go. It was not his nature to pursue 
 uselessly, nor to give expression to a futile annoyance or an 
 unavailing disappointment ; he was silent from that moment 
 on the subject. 
 
 The nuns, with their Mother Superior, thought he had 
 become convinced that his fancy was the phantom of his 
 delirium. Erceldoune remained certain that no unreality, 
 no mere vision, fever-begotten, would have been impressed 
 as this was upon him ; he remembered what it would have 
 been wholly unlike him to have imagined. And this fugitive 
 memory of one who had been his saviour in his extremity, 
 yet who was lost to him on his awakening to consciousness, 
 filled his thoughts unceasingly during the lull of his life in 
 the solitudes of Monastica. 
 
 Por many weeks he lay there in the antique quiet 
 chamber, with the glimpse of hill and torrent seen through 
 its single casement, and the cadence of the Angelus or the 
 Pro Peccatis alone breaking the stillness at matins, mass, 
 or vespers ; the inaction, the imprisonment, the monotony, 
 were as intolerable to him as to a fettered lion, for though 
 solitude might be oftentimes his preference, it was ever the 
 solitude of freedom, of action, and of the grandeur of desert 
 wilds. He recovered slowly but surely, the science of the 
 Sisters and his own natural strength bringing him through 
 in the teeth of imminent peril; but it was far into the 
 autumn, and the pines were the only trees not bare in the 
 Moldavian woods, when he rose with anything of his old 
 
54 IDALIA. 
 
 power in his limb?, with anything of the old muscular force 
 in iiis right arm, and breathed without pain, and was free to 
 go back to the world of the living without danger. 
 
 Meanwhile, Europe rang for a space with his attempted 
 assassination. A Queen's messenger could not have been 
 left for murdered, and English state papers of the first and 
 most secret importance been waylaid by so singular and 
 trained a conspiracy, without the outrage being of import, 
 and rousing alike the wrath of his government and the 
 speculations of all other powers. That those who had 
 stopped him were no ordinary assassins and marauders the 
 object of their plunder showed ; common banditti would 
 have menaced his money, not his despatches. It seemed 
 evident that his enemies had been men of considerable 
 resources and power, that they had been well acquainted 
 with his movements, and that their object had been political. 
 Southern Europe was in the throes of revolt, and much of 
 central and Eastern Europe seething in intrigue ; political 
 gamesters would have counted one man's assassination a 
 very little cost for the gain of political information and ad- 
 vantage in their unscrupulous rouge et noir. 
 
 Amid all, the criminals remained untracked. Moldavia 
 said she did all she could to discover and render them up to 
 justice. Whether or not this were true, they were undis- 
 covered : the little State was heavily mulcted for the out- 
 rage, and the perpetrators went scot free at large, the night 
 and their masks having shrouded them, the pine-forests 
 telling no tales, and the sole clue to their subsequent identi- 
 fication lying in Erceldoune's recognition by voice of their 
 ringleader, as the vivacious and graceful bewailer for the 
 sacrifice of crystallised violets whom he had met at the 
 Paris cafe. 
 
 The menace of England failed to track his assassins and 
 bring them to their reckoning ; but he swore that sooner or 
 later his own vengeance should find them, and strike home 
 to that tiger brute whose laugh he would know again though 
 a score of years should have rolled away before they stood 
 face to face. 
 
 * You bear no malice to your savage murderers, my son ? 
 said the Abbess of Monastica to him wistfully one day, an 
 aged woman, white-haired and venerable, gentle as a child, 
 and unworldly as an infant, for she had taken the veil in her 
 
1 WETES VOUS PAS DU PARADIS? 1 55 
 
 fmrteenth year, and had never left the convent now that 
 the had reached her seventieth, save on an occasional visit, 
 its permitted by Moldavian rules, to the innocent festivities 
 of Jjissy. 
 
 * Malice, madam ? No ; I am not a woman ! ' 
 
 The Abbess looked at him wistfully still ; the answer 
 was affirmative, yet she was not wholly secure that this was 
 the meek and lowly mercy which she sought to win from 
 him. 
 
 1 Then vou forgive them, my son, and would remember, 
 if you niefc them, the Lamb of Grod's injunction, " If thy 
 enemy smite thee on one cheek, give him the other," and 
 would refrain from all vengeance would you not ? ' 
 
 Erceldoune's hand came down on the massive oak table, 
 standing by him with a force that shook it to its centre. 
 
 * By my honour, madam, I would remember it so, that 
 the life should not be left in one of them ! Forgive ? Ay ! 
 when I have turned dastard like them/ 
 
 The Mother Superior gazed at him with perplexed trouble 
 in her eyes ; the child-like innocent woman could not under- 
 stand the strong unfettered nature of the man, with its deep 
 passions and its fiery honour, which made the low serpent 
 meanness of malice as impossible and incomprehensible to 
 him as it made the chastisement of cowardice and the ven- 
 geance of treachery instinctive and imperative, resistless as 
 an impulse as it was sacred as a duty. 
 
 * But forgiveness is godlike, my son.' 
 1 May be, madam ; but I am mortal.' 
 'But it is a human duty.' 
 
 * To an open gallant foe, madam yes ! I will render it 
 him to-morrow, and honour him from my soul the better lie 
 fights me and the harder he strikes ; but the serpent that 
 stings me in the dark I set niy heel on, for the vermin he 
 is, and serve God and man when I strangle him ! ' 
 
 The venerable Abbess sighed ; she had ministered to him 
 through his unconsciousness and through his suffering, she 
 had seen him bear torture with a silent endurance that 
 seemed to her superhuman in its heroism, and she had wept 
 over the stately stature levelled like a cedar felled by the 
 axe, and the superb strength brought down to worse than 
 a child's weakness, till she had felt for him something of a 
 mother's tenderness, and found it hard to urge him to love 
 
5$ ID ALIA. 
 
 and to pardon his injurers. Moreover, Mother Veronica 
 was no casuist. 
 
 'It must be bitter, my son, 1 lmo\\,' she murmured, 
 ' and the evil spirit is strong in us, and fearful to subdue ; 
 but One who suffered a deadlier wrong than thine forgave 
 the traitor and the murderer, though Judas sold Him to the 
 the Cross.' 
 
 Erceldoune gave a movement of impatience, and the 
 muscles of his arm straitened as though by sheer instinct 
 of longing to ' deliver from the shoulder.' 
 
 ' Pardon me, holy mother, I am no theologian ! But I 
 know this, that if there had been a touch of loyalty and 
 fealty among the eleven left, that scoundrel of Iscariot 
 would not have lived till the morrow to hang himself. If I 
 had been in Galilee, he would have had a lunge of steel 
 through his lungs, and died a traitor's death ! ' 
 
 So startling a view of apostolic duty had never penetrated 
 the sacred walls of the Convent of Monastica ; the whole 
 range of her instruction from the Church had never given 
 her a rule by which to deal with such a novel article of 
 creed ; and she sat silent, gazing at him with a wistful be- 
 wilderment, wondering what the sainted Eemigius had replied 
 when King Clovis gave him a similar answer in the old days 
 of Gaul. 
 
 Erceldoune, who felt a sincere gratitude to the aged wo- 
 man who had showed him a mother's tenderness and care 
 throughout a lengthened peril, bent to her with gentle rever- 
 ence, which sat well upon him. 
 
 4 Pardon me, madam, I spoke something roughly, and 
 men should not talk of these matters to women. There is 
 one broad ground on which we can meet and understand one 
 another, that of your goodness to a stranger, and his sincere 
 recognition of it. Let that suffice ! ' 
 
 And Mother Veronica smiled wistfully on him, and after 
 seventy years of unsullied devotion to the Supreme Church, 
 found herself guilty of the horrible heresy of loving one 
 whose soul was lost, and whose wild living will, and erring, 
 wayward creeds, were the most fatal forms of tumult and 
 revolt against which the Infallible Faith warned her. 
 
 An eagle from his native Cheviot-side, fettered in a cage, 
 would not have been less fitted for it than Erceldoune for 
 his imprisonment at Monastica. As soon as he was strong 
 
'N'ETES VOUS PAS DU PARADISE SI 
 
 enough to be raised in his couch, and was able to use his arn., 
 he beguiled the time with a pastime which had often whiled 
 away hours and days of enforced inaction, in quarantine, on 
 board ship becalmed in the topics, or cooped up in Marseilles 
 during the mistral. He painted extremely well. He was 
 too thorough a man of action, too truly the English Effendi 
 of the Eastern nations, ever to take art or indolence by 
 choice ; but there had come many times in his life when to 
 paint the rare scenery, or the picturesque groupings around 
 him, had been his only available pursuit ; and he did thi& 
 with singular dash and delicacy, vividness and truth. Ercel- 
 doune would never have been a creative artist ; he had not 
 the imaginative or poetic faculty which idealises, it warj 
 wholly alien to his nature and his habits ; but what he saw 
 he rendered with a force, a fidelity, and a brilliance of hue 
 which painters by the score had envied him. He passed the 
 dreary weeks now at Monastica painting what he had seen ; 
 and the picture grew into such life and loveliness that the 
 nuns marvelled when they looked on it, as the Eeligieuses 
 of Bruges marvelled when they saw the ' Marriage of St. Ka- 
 therine,' left in legacy to them by the soldier-artist Hans 
 Hemlin, whose wounds they had dressed, and cried out that 
 it should be the Virginal altar-piece in a world-famed cathe- 
 dral. Yet the picture was but a woman's face a face with 
 thoughtful lustrous eyes, and hair with a golden reflex on it, 
 and lips which wore a smile that had something more pro- 
 found than sadness, and more imperial than tenderness ; a 
 face looking downward from an aureole of light, half sunlit 
 and half shadowed. 
 
 4 Now I know that I have seen it, or I could not have 
 painted it,' said Erceldoune to himself, as he cast down his 
 brushes ; and to know that was why he had done so. 
 
 ' Keep the picture, madam, as altar-piece, or what it please 
 you, in token of my gratitude, at the least, for the kindness 
 1 cannot hope to return/ he said to the Mother Superior ; 
 ' and, if you ever see a woman whose likeness you recognise 
 in it, she will be the one to w r hom I first owed the rescue 
 of my life. Tell her Eulke Erceldoune waits to pay his 
 debt/ 
 
 And Mother Veronica heard him with as much pain in his 
 last words as she had had pleasure in his first ; for she saw 
 that the Dhantoin of his delirium was still strong on him, and 
 
58 ID ALIA. 
 
 feared that his mind must wander, to be so haunted by this 
 mere hallucination of the lady of his dreams. 
 
 A few days later on, Erceldoune, able at last to endure the 
 return journey through the mountains and across Hungary, 
 attended a Te Dcum to gratify the Abbess, in celebration, 
 and thanksgiving for his own restoration from death to life, 
 left his three months' pay to the almsgiving of the order, 
 bowed his lofty head for the tearful benediction of the M other 
 Superior, and quitted the innocent community of religious 
 women, in whose convent he had found asylum, the Angelus 
 chiming him a soft and silent farewell, as, in the late leaf- 
 less autumn, while the black Danube was swelling with the 
 first rains of winter, and the forests were strewn with the 
 yellow leaves that covered the grave of his dead sorrel, he 
 went out from the solitudes of Monastica back to the living 
 world. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 'AN IGFIS FATTJUS GLEAM OF LOYE.' 
 
 ' IT was a superb thing magnificent ! ' 
 
 The most popular personage in the English Cabinet was 
 standing on the hearth-rug of his own library of his wife's 
 chateau of Liramar, South Italy, where he had snatched a 
 brief autumn holiday, nothing altered and little aged since 
 some twenty years before, when the beggared Border lord, 
 in the pride and liberty of his youth and his ruin, had won 
 the great minister's liking for life by a defiance. 
 
 Erceldoune laughed a little impatiently. 
 
 ' Nothing of the kind ! Any other man in the service 
 would have done the same ; simplest duty possible.' 
 
 1 Simple duties get done in this world, do they ? Humph ! 
 I didn't know it. I suppose you expected, when you gave 
 the word to fire, that the brutes would kill you eh ? ' 
 
 ' Of course. I can't think now how they missed it. 1 ought 
 to have been riddled with bullets, if they had aimed properly.' 
 
 i I believe he's half disgusted he wasn't wholly dead now ! ' 
 said his lordship plaintively. ' It was a superb thing, I tell 
 you. But don't you do it again, Erceldoune. The trash we 
 write to bully and blind one another isn't worth the loss of a 
 gallant man's life. We know that. A terrible fellow went 
 and said so too, in the Commons, last session. He was up, 
 
' AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE. 9 59 
 
 And nobody could stop him. He told us, point blank to our 
 faces, that though we posed very successfully for the innocent 
 public, we might as well drop the toga and show the sock 
 and buskin before each other, as the attitudinising didn't 
 take in the initiated, and must be a fearful bore always for 
 us. Clever fellow ; tremendous hard hitter ; but he wants 
 training. By the way, the Principalities paid us down a 
 heavy fine as indemnity for that outrage. Half the money 
 comes to you, clearly.' 
 
 f I thank you, my dear lord ; I have no need of it.' 
 1 Eh ? What ? I thought you were poor, Erceldoune ? ' 
 ' I am ; but I have never been in debt, and I want 
 nothing. Besides, if you will pardon my saying so, I don't 
 admire that system of " indemnification," J pursued Ercel- 
 doune, giving himself a shake like a staghound where he 
 leaned against the marble mantlepiece. * A single scoundrel, 
 or a gang of scoundrels, commits an insult^ as in this case, on 
 England, or any other great power, through the person of 
 her representative, or perhaps merely through the person of 
 one of her nation ; the State to which the rascals belong is 
 heavily mulcted by way of penalty. Who suffers ? Not the 
 guilty ; but the unhappy multitudes, peasants, traders, farm- 
 ers, citizens, gentlemen all innocent who pay the taxes 
 and the imposts. With an outrage from a great power, if acci- 
 dentally committed on a traveller by a horde of thieves, you 
 would take no notice whatever ; if one were done obviously as 
 a political insult you would declare war. But when the thing 
 happens in a small State she is punished by an enormous 
 fine, which half ruins her, for a crime which she could no 
 more prevent than you can help in Downing- street the last 
 wreckers' murder that took place in Cornwall. Pardon me, 
 but I fail to see the justice or the dignity of the system ; 
 and for myself, when my own conviction is that the assassins 
 who stopped me were not Moldavians at all, what compen- 
 sation would it be to me to have the money wrung from a 
 million or two guiltless people, whose country the cowards 
 chose to select as their field ? If you wish to avenge me, 
 track the dastards, and give them into my power.' 
 
 The statesman listened as they stoodalone in the library, and 
 
 looked at his guest, with humour lighting up his blue eyes. 
 
 * Erceldoune, if you hadn't that stiff-necked Scottish 
 
 pride, which would make you knock me down, in all proba- 
 
60 ID ALIA. 
 
 bility, if I offered it, I would give you three thousand a year 
 to live with me and speak your mind,' laughed his lordship, 
 meaning his words too. " You are a miracle in your genera- 
 tion ; you're not a bit like this age sir not a whit more 
 than the Napiers ; you speak rarely, and never speak but 
 the truth ; you have to choose between your life and your 
 trust, and, as a matter of course, give up your life ; you are 
 moneyless, and refuse money the State would tender you 
 because you think it gained " neither by justice nor dignity; " 
 you have have dined at my house in town ; you have 
 stayed in my house in the country ; you know that I 
 like you ; and yet you are the only man of my acquaintance 
 who has never asked me for anything. On my life, sir, you 
 don't do for this century!' 
 
 Unfit for my century, my lord, because I value your 
 friendship and honour your esteem too highly to regard both 
 only as ladders to " place " ? ' 
 
 The minister stretched his hand out to him with one ot 
 those warm silent gestures of acknowledgment, very uncom- 
 mon with him, but very eloquent. Too sweet and sunny a 
 temper to be a ' good hater,' he was a cordial friend how 
 true and steadfast a friend those only knew who knew him 
 in private life. 
 
 * Well, the State, at least, owes you something/ he said 
 after a pause. * You must let us pay our debt. Messenger- 
 ships never do lead to anything ; but that is no reason why 
 they should not in your person. There are many half civil, 
 half military appointments for which your life has fitted you, 
 and which you yourself would fill better than any man I 
 know ; the governorship of some good island, for instance.' 
 
 Erceldoune was silent a moment, leaningagainst the marble. 
 
 * I thank you sincerely ; but I want nothing ; and I have 
 too much of the nomad in me to care to relinquish my wan- 
 dering life in saddle. Grive me no credit for asceticism or re- 
 nunciation ; it is nothing of the kind. I should have been 
 born a desert chief. I have never been happier than in the 
 Kabyles' " houses of hair," living on maize and camel-flesh, 
 and waiting for the lions through the night with the Zouaves 
 and the Arabs. If you think, however, that I have really 
 done enough to have earned any preference from England, I 
 will ask you to send me on service, as soon as I am myself 
 again, to South and East Europe, with your authorisation 
 
' AN IGNIS FATUUS &LEAM OF LOVE: 6l 
 
 to take leisure in returning if I desire it, and full powers 
 from the government to go to any expenses, or impress any 
 assistance I require, if 1 should be able to discover the per- 
 sons or the track of the assassins.' 
 
 ' Certainly ; you shall have both to the fullest extent. 
 Ton shall have the authorisation of the Crown to act 
 precisely as you see fit ; and spare no cost, if you can get 
 on the villains' trail, in bringing them to justice. I fear 
 you will be baffled ; we don't know enough to identify them. 
 They seconded us well in France, and everything was tried, 
 but failed. It was in Paris you had seen . the man whose 
 voice you recognised, wasn't it ? Would you know him 
 again ? ' 
 
 Erceldoune ground his heel into the tiger-skin of the 
 hearth rug as though his tiger foe were under his feet ; he 
 longed to have his hand on the throat of the silky murderous 
 brute. 
 
 * I would swear to his voice and his laugh anywhere & 
 score of years hence ; and I should know him again, too ; 
 he was as beautiful as a woman ; though I did not take his 
 measure, as I should have done had I guessed where we 
 should meet.' 
 
 1 The object, of course, was purely political ; and there 
 are thousands of men Carlists, Ultramontanists, Carbona- 
 rists, Reactionists, Socialists, and all the rest of the Con- 
 tinentalists who would have held that they only obeyed 
 their chiefs, and acted like patriots in shooting you down 
 for the sake of your papers. "Well, you shall have your 
 own way, Erceldoune, and all you ask ; it is little enough. 
 Lady G-eorge,' broke off his lordship vivaciously, as a party 
 from the billiard-room entered the library, * here is Ercel- 
 doune so enamoured of the country he was murdered in that 
 he is asking me to have him sent off there again I These 
 messenger fellows are never quiet. He says he ought to 
 be an Arab chief; and so he should be.' 
 
 ' He only wants the white haick to look like one,' smiled 
 Lady G-eorge, a lovely blonde, dropping her azure eyes on 
 him with an effective side glance, wholly wasted. 
 
 Erceldoune, to his own infinite annoyance, had found 
 himself an object of hero worship to all the brilliant beauties 
 down at Liramar, where he had been bidden by the great 
 minister as soon as he was able to leave Monastica, and 
 
62 1DALIA. 
 
 where that unworn octogenarian was himself taking a rare 
 short rest in the November of the year. His lordship was 
 imperative in his summons to his favourite courier, to whom 
 the southern air was Lkely to give back the lost strength 
 which was still only returning slowly and wearily to muscles 
 and limbs whose force had been ' even as the lions of Libya.' 
 
 The story of his single-handed peril, his choice of death 
 rather than disloyalty to his trust, in the silent ravine of 
 the Moldavian pine-woods, had sent a thrill of its own 
 chivalry through the languid, nil admirari, egotistic, listless 
 pulses of high-bred society. Erceldoune was the hero of 
 the hour if he chose ; and the Border Eagle might have 
 folded his strong pinions under the soft caress of a thousand 
 white hands. But he did not choose ; he had never cared 
 for women ; they had never gained any hold on him. Steeped 
 in vice in his earliest years, sensuality had little power over 
 his manhood; and the languid intrigues, the hollow homage, 
 the ' love' of the drawing-rooms pulseless, insipid, artificial, 
 frivolous, pare a la mode were still more contemptible and 
 absolutely impossible to him. Nor was fashionable life to 
 his taste ; its wheels within wheels ill suited the singleness 
 of. his own character ; the feverish puerility of its envies 
 and ambitions woke no chord of sympathy in him ; and its 
 hot-pressed atmosphere was too narrow and too rarefied 
 with heat and perfume for the lungs which only breathed 
 freely on the moorland and the prairie, on the ocean and 
 the mountain-side. A man once bound to the great 
 world is a slave till the day of his death ; and Erceldoune 
 could not have lived in chains. 
 
 6 Tou are very like one of the eagles of your own border, 
 Sir 3?ulke,' said a French duchesse at Liramar to him. She 
 had been a beauty, and now, at forty, was a power the 
 customary development of a Frenchwoman 
 
 c In love of liberty, inadame, and solitude? Well, yes.' 
 
 He thought how he and the golden eagle had fallen, 
 much alike ; and the thought crossed him vaguely, should 
 he ever live to wish that the shot, like the eagle's, had told 
 home ? 
 
 ' Yes, and if I were twenty years younger, I would tame 
 you ! ' said the Duchesse, with a malicious smile. ' Ah, how 
 you would sutler, how you would beat your strong wings 
 against the chains, how you would hate and worship, in one 
 
'AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE: 63 
 
 breath, your captor, and how you would pant out your great 
 life in torture, till you sank down at last in slavery as intense 
 as your resistance ! ' 
 
 f I? You do not know nie much, Miladi. 1 
 
 The Duchesse gave him a perfumy touch with her fan as 
 she swept away. 
 
 4 Bah ! M. Erceldoune, I know your tribe and I know 
 bheir tamers. You will find a worse foe than a bullet, soon 
 or late. Your assassins were merciful to what your love 
 will be when you love. See if I am wrong ! ' 
 
 And with a laugh of compassion and of mocking pre- 
 science the prophetess of dark omen went to her whist-table, 
 where she played as well as Prince Metternich ; and Ercel- 
 doune passed on his way to the smoking-room, a contemp- 
 tuous disdain working in him. ' Love ! ' He had never 
 known it, he had never believed in it, the frank boldness of 
 his nature had been proof against most of its seductions, and 
 he only recognised in it a sophistical synonym for women's 
 vanity and men's sensuality, or vice versa ; and, take it in 
 the long run, he was undoubtedly right. 
 
 His passions were great ; but they had never been fairly 
 aroused ; and he had, or thought he had, them under an 
 iron bridle, like some Knight of St. John, half priest, halt' 
 soldier, stern warrior and ascetic monk in one, his soul, like 
 his body, inailt-d in steel, and wrestling with the vile 
 tempters of the flesh as with twining serpents that sought 
 to wreathe round and stifle out his martial strength, and 
 drag it downward into voluptuous fumes^ and enervating 
 shame, and weakness, that would disgrace his manhood and 
 his pride, his order and his oath. 
 
 Yet vague, dreamy, half soft, half stormy thoughts swept 
 over him of some love that this world might hold, with all 
 the delight of passion, while loftier, richer, holier, than 
 mere passion alone, which wakes and desires, pursues, 
 possesses and dies. He believed it a fable ; he was in- 
 credulous of its dominion ; it was, he fancied, alien to his 
 nature ; he neither needed nor accredited it ; yet the dim 
 glory of some such light that ' never yet was upon sea or 
 land' half touched his life in fancy for a second. For, 
 where he sat in the lonely smoking-room, with the smoke 
 curling up from the meerschaum bowl which had turned 
 the bullet from his heart in Moldavia, and floating away to 
 
64 ID ALIA. 
 
 the far recesses of Rembrandtesque shade, out from the 
 shadow there seemed to rise, with the lustre in the eyes 
 and the unspoken tenderness upon the lips, the face of the 
 one who had saved him. 
 
 The face of a temptress or an angel ? 
 
 Erceldoune did not ask, as he sat and dreamt of that 
 memory called up from the depths ot thought and shade ; 
 then he rose with an impatient disdain of himself, and strode 
 out into the white, warm, Mediterranean night. 
 
 Had he refused to surrender his life to any living woman, 
 only to have it haunted by. a mere phantom-shape, an hal- 
 lucination wrought from the fever fancies of a past delirium ? 
 
 The great minister went home ; the gathering at Liramar 
 remained with the hostess Erceldoune with them ; the sea 
 breezes were bringing him back their old force into his 
 limbs, and the mellow air was driving away the danger 
 which for a time had threatened his lungs from the deep 
 chest wound where the ball had lodged. In physics he did 
 not believe he never touched them ; air and sea water 
 were his sole physicians, and under them the fallen Titan 
 rose again. 
 
 1 1 took too much killing ! ' he laughed to one of the men 
 as they drifted down the waters lapping the sunny Sicilian 
 shores, in the brief space which severs the day from the 
 night. He had reported himself ready for fresh service, 
 and the messenger who was to bring the Italian bag to 
 Palermo would deliver him despatches for the Principalities 
 and Asiatic Turkey. Erceldoune was impatient to be on 
 the move, and feel himself in saddle once more ; while in 
 inaction, too, he was no nearer on his quest of those who 
 had attacked his life, and of the one who had saved it. 
 Phantom, hallucination, delirious memory, be it what it 
 would, the remembrance which haunted him, and which he 
 had no single proof was anything more tangible than a 
 fever-born fancy, was strong on him the stronger the more 
 he thrust it away. The woman who had rescued him, and 
 who had since been lost to him in the darkness of mystery 
 and the wide wilderness of the world, he could not recall, 
 gave by such intangible unsubstantiated recollection as had 
 remained to him from unconsciousness ; common reason 
 told him that it could be but a folly which haunted the 
 brain from the visions of his lour: p.eril A hut reason failed to 
 
'AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVES 65 
 
 drive it out, or shake the first impression which had ever 
 wakened or seized his imagination. The idea which pursued 
 him, the face he had painted in the monastic solitude of the 
 convent, had become to him a living reality ; he resisted it, 
 he trampled it out ; not unfrequently he recoiled and 
 shuddered from it, as from the phantasia of impending in- 
 sanity ; but it remained there. Her face rose before him 
 from the sea depths, when he plunged down into the dark 
 violet waves, and let them close above his head ; he saw it 
 with every gorgeous sunset that flushed the skies with fire ; 
 he remembered it with every hour he spent alone lying on 
 the sands, or steering through the waters, or waiting 
 with his rifle for the sea birds on the pine-crowned rocks. 
 He could not banish it ; and he used no sophism or half 
 truths with himself ; he knew that, vision or reality, which- 
 ever it was, it had dominion over him, and that the search 
 he so thirsted to make for his assassins was not more closely 
 woven with his thoughts than the quest of what was but 
 une ombre, un reve, un rien a phantom and a shadow. 
 
 The boat dropped down the Mediterranean that night, 
 while the suri was setting, drifting gently through the blue 
 stretch of the waves, while the striped sails were filled by a 
 west wind that brought over the sea a thousand odours fron/ 
 the far Levant, and the voices of the women idly chanted 
 the ' Ave Maria, Stella Yirgine ! ' Erceldoune was stretched 
 in the bottom of the boat, at the feet of a fair aristocrat, 
 whe leaned her hand over the leeward side playing with the 
 water, and letting the drops fall, diamond bright as her 
 rings, glancing at him now and then the while, and wonder- 
 ing, as she had wondered long at Liramar, what manner of 
 man this was, who confessed himself poor and a mere 
 courier, yet bore himself like a noble ; who had the blood 
 of an ancient race, and the habits of a desert chief, who was 
 indifferent and insensible to all women, yet had, for all, a 
 grave and gentle courtesy for the grape girl among the 
 vineyards yonder, as for her, the patrician and the queen of 
 coquettes, leaning here. He was unlike anything in her 
 world and Lady Greorge would fain have roused in him 
 the forbidden love which she, proud empress though she 
 was, had learned, in her own despite, as her own chastise- 
 ment. 
 
 But Erceldoune lay lookiDg eastward at a lateen uoal; 
 
66 IDALIA. 
 
 cutting its swift track through the waters ; so little had her 
 beauty ever caught his eyes, that he never even knew that 
 he had roused her interest. Vanity he had absolutely none; 
 and as for pride in such uncared-for, unsought victories, he 
 would have as soon thought of being proud that a bright 
 Sicilian butterfly had flown beneath his foot and been 
 crushed by it. 
 
 e How beautifully she cuts her way ! ' he said to the man 
 beside him. ( Look how she dips, and lifts herself again 
 light as a bird ! She will be past us like lightning.' 
 
 Lady George glanced at her rival across the sea ; how 
 strange it was, she thought, that any man should live who 
 could look at a lateen boat rather than at her ! 
 
 ' As with a "bound 
 Into the rosy and golden half 
 Of the sky, 
 
 I suppose,' she quoted listlessly. 
 
 Their own vessel floated lazily and slowly; the lateen 
 craft came on after them, as he had said, turned into a plea- 
 sure boat, and draped with costliness, and laden with a fra- 
 grant load of violets gathered for distilling, piled high, and 
 filling the air with odour. The skiff passed them swiftly 
 half screened by the rich draperies, the tawny sails, and the 
 purple mound of the violets, and turned half from them, 
 and toward the western skies, as the boat flashed past, in 
 the haze of light, he saw a woman. 
 
 With a loud cry he sprang to his feet, the vessel rocking 
 and lurching under the sudden impulse ; he had seen the 
 face of his dreams, the face of his saviour. And the lateen 
 boat was cutting its swift way through the waves, away into 
 the misty purple shadow out. of reach, out of sight. 
 
 ' Neuralgia ? ' said one of the men. ' Ah, that is always 
 the worst of shot wounds.' 
 
 6 You are ill you are in pain ? ' asked Lady George ; and 
 her voice was hurried and tremulous. 
 
 Erceldoune set his teeth hard, his eyes 'straining into the 
 warm haze where the lateen boat was winging her rapid 
 way, out of reach, while their own lay idly rocking on the 
 waves. 
 
 s Pardon me no/ he said, in answer to them, for the 
 man's nature was too integrally true to seek shelter under 
 
'AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE. 9 67 
 
 even a tacit acceptance of an untruth. ' I saw one whom 
 I recognised as having last seen in Moldavia the day the 
 brigands shot me down. I fear that I foolishly startled you 
 all?' 
 
 They thought it nothing strange that any link with the 
 memory of his attempted assassination should have roused 
 him ; and he leaned over the boat's side following the now 
 distant track of the light lateen skiff with his eyes, silent in 
 the wild reasonless joy, and the bitter baffled regret, which 
 swept together through his veins. The face that he had 
 dreamed had bent over him in his anguish and extremity 
 was then a truth, a living loveliness, a life to be found on 
 earth no fever-born ideal of his own disordered brain; he 
 had seen again, and seen now in the clearness of reason, 
 the face of the woman who had been his ministering angel. 
 Yet, as she had been lost to him then, so she was lost to 
 him now ; and as the sun sunk down below the waves, 
 and the sudden southern night fell shrouding the Sicilian 
 boat in its shadows, the phosphor light left in its track, and 
 the odour of its violet freight dying off from the sea and 
 the air, he could have believed he had been dreaming afresh. 
 
 Was he mad ? Erceldoune almost asked himself the ques- 
 tion as he leaned over the vessel's side looking down into the 
 purple shadows of the water. High-born by the beauty of 
 her face, and by the luxury with which that little skiff was 
 decked, how should she have been in the wikl solitudes of 
 the Moldavian forest ? Compassionate to his peril and ex- 
 tremity, would she have cared nothing to know whether death 
 or life had been at last his portion ? and could an act of such 
 noble and pitying humanity have needed the vale of mystery 
 and denial in which it had been shrouded by the serfs' repu- 
 diation of all knowledge that any save themselves had found 
 him? 
 
 Yet the face of which he had dreamed he had seen now 
 in the evening light of the Mediterranean the mere phan- 
 tom of a delirium could not have become vivid and living 
 thus. A heavy oath was stifled in his teeth, as he stood 
 with his eyes strained to pierce the cloudy offing. Why 
 had he not been alone, that a few yards more sail flung 
 out to the winds, and his own hand upon the helm his 
 boat could have given chase down the luminous sea, ancj 
 have swept away with hers, no matter at what cost of sand- 
 reel or of shiD wreck, into that e-olden mist, that twilight 
 
68 ID ALIA. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 
 
 THE pines were tipped with their lightest green, the tor- 
 rents were swollen with the winter rains, the rafts were 
 .rushing, lightning like, down the rivers in the impetus that 
 the spring lends to nature and to labour, to the earth and 
 the human swarm it bears ; primroses strewed every inch of 
 ground under the boughs of the pine- woods ; and the light 
 of the young year was on the solitary hills and ravines as 
 Erceldoune rode once more into Moldavia, through the same 
 defile where his assassins had waylaid him. 
 
 He checked his horse, and wondered if the horrors of 
 that wild night had been all a dream, as he looked down. 
 The tumbling water glistened in the sunlight, the grass had 
 grown in ranker luxuriance where the good bay was laid in 
 her last resting-place ; over the place where he had fallen, 
 bright clusters of spring flowers blossomed among the moss; 
 two records of the night's work alone remained : the black 
 and broken pine trunk that had been flung across the road, 
 and had only been now lifted to one side, and a dark eriia- 
 son stain, where the granite rock had been soaked and 
 crusted with his life's blood, too deeply for even the snows 
 of winter wholly to wash out the shade it left. The most 
 thoughtless man would have felt some shadow of earnest- 
 ness steal on him in such a place, with such a memory ; 
 Erceldoune, though used to meet death in every shape, and 
 too habituated to danger to ever feel its terror, let the 
 bridle slacken on his stallion's neck, and gazed down on the 
 wild ravine round him, with something of solemnity upon 
 him had the shot been one hair's breadth nearer his heart, 
 he had now been rotting there with his dead horse ; had she 
 who had come as his guardian angel been one instant later, 
 his eyes had now been blind to the light of the sun, and his 
 life numbered with the vast nameless multitudes of the 
 grave. 
 
 It was a strange unreal knowledge to the man in whose 
 veins life swept with such eager vivid force, and in whose 
 every breath and every limb strength was so vital, that life 
 and strength both seemed eternal. 
 
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. G:) 
 
 It was very still, here in the depths of the Danubiftn 
 defile ; and in the flood of sunset light he seemed to see the 
 face of the woman he had lost. His heart went out to her 
 with a futile, passionate longing; the pine-boughs that bent 
 over him had shadowed her, the water that foamed at his 
 feet had b(k;n touched by her hand ; here his head had rested 
 on her bosom, here his eyes had looked upward through the 
 mists of agony to hers. The very grasses whispered of her , 
 the very rocks were witness of his debt to her ! 
 
 In madness with himself, in passionate thought of her he 
 dashed the spurs into his horse's flanks, snd swept full gallop 
 down the steep incline. "Was this Love? 
 
 For a woman seen but twice, for a mere memory, for a 
 loveliness, fugitive, nameless, dreamlike, mourned and lost 1 
 
 In the first spring-time of the year, holy Mother Veronica 
 sat in her pleasant little chamber, which was panelled with 
 maple wood, and filled with early flowers, and delicate carv- 
 ings, and the soft-hued heads of saints, and had as little of 
 conventual gloom as though it had been the boudoir in a 
 chateau rather than an Abbess's ' cell ' in Monastica ; for 
 they are no ascetics, but enjoy life in their way, those in- 
 nocent, childlike, sunny-natured nuns of Moldavian Monas- 
 tica. . 
 
 Mother Veronica sat in deep thought, the sun upon hei 
 silvered hair, primroses and an antique vellum ' Hora3 ' lying 
 together in her lap the fresh gifts of Nature with the worn 
 manual of Superstition venerable and happy in her serene 
 old age. The primroses were untouched, the missal lay 
 unread, Mother Veronica was looking out at the blue mouii* 
 tain line, and thinking of the stranger to whom she had 
 felt almost that mother's tenderness which her life had not 
 known, though in her eyes he was godless and a lost sou], a 
 grand I 3 agan whom it was hopeless to save : thinking wist- 
 fully, for she believed, that on earth she would never sec 
 him again. Suddenly she heard in the convent aisle with- 
 out the iron ring of a tread more like that of the Knights 
 Templar, who had once held Monastica, than like the subdued 
 slow step of her order she started and listened ; could it bo 
 that the Virgin had heard her prayers, and allowed her to 
 see the heathen who was, perchance, so wrongly dear to 
 her ? She hardly hoped it ; yet she listened with longing 
 anxiety. It was very sinful to so wish to behold the mere 
 mortal life of a heretic ! 
 
70 ID ALT A. 
 
 But that he was such an infidel, Mother Veronica wholly 
 forgot when the door unclosed, and a Sister ushered in Er- 
 celdoune. 
 
 1 Ah, my son, the blessing of Heaven rest on you ! ' cried 
 the Abbess, stretching out her hands with fervent welcome. 
 ' I never thought to see you here again. It is good very 
 good to have remembered us, and come back from your 
 great world to Monastica ! ' 
 
 ' Far from it, madam,' answered Erceldoune, bending 
 lower to the simple venerable woman than he had ever bent 
 to the patrician coquettes of Liramar. ' It would be sorely 
 ungrateful if I could enter Moldavia without seeing those to 
 to whom I owe it that I am not now rotting in its pine- 
 woods/ 
 
 ' And you are recovered entirely ? ' 
 
 ' Entirely. My strength is wholly returned/ 
 
 Her hands still holding his, Mother Veronica drew him 
 nearer to the light, looking upward at him with as much 
 pride and tenderness as though he had been her son by 
 blood instead of by the mere title of the Church ; then a 
 sudden remembrance lightened her aged face and sunken 
 eyes with all the innocent eagerness of a life which lives in 
 solitude, where each chance trifle is a rare and wondrous 
 event. _ 
 
 ' Ah, my son I forgot I have so much to tell you. I 
 have seen the woman of your picture ! ' 
 
 ' You have / And she ' 
 
 'She saved your life yes; but it is all so strange! 
 Listen I will tell you.' 
 
 4 Do, for God's sake ! And she? ' 
 
 ' O, my son, do not take a holy name in vain for a woman's 
 perishable beauty ! ' said Mother Veronica, with plaintive re- 
 proof, while Erceldoune crushed his heel into the maple-wood 
 floor in a sore effort to contain his soul in patience. ' It 
 was about a month ago that at a Salutation to the Virgin, 
 to which, as you know, strangers come sometimes from 
 Piatra, even sometimes as far as from Eonan and Jassy, I 
 lifted my eyes duriug the service I cannot tell how I came 
 to do so wicked a thing and I saw ah ! I thought I should 
 have fainted ! in the shadow of another aisle, living before 
 me, the glorious beauty that you painted in our altar-piece ! 
 I ne?er sinned so deeply in my life before, but, though I 
 
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. Ji 
 
 never raised my eyes again, I thought of nothing but her 
 all through the' mass. If she tempted me so, how must she 
 have tempted the souls of men ! She is more lovely even 
 than your portrait ' 
 
 * But her name her country ? ' broke in Erceldoune im- 
 patiently. ' Why have withheld from me that she ' 
 
 * My son, I will tell all I know if you do not hasten me/ 
 pleaded Mother Yercnica. ' "When the Salutation was over, 
 Sister Eunice came and told me that a lady sought to see me ; 
 I bade her bring her here, and it was here I saw her the 
 woman of your picture, with those deep marvellous eyes, and 
 that hair which is like light. Ah ! how wicked it is that a 
 mere earthly beauty of form can touch us and win us as can 
 never all the spiritual beauty of the saints. One sees at once 
 that she is of noble rank, and young, but she is a woman of 
 the world too much a woman of the world ! She apologised 
 to me with a proud grace that the base-born never can have, 
 my son (though we ought to believe that the Father has 
 made all equal), and said she came to ask about a stranger 
 who had been succoured by us in the autumn, and been cured 
 of dangerous wounds ; had he suffered much had he been 
 wholly restored ? Then I knew that what we had deemed 
 delirium had been the truth, and that this was she who had 
 saved you ; but I said nothing of that, only answered her 
 fully of your illness and of your cure, and then added to her, 
 as it were carelessly, that in your convalescence you had 
 painted an altar-piece for Monastica would she like to see 
 it ? She assented she has a voice as low and rich as music 
 and I led her to the chapel, and pointed to the Virgin's 
 altar, where it hangs. She went forward and I saw her 
 Start ; she gave a stifled cry, and then stood silent. She 
 could not but see that it was her own beauty. I let her 
 stand awhile, for I thought she was agitated ; then I went 
 forward, and said to her, " He who painted that picture, my 
 daughter, when he left it with me said, e If you ever see a 
 woman whose portrait you recognise in it, she will be the 
 woman to whom I first owed the rescue of my life. Tell her 
 Eulke Erceldoune waits to pay his debt.' My daughter you 
 are she." Her lips quivered a little though she answered me 
 coldly. " He said that ? How could he have known ? 
 how could he have remembered ? " " How well he remem- 
 bered, my daughter," I answered her, "hie painting Bays. 
 
72 ID ALIA. 
 
 Your words confess that you first saved this stranger's life ; 
 why conceal so noble an act of mercy ? " She turned her 
 eyes on mine, half mournfully, half haughtily. " I had due 
 reason. It was little that I did for this English traveller. 
 My hound led me to liim, and I found him, as I supposed, 
 dying left for dead, doubtless, by some forest brigands. 
 I did what I could to revive him it was scarce anything to 
 name and stayed with him while I sent my dog for assist- 
 ance. That was all ; it merited no gratitude, and I had no 
 thought that he would ever know it, since - he was uncon- 
 scious all the time I watched him." " But you were in 
 peril, niy daughter ? If the brigands had returned " Ah, 
 my son, if you could have seen the proud beauty of her face 
 as she smiled on me ! " Is life so beloved a thing, that we 
 must be too great cowards to chance its loss when another 
 is in extremity, and needs us ? " The words were so coura- 
 geous, and yet so mournful ! She is as beautiful as the 
 morning, but I fear she is not happy.' 
 
 Erceldoune paced the little chamber to and fro for a 
 second, his arms folded, his head bent, his heart moved to a 
 strange softness and pain that his life had never known ; then 
 he paused abruptly before the Abbess. 
 
 ' Her name ! Tell me her name 1 ' 
 
 ' Alas, my son ! I cannot.' 
 
 1 Cannot ! Great Heaven ! you never let her go un- 
 known ? ' 
 
 ' Do not be angered, my son. It was not in my power to 
 prevent it ; she chose it ibo remain secret. All I know is, 
 that she let fall a gold perfume-box as she left my cell, and 
 that as I lifted it, and sent Daughter Virginia with it after 
 her, I saw engraven on the lid one word only " Idalia." ' 
 
 He repeated the word with passionate tremulous eager- 
 ness ; it seemed to him the sweetest poem poets could ever 
 dream, the fairest echo that ever the world heard, the treasury 
 of all that womanhood could give of beauty, grace and love, 
 that single Greek name of the woman he pursued ; yet it 
 could serve him in nothing. 
 
 1 Idalia! -Idalia ! That will do nothing to find her ! O, 
 3iy God ! she is lost to me as she was lost in Sicily ! ' 
 
 The words were more full of bitterness than any she had 
 ever heard wrung from him by his physical anguish, while 
 he paced up and down the narrow chamber. 
 
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 73 
 
 ' It is very strange ; but indeed it was no fault of mine/ 
 pleaded the Abbess a little piteously, for she saw that it was 
 a heavy blow to him, and she dreaded alike to see the pain 
 or the wrath of that unchastened Pagan nature, before which 
 the Mother Superior, used only to deal with and chasten or 
 solace the untroubled souls of guileless women, whoseheaviest 
 sin was an omitted prayer, felt helpless. ' And perhaps it is 
 for the best that you should not know where to seek her, for 
 hers is a wondrous sorcery, and it might be a fatal snare ; if 
 it is such a delight of the eyes to me, what might it be to 
 you ? It is not well to see anything of a mere human earthly 
 charm so glorious as that/ 
 
 Erceldoune stretched his hand out with an irrepressible 
 gesture. 
 
 ' But surely you told her, at the least, how great I held 
 the debt I owe to her ? how deeply I felt her humanity, 
 her heroism, her self-devotion to a stranger ? How ' 
 
 ' I told her, my son, that in all your delirium you spoke 
 but of her, and that on awaking to consciousness your first 
 question was for her, even as the first effort of your strength 
 was to paint her own loveliness upon the canvas ; and she 
 heard me silently and seemed profoundly moved that you 
 should have thus remembered her,' pursued innocent Mother 
 Veronica placidly, unwitting in her serenity that she was 
 but * heaping fuel to the burning/ while where Erceldoune 
 leaned in the shadow his face flushed hotly again. Spoken 
 out in the calm words of the Superior, his passionate memory 
 of an unknown womanlooked more wild and more tenderthan 
 he liked that anything of his should look. ' I spoke of you 
 as I felt,' went on Mother Veronica ; ' and she seemed ta 
 like to hear all, which was but natural since she saved youi* 
 life, and found you so cruelly injured in the forest ; though 
 she said that you owed her little, and that the dog had done 
 more for you than she had. She looked long at the paint- 
 ing. " The English stranger has honoured me too much,'* 
 she said at last ; " and so, holy mother, have you. The por- 
 trait my portrait should not be chosen for any altar-piece. 
 Hang it rather in the shadow, with that Gruido's Magdalen." 
 And with those words, my son, she bade me farewell ; and 
 I felt, all sinful though it was to feel such a thing for a mere 
 mortal creature, as though the light had sunk out of Monas- 
 tica when she was gone, Ah ! just such beauty must have 
 
74 IDALIA. 
 
 been tlie beauty of the glorified Dorothea, when she brought 
 the summer roses and the golden fruit of Paradise at mid- 
 night to the stricken unbeliever ! ' 
 
 Erceldoune stood long silent, leaning against the embra- 
 sure, with his head bent ; except under the immediate im- 
 pulse of passion, many words were not natural to him. 
 
 ' Is she married ? ' he said suddenly, after a lengthened 
 
 P ause - -* ^r 
 
 6 1 cannot tell my sont She said nothing of herself. Her 
 
 dress is rich, her manners noble. I know no more. She 
 had many rings upon her left hand ; one of them might be 
 her marriage-ring. That she is not happy, I am certain.' 
 
 Erceldoune crushed a bitter oath to s'ilenee. Not even to 
 know this of her ! 
 
 f Can I see the picture in the chapel ? ' 
 
 ' Surely, my son. Do we not owe it to your art and your 
 gift? 
 
 His step woke the hollow echoes of the arched aisles as 
 it rang on the stone pavements, and he passed into the chapel, 
 far famed through all the Danubian Principalities for its an- 
 tiquity, its riches, and its architecture, which closely resem- 
 bled that of the Bohemian Chancery at Vienna. It was cool 
 and dark and still, the glass stained with deep and glowing 
 hues, the lofty arches stretching on till they were lost in 
 gloom ; and the face of his own painting, with its brilliant 
 light, looked down like that of an angel from out the depths 
 of shade. Thus had he seen her and seen only to lose her 
 once more in the violet shadows and the falling night of 
 the Sicilian seas. 
 
 Erceldoune stood there long, and in silence, as before him 
 a Templar, leal to his monastic oath through half a lifetime, 
 might have stood before the same altar, seeing in the virginal 
 beauty of some sacred artist's painted thought only the 
 loveliness of the woman before whom the asceticism of the 
 soldier, priest, and anchorite had flung down sword and 
 shield and cross, and bowed and fallen. 
 
 The Abbess Veronica looked at him with an earnest sad- 
 ness, then went and laid her hand on his arm : 
 
 ' Do not think so much of her, my son ; it may be she is 
 not worthy of it. A beauty divine she has ; but it is not 
 always in those of fairest form that the divine spirit rests. 
 Ihere is mystery with her \ and where there is mystery, my 
 
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 75 
 
 son, all is not; well. I doubt me if she be what you deem 
 her. The belladona is beautiful ; but living in darkness, 
 and loving the shade, it brings only poison and death. Take 
 to your bosom that flower alone which lives in the clear- 
 ness of light, and folds no leaves unopened from your eyes.' 
 He gave a movement of impatience, but he answered 
 nothing ; it was not in him to take shelter beneath denial, 
 when to give the lie would have been to lie, and he turned 
 and walked up and down the aisle, where, a few months 
 before, the living presence of the woman he sought had been, 
 his tread reechoing through the silent chapel, in which the 
 step of man had never been heard since the days of the 
 Temple Knights. And as he went, pacing slowly to and 
 fro in the religious solitudes, he saw nothing but the face 
 above the Virgin's altar the face of the woman on whose 
 heart he had rested, from whose hand he had drunk the 
 living waters of life, and yet who was lost to him, a stranger 
 and untracked, in the wide wilderness of the world. 
 He stayed that night at Mouastica. 
 The nuns were innocent as children, and though reluctant 
 to receive a male guest, entertained him cheerfully, once 
 admitted. He was reluctant to leave the place where at 
 least one could speak to him of the woman whose memory 
 was so dear where at least her presence once had been, 
 and still seemed to him to sanctify the very stones that she 
 had trodden. Mother Veronica made him welcome with 
 almost a mother's devotedness ; this strong, fiery, lawless 
 heathen, as she held him, had grown very dear to her, and 
 having eased her conscience by warning him, she could no 
 longer resist the temptation, so strong in a monotonous and 
 one-idea'd life, of dwelling on the romance and mystery of 
 the single episode which had broken the even tenor of her 
 days. He listened over and over again to the same words, 
 never wearying of them, for he was in love with his own 
 ideal as utterly as any lad of twenty. In the pause between 
 her religious services, in the hush of the spring-tide, while 
 she walked with him in the still convent gardens,- and at the 
 supper she shared with him in her pretty little cell, with its 
 maple wood, its sunny pictures and its fresh primroses, that 
 had nothing of the recluse, as the meal had nothing of the 
 ascetic in its frothing chocolate, golden honey, milk-white 
 cakes, dainty river-fish, and newly-laid eggs, the Abbess 
 
76 ID ALIA. 
 
 spoke incessantly and garrulously of but one theme. She 
 did penance for the indulgence every ten minutes, it is true, 
 by a gentle little pleading sermon against the desire of the 
 eye, the perishableness of earthly beauty, and the danger 
 of erring idolatry ; but the penance done, she perpetually 
 nullified it by dwelling, in all her innocent unwisdom, on 
 every grace, on every word, on every charm of the woman 
 against whom, nevertheless, she tenderly warned him. Every 
 syllable she uttered heightened a hundredfold the sorcery 
 which his lost saviour's memory had for him, and all her 
 simple warnings drifted past his thoughts unheard. A. child's 
 hand will sooner stop the seas, when they rise in their wrath, 
 than counsels of caution or of prudence arrest the growth of 
 a great passion. 
 
 'Idalia!' 
 
 That solitary word seemed all he could see or hear as he 
 sat in the twilight, while the mist slowly stole over the 
 bright primroses, the sculptured ivory Passion, and the 
 silver I.H.S. that glistened on the draperies of the Mother 
 Superior's peaceful altar, as it had once done on the labarum 
 of the Cpnstantines. 
 
 'Idalia! 3 
 
 It seemed to fill the night, that single name of the shadow 
 he pursued, as Erceldouue stood on the balcony that ran 
 round the convent alone, while all around him slept, while 
 the great forests stretched away on every side into the dark- 
 ness, burying in them the little Swiss-like chalets, in each 
 of which their dwelt, according to Moldavian custom, one 
 nun alone safe in that lonely wilderness, though with, no 
 guardian but her own sanctity. 
 
 The stars were bright, the murmurs of innumerable tor- 
 rents filled the silence, the heavy odours of a million pinea 
 rose up from below, and over the far Danubian plains the 
 woods trembled as though stirred by the shadowy hosts of 
 Persian myriads and of Scythian chiefs, of Eoman legions 
 and of Avar hordes, whose bones had whitened in their 
 eternal sands, and whose graves were locked in their fune- 
 real depths. It was profoundly still, while from the convent- 
 tower the midnight strokes fell slowly, beating out the flight 
 of Time, that in its merciless eternal movement had left of 
 the Great King but the writing on the wall, but the mute 
 atory of Assyrian stones ; and that had swept down, like 
 
THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA. 77 
 
 insects of a summer-day, the mailed and mighty cohorts 
 who once had passed the windings of the Ister, with the 
 shouts of ' Ave Caesar Imperator ! ' proudly heralding the 
 passage of the last Constantine. "Where were they the 
 innumerable Peoples of the Past ? 
 
 Where were they bright Greek and delicate Persian, 
 ravening Hun and haughty Latin, swift Scythian and black- 
 browed Tartar, brute Mogul and patrician Koman, whose 
 bones lay buried there, unmarked, unparted, in the com- 
 munity of the grave ? 
 
 The Danube rolled along its majestic waters, while cen- 
 turies and cycles passed ; sweeping onward under the same 
 suns that once flashed on the diadem of Darius ; flowing in 
 solemn melody through the night under the same stars 
 which the wistful eyes of Julian once studied in the still 
 lonely watches of his tent. The river was living still, dark 
 and changeless, rushing ever onward to the sea ; but they, 
 the fleeting and innumerable phantoms, the Generations of 
 the Dead, were gone for evermore. 
 
 As he stood there in the midnight solitude, it seemed to 
 him as if, in the midst of his virile and adventurous life, he 
 suddenly paused for the first time, and thought itself paused 
 with him : it was because he was for the first time a dreamer 
 for the first time a lover. 
 
 Something of melancholy, of foreboding, were on him ; 
 the world, for once, seemed weary to him ; he wondered why 
 men lived only to suffer and to die. In all his years before 
 he had never felt this ; they had been filled with rapid ac- 
 tion and vigorous strength, finding their joys in the close 
 conflict of peril, in the mere sense of abundant and powerful 
 life, in the victories of an athlete wrestling breast to breast 
 with the lion or bear, and in the swift sweep of a wild gallop 
 through jungles of the tropics or cold crisp dawns of northern 
 moorlands. Now he knew that his life was no longer under 
 his own governance ; now he knew that the vague fantasy 
 of a baseless dream was dearer to him than anything thi 
 earth held. It had its sweetness and its bitterness both : 
 she lived ; she had remembered him ; she was not happy ; 
 this was all lie knew, but it was enough to fill the night 
 with her memory, and from those brief words to build a 
 world. 
 
 His imagination had never awakened before ; but now 
 
78 IDALIA. 
 
 his fancies thronged with dreams, wild as a youth's, vague 
 as a poet's, and dazzling as 
 
 Fireflies tangled in a silver braid. 
 
 Thus, before him, in the Dauubian solitudes, once the battle- 
 field of nations, the Persian of the Immortal Guard had 
 thought of some gazelle-eyed Lydian, seen once, never to be 
 forgot, in the Temple of the Sun ; the wild Bulgarian had 
 felt his savage eyes grow dim with tears of blood when the 
 Byzantine arrow pierced his breast, and he remembered 
 some Greek captive, loved as tigers love, who never again 
 would lie within his arms, and to whose feet he would never 
 bring again the pillage of the palace and the trophies of the 
 hunt ; the E/oman Legionary leaning on his spear, on guard, 
 while the cohorts slept in their black frozen camp, had 
 dreamed of a gold-haired barbarian far away in the utmost 
 limits of the western isles, whom he had loved under the 
 green shadows of fresh Britannic woods, as he had never 
 loved the haughty Homan matron who bore his name where 
 tawny Tiber rolled. Thus, before him, men had mused, in 
 those forsaken solitudes, of the light of a woman's smile, of 
 the softness of a woman's memory, where, standing in the 
 silence of the night, he heard the fall of the torrents thunder 
 through the stillness, and watched the black pines tower up- 
 wards into the star-lighted gloom. Nations had perished on 
 those shadowy battle-plains ; but the same river rolled un- 
 changed, and unchanged the same dreams of passion dreamed 
 themselves away. 
 
 CHAPTER Vil. 
 
 $HE BADGE OF THE SILYEE. IVY. 
 
 IT was midnight and midwinter in Paris, snow lying thick 
 on the ground : dead lying thick in the Morgue ; outcasts 
 gnawing the bones dogs had left, and shivering on church- 
 steps built by pious crowds, who glorified God and starved 
 their brethren ; aristocrats skimming over the ice, flashing 
 their diamonds in the torchlight, warm in their swansdown 
 aud ermine ; wretches who dared be both poor and honest, 
 sleeping, famine-stricken, under bridge-arches, as such a 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 79 
 
 twin insult to a wise world deserved ; philosophers, male and 
 female, who were vile, and got gold, and joliment jouaient 
 leurs mondes, drinking Cote and Khine wines, and laughing 
 at life from velvet couches. It was a bitter icy night, and 
 the contrasts of a great city were at their widest and 
 sharpest, as the chiffonnier searched in the snow for offal 
 as treasure, and the Princess lost in the enow, as a mere 
 bagatelle, wealth in an emerald that would have bought 
 bread for a million ; as a young child, half naked, sobbed, 
 homeless, under the pitiless cold, and a State messenger, 
 wrapped in furs, was rolled in his travelling-carriage through 
 the bright gaslit streets. The Royal courier was lying, 
 stretched nearly at length on his carriage-bed, while he 
 dashed through the capital full speed, not losing a moment 
 to get through to Persia. 
 
 There was plenty of time to sleep while the train tore 
 through the night to Marseilles, and he raised himself on 
 his arm, and looked out at the old familiar welcome streets 
 of Paris ; a mistress for every new-comer, a friend to every 
 well-worn returning traveller, a siren ever fresh, ever dear, 
 ever unyivalled. As he did so, Hie carriage was passing 
 down the Rue Lepelletier and before the Opera, where the 
 doors had just opened for one of those balls to which all 
 Paris proper (or improper) flocks. The throng was great ; 
 the wheel of his carriage nearly locked in another, whose 
 gas-lamps, flashing off the snow, lighted up the face of a 
 woman within, with the azure of sapphires glancing above 
 ^er brow. The Queen's messenger started up from his 
 carriage-couch, and threw himself forward ; his postboy 
 saved the collision, his horses dashed on without a pause. " 
 
 He flung himself* back among his furs, with a fierce bitter- 
 ness in his soul. 
 
 ' Good G-od, again ! and there f * 
 
 The carriage whirled on, leaving the masked throngs to 
 flock to the wild Bigolboche of the Opera. 
 
 That night, under the glitter of a chandelier in the Hotel 
 Mirabeau, before a fire which flung its warmth over the 
 green velvet and walnut wood, the ormulu and silver, the 
 mirrors and consoles of the chamber, two men sat smoking 
 over claret and olives, having dined alone, by a miracle, in 
 the midst of the laughing, dazzling, contagious gaieties of 
 peopled Paris. In these days confederates meet over liqueurs 
 
80 IDALIA. 
 
 and cigarettes, instead of in subterranean caverns ; and con- 
 spirators plan their checkmates in the coffee-room, an opera- 
 box, or a drive to an imperial stag-hnnt, instead of by mid- 
 night, under masks, and with rapiers drawn. 
 
 One of the men was Victor Yane, the other that dashing 
 Free Lance, that Monodist of the Sugared Violet, that poli- 
 tical brigand of the Carpathian Pass, to whom the telegram 
 had been addressed as to the Count Conrad Constantine 
 Thaulcon : a man in physical beauty, physical prowess, 
 talent, wit, and bearing, far the superior of the Englishman, 
 yet whom the latter dominated and held in check, simply 
 by that fine and priceless quality, which is colourless 
 because inscrutable, and irresistible because prevoyant 
 Acumen. It crowns genius and dethrones kings. 
 
 Socially, there was the same anomaly between them. 
 Vane, of whose antecedents none knew very much (except 
 that his mother had been a Venetian, wedded, but not of 
 very fair fame, and his father a decayed English gentleman, 
 chiefly resident in Naples, both of whom had been dead 
 long ago), with no title, with no connections, with a some- 
 what notorious association with the ultra parties of Southern 
 Europe, and with no particular quality of social distinction 
 beyond his perfect breeding, his scientific whist, and his 
 inimitable tact, was, nevertheless, seen at all courts save 
 those of Vienna and the Vatican, and had made himself not 
 only received, but welcomed in many of the best families 
 and highest sets in all countries. Phaulcon, on the other 
 hand, in whose veins ran blood of purest Hellenic breed, 
 who could trace his chain of descent unbroken, who had a 
 marvellous beauty, a marvellous grace, and a marvellous 
 tact, with many other gifts of fortune and nature, was con- 
 traband of courts, had long since been exiled from f good 
 society ; ' and was considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong 
 to the bohemian class of Free Lances, the Chevaliers 
 d'Industrie of politics, the wild lawless Eeiters of plot and 
 counterplot, of liberalism and intrigue, who are the abomi- 
 nation of the English mind (which commonly understands 
 not one whit about them), and are the arch disturbers of 
 continental empires, where the peoples recognise at the 
 bottom of all their schemes and crimes the germ and memory 
 of one great, precious, living truth and treasure Liberty. 
 At the core, both these men were as deeply dyed, and as 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 8 1 
 
 utterly unscrupulous, the one as the other, the only differ- 
 ence being that the one was the more wilily dangerous, 
 the other the more visibly lawless ; both deserved equally to 
 be out of the presence-chamber of princes and the pale of 
 aristocratic cliques, yet Vane was accepted as a man of 
 fashion by the most fastidious, Phaulcon was excluded by 
 the least fastidious as among the ' equivocal.' "What made 
 the difference ? 
 
 Victor would have told again, with his charming low 
 laugh, that when quiet on his lips was always in his sunny 
 eyes, which dazzled women and never met men fairly 
 1 Acumen ! ' 
 
 * 1 cannot imagine how you could miss him ! ' he was say- 
 ing now, breaking a macaroon, with a slight superb disdain 
 in his tone, as of a man who never missed anything. 
 
 1 How should I know ? ' cried Phaulcon, with petulant 
 impatience. ' We fired half a dozen balls at him, the man 
 fell dead, never stirred, never breathed ; who on the face of 
 the earth could imagine he was going to get up again ? ' 
 
 ' Carissimo,' said Vane, with soft persuasion. 4 Why will 
 you persist in that most deleterious habit of trusting to 
 chance, and satisfying yourself with *' appearances " and 
 with " beliefs " ? Nothing more fatal. Always make sure. 
 Just a farewell plunge of an inch of steel into the aorta, 
 and you are always certain.' 
 
 The picture-like beauty of Phaulcon's face reddened with 
 a momentary flush, and he tossed back his long hair. 
 
 ' Parbleu ! one is not an assassin ! ' 
 
 ' Since when have you discovered that ? ' 
 
 The flush grew darker on Count Conrad's forehead ; he 
 moved restlessly under the irony, and drank down a draught 
 of red h'ery Koussillon without tasting it more than if it 
 had been water. Then he laughed; the same careless 
 musical laughter with which he had made the requiem over 
 a violet a laugh which belonged at once to the most 
 careless and the most evil side of his character. 
 
 ' Since sophism came in, which was with Monsieur Cain, 
 when he asked, " Am I my brother's keeper ? " It was in- 
 genious that reply ; creditable to a beginner, without social 
 advantages. " An assassin ! " Take the word boldly by the 
 beard, and look at it. What is there objectionable"? ' * 
 
 ' Nothing except to the assassinated.' 
 
$2 IDALIA. 
 
 ' It has had an apotheosis ever since the world began, 1 
 pursued Phatilcon, unheeding, in his bright vivacity. ' "Who 
 are celebrated in Scripture ? Judith, Samuel, David, Moses, 
 Joab. "Who is a patriot ? Brutus. "Who is an immortal ? 
 Harmodius and Aristogiton. "Who is a philosopher ? 
 Cicero, while he murmurs " Vixerunt ! " after slaying 
 1 Lentulus. "Who is a hero ? Marius, who nails the senators' , 
 heads to the rostne. "Who is a martyr? Charles, who 
 murders Strafford. "What is religion ? Christianity, that 
 has burnt and slain millions. Who is a priest ? Calvin, 
 who destroys Servetus ; or Pole, who kills Latimer, which 
 you like. "Who is a saint ? George of Cappadocia, who 
 slaughters right and left. Who is a ruler? Sulla, who 
 slays Ofella. Who is a queen? Christina, who stabs 
 Monaldeschi ; Catherine, who strangles Peter ; Isabella, 
 who slays Moors and Jews by the thousand. Murderers 
 all ! Assassination has always been deified ; and before it 
 is objected to, the world must change its creeds, its cele- 
 brities, and its chronicles. " Monsieur, you are an assas- 
 sin, 3 says an impolite world. " Messieurs," says the polite 
 logician, " I found my warrant in your Bible, and my prece- 
 dent in your Brutus. What you deify in Aristogiton and 
 Jael you mustn't damn in Ankarstrom and me." Yoila ! 
 What could the world say ? ' 
 
 ( That you would outwit Belial with words, and beguile 
 Beelzebub out of his kingdom with sophistry/ laughed 
 Yane, with a quiet lazy enjoyment. ( Caro, caro ! with 
 such exquisite subtleties in speech, how is it that you are 
 so uncertain in acts, so rash even occasionally, and so 
 just now and then so weak ? ' 
 
 Phaulcon laughed too. 
 
 c Because, intellectually, I am quite a devil, but morally, 
 perhaps, keep a pin's point of humanity still. 1 am 
 ashamed of it, but what would you have ? Achilles could 
 be shot in the heel.' 
 
 And there was the very slightest shadow of bitterness in 
 the words, which showed that there was a ' pin's point,' too, 
 of truth in them. Yane looked at him with his quiet 
 amusement undisturbed. 
 
 'And your delicate susceptibilities will let you shoot a 
 man, but not stab him ? What an artist's eyes for impercep- 
 tible shades of colour ! ' 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 83 
 
 And it was with that gentle mocking banter that he had 
 killed perseveringly and remorselessly killed any linger- 
 ing touches of nobler things, any stray instincts toward 
 holier impulses, that he had found in that unscrupulous, 
 brilliant, lawless Free Lance, who laughed now witli an 
 evil glitter in his eyes, and a sense of ridicule and shame 
 for the single impulse that had moved him with something 
 true and human. 
 
 .' Madre di Christo ! shot or steel, I would have given 
 him either willingly enough when he outwitted us. Curse 
 him ! if ever we come across each other, it shall go worse 
 with him for that trick.' 
 
 6 O no,' interposed Victor languidly. ' 'No, certainly not, 
 let him alone. Never kill save when there is necessity ; 
 besides, any rcw between him and you might draw attention 
 to that little affair, and though we must make the sacrifice 
 of those unpleasant trifles to la haute politique, it does not 
 do for them to get wind. They do not dream we were in 
 it. They have plenty of toy-terriers, and yapping puppies, 
 and truffle-dogs with a good nose for a perquisite at the 
 English Foreign Office, but they have no bloodhounds in 
 the bureau they can't track. Apropos of tracking I 
 tell you who I wish were more completely pledged to us ' 
 
 'Lilmarc, of course. So do I, but he is caution itself; 
 and I believe, on my faith, that a white wand at Vienna 
 would buy up what little Magyar spirit there is in him. 
 He is a fox, with the heart of an ape ! ' 
 
 Lilmarc was the Graf von Lilmarc, a Hungarian noble 
 of splendid possessions, and of wavering aliegiauce now to 
 Austria, and now to his Fatherland. Vane trilled gravely 
 with his olives. 
 
 ' But Lilmarc has one weakness women. Cannot the 
 Countess Vassalis seduce him ? ' 
 
 Phaulcon gave a despairing shrug of his shoulders. 
 
 1 There is no reliance on women ! I don't know what 
 has come to Idalia of late ; she is not herself, and is oftener 
 dead against us now than anything else. I have asked her 
 to make play with Lilmarc ; she might have him in her 
 hands like wax in no time, but she will not ; she is wayward, 
 cold, haughty ' 
 
 ' Perhaps she has taken a lover you know nothing about; 
 said Victor, with a smile in his eyes. He liked his frieno 
 
84 ID ALIA. 
 
 and confederate as well perhaps as any one in the world, 
 but he liked better still tormenting him. 
 
 The blood flushed Pbaulcon's forehead, 
 
 1 If I thought that ' Then he laughed the melodious 
 laugh which was in harmony with the reckless poetic grace 
 of the man's beauty. ' 0, no ! She only sees through us, 
 and has found out that our sublime statue of Liberty has 
 very clay feet. Mbitie marbre et moitie loue, as Voltaire 
 said of the Encyclopedic.' 
 
 'Why do you let her see the clay feet, then ? ' 
 
 ' Why ? Idalia is not a woman that you can blind. You 
 have not seen her.' 
 
 * Unhappily, no ! I have heard men rave of her, as they 
 never raved of anything, I think ; and I know how madly 
 they have lost their heads for her to our advantage. Mi- 
 ladi's loveliness has done more for the cause than half our 
 intrigues. She is now at Naples ? ' 
 
 ' She was ; to-night she is in Paris.' 
 1 In Paris?' . 
 
 * Tes ; I thought you knew it. In half an hour I am 
 going back to take her to the opera ball. Lilmarc is sure 
 to be there, and she must beguile him out of his reticence 
 and caution if she can ; there is not a better place for en- 
 ticing Tannhauser into the Yenusberg than en domino in an 
 opera-box, while all the world is going mad below/ 
 
 * jp'avance, I am jealous both of Lilmarc and of you! ' 
 cried Vane, with that easy worldly serenity to which such 
 a normal and barbaric passion as jealousy seems wholly 
 antagonistic and impossible. ' At last 1 shall see her, 
 then your beautiful Vassalis ! Shall I come with you ? ' 
 
 ' No ; better come up to the box when Lilmarc is not 
 there. If he saw you with her he might take fright and 
 cry off; if you have an ivy spray at your button-hole she 
 will understand and admit you, whether I be there or not. 
 Here ! ' With the words he opened a small long bonbon- 
 box he took from his coat, and tossed Vane one of the little 
 sprays of silver ivy that it held the badge which all those 
 who would be recognised by Idalia, Countess Vassalis, 
 must wear on their dominoes that night. 
 
 ' Thanks/ said Victor, as he slipped it in his waistcoat- 
 pocket. * I shall be there by one o'clock at latest. Idalia 
 this wonderful Idalia ! how often I have missed her, how 
 
THE BADGE OF' THE SILVER IVY. 85 
 
 often I have longed to see her, the fairest conspirator in 
 Europe ! ' 
 
 The Bal de 1' Opera was brilliant, crowded, dizzy, mad 
 with the very insouciant and reckless gaiety of the Prince 
 who invented it, as though the spirit of Philippe d' Orleans 
 still presided over the revelries . Dominoes here, dominoes 
 there ; gold spangles, silver spangles, rose and white, blue 
 and amber, violet and gray, scarlet and black, mock jewels 
 flashing like suns and glancing like stars, ' debar deurs ' and 
 'grands MMs* Pierrots and Scaramouches, white shoulders 
 and black masks, fluttering rosettes and dainty signal-roses, 
 were all pell-mell in glittering tumult and contagious riot ; 
 and Vane, in a domino of imperial blue, with the silver ivy 
 spray fastened on his shoulder, made his way through the 
 crowd, not dancing, not heeding much the invitations, 
 mockeries, and whispers of a score of charming masks, but 
 looking incessantly upward at the boxes. 
 
 He did not see what he looked for ; but he did see, every 
 now and then, till they had numbered more than a dozen, on 
 an Ottoman, on a Knight of Malta, on a Pharaoh, on a Pois- 
 sarde, on a black domino, on a scarlet, on a purple, on a 
 violet, the little spray of ivy like his own, that had come out 
 of Phaulcon's bonbon-box. 
 
 ' Che, che, ch-e-e !' murmured Victor, with the southern 
 expletive. 'Miladi Idalia will have a large gathering. Is 
 she as beautiful as they say ? One would think so to judge 
 by her power.' 
 
 He got as much out of the press as he could, and moved 
 on in silence, heeding nothing of the cancan d'enfer and 
 cliaine du diable dancing round him. He was not a man 
 who cared for noisy dissipations ; they had no sort of attrac- 
 tion for him ; indeed, dissipation at all had not much, unless 
 it were associated with the intricacies of intrigue. Pie cared 
 for nothing that was not ruse. His own life was emphatically 
 so ; he had begun it with serious disadvantages : first, of birth, 
 which, though gentle on one side, was not distinguished ; of 
 fortunes which were very impoverished ; of prospects which 
 were absolutely nil ; of a world in which he had no place, 
 and which had no want of him ; of a temperament that was 
 intensely ambitious, intensely dissatisfied, and intensely spe- 
 culative. Despite all these drawbacks, by dint of tact and 
 finesse, he had now, when he was but thirty, moved for many 
 
#6 WALIA. 
 
 years iu some of the best society of Europe. He lived ex- 
 pensively, though he was very poor ; and he was deferred to, 
 though no one could have said why they gave him such a 
 preference. He had the spirit of the gambler with the 
 talent of the statesman, and he found the world one great 
 gaming-table. He could not be a statesman in his own 
 country ; England would not accept as statesmen what she is 
 pleased to term ' adventurers/ whereby she loses all men of 
 genius, and gets only trained men of business. Hence he 
 had thrown himself, partly in pique, more in ambition, into 
 the interests of a certain ultra political party abroad. Bred 
 in Yenetia, he hated Austria with a cold but very virulent 
 hatred. Kash only in the height and unscrupulousness of 
 his ambitions, he adopted politics or, perhaps, to give them 
 their true and naked name, conspiracies as the scaling- 
 ladder for his own advancement. If all the waters round 
 him were lashed into a tempest, he knew so cautious and 
 tried a swimmer as himself would have a fair chance to come 
 uppermost while other men went down. He loved intrigue 
 for mere intrigue's sake, and power for the simple pleasure 
 of holding it. Serene, sunny, impassive, and even indifferent 
 in bearing, and, indeed, ia temperament, he could seize 
 savagely and hold pitilessly. In deceiving any one Vane had 
 no sort of scruple ; it was only an artistic kind of exercise ; 
 but kill anybody, or provoke anybody, he would not think 
 of doing ; it was a barbaric blundering style of warfare, 
 He never went out of his way in wrath ; but, all the same, he 
 never missed his way to revenge. He had a good deal of 
 ice in his nature ; but it was, perhaps, the most dangerous 
 of ice that which smiles in the sun, and breaks to drop you 
 into the grave. ID the world of fashion Victor was bui a 
 man of fashion popular, very successful with women, an 
 admirable tactician, and a guest who brought his own wel- 
 come everywhere by his easy social accomplishments, and 
 his languid gentle temper, which had over and over again 
 smoothed a quarrel, prevented an embarrassment, hushed a 
 provocation un uttered, and arranged a misunderstanding 
 before jt grew to a rupture. In that world unseen, which 
 revolves under the rose, he was very much more than this, 
 and had a sway and a place of considerable influence in a 
 society of politicians whose members are in all classes and 
 orders, aad whose network spreads more widely and finely 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. &7 
 
 beneath society than society dreams, stretching from Paris 
 to Sicilia, and from the Quadrilateral to the Carpathians, in 
 their restless scheming for the future, and their plans for 
 the alteration of the map of Europe. It was not, however, 
 of the French in Borne, the ' white coats' in Venice, the 
 Muscovites in "Warsaw, or the states of siege in G-alicia, 
 that he was thinking now, as he went through the wild, 
 panting, crushed crowd of dancers at the French opera ; it 
 was of something far fairer, if equally dangerous a woman. 
 
 * Is she here ?' he asked a violet domino, who wore, like 
 himself, the badge of silver ivy. 
 
 * No. Perhaps she will not come, after all.' 
 4 O, yes, she will.' 
 
 * How do you know ? Have you seen her ? ' 
 
 ' No ; I never saw her ; but Conrad has been dining with 
 me, and left me to go and fetch her.' 
 
 The violet domino went on without a word. 
 
 6 He's in love with her, too ; he can't speak of her with- 
 out a tremor in his voice ; and by his voice he is nobody 
 less than Prince Carlo himself,' thought Yane, glancing 
 back at his silver ivy, in apprehension lest it should bo 
 torn off or stolen in the press. ' What can her power be ? 
 Ah, bah! What was that of the L'Enclos? Nobody 
 knew ; but nobody resisted.' 
 
 And he went on, humming to himself Scarron's quatrain j 
 
 ' Elle avait au bout de ses Blanches, 
 Une paire de mains si blanches ; 
 Que je voudrais en verite, 
 En avoir ete soufflete ! ' 
 
 * Ah, there she is ! ' 
 
 The stifled exclamation fell on his ear, low spoken but 
 impulsively passionate, as only a lover's entranced recogni- 
 tion is. He turned, and saw a mask in Venetian costume, 
 to whose shoulder was also fastened the little badge of 
 ivy. 
 
 ' One o us ! Who, I wonder ? He, too, cannot speak 
 of her without betraying himself,' thought Victor, as he 
 swung round quickly and glanced over the boxes. In one 
 of them he saw what he sought, with black laces and azure 
 silks sweeping about her, caught here and there with sprays 
 of silver ivy, a woman masked, who, leaning her arm on the 
 
&3 ID ALIA. 
 
 front of the box, and her cheek upon her hand, gazect down 
 into the tumult of colour and of movement that made up 
 the ball below. Her face was unseen ; but the lips, ex- 
 quisite as the lips of a G-reuze painting, had a certain 
 proud weariness on them ; and in the bright richness of 
 her hair, in the elegance of her hand and arm, in the lan- 
 guor and grace of her attitude and her form, there were 
 sufficient sureties of the beauty that would be seen if the 
 black mask that veiled it were removed. 
 
 The Venetian domino looked at her long, then with a 
 stifled sigh turned away. 
 
 ' You have loved her ? ' whispered Vane. 
 
 The domino started, and glanced at the ivy branch on 
 Victor's arm. 
 
 1 To my cost,' he said bitterly as he plunged among the 
 whirling dancers, and was lost in the spangled and riotous 
 multitude. 
 
 His hearer smiled. A woman who owned a limitless 
 power, and was unscrupulous and without pity in its use, 
 was, perhaps, the only w r oman he was capable of respect- 
 ing. Cold as he was, and but little accessible to anything 
 of passion, for which his blood ran too suavely and too 
 tranquilly, he felt something of warm eager curiosity sweep 
 over him, and his pulse beat a shade quicker with a new 
 expectation. He had long heard of this sorceress ; he had 
 never seen her ; and he threaded his way with impatience 
 through the Arlequins, Pierrots, masks, and costumes till 
 he reached the stairs, and mounted them lightly and rapidly 
 towards the box, opened the door, and entered. 
 
 It was filled with dominoes, all decorated with the silver 
 spray, and all bending towards her with eyes that told 
 their admiration through their masks, and voices that mur- 
 mured flatteries, homage, and wit to an inattentive ear. 
 She lifted her head, and turned slightly as the door un- 
 closed ; her eyes dwelt on him through her mask, noting 
 the badge he wore ; she bowed languidly. 
 
 ' Enter, monsieur.' 
 
 And Victor Vane, all-impassive diplomatist, all ruse man 
 of the world though he was, felt a thrill run through him, 
 and a hot breath seemed to pass sirocco-like over his life 
 as he heard the nameless magic of that melodious lingering 
 voice, and found himself for the first time in the presence 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 8g 
 
 of that Queen of the Silver Ivy who was known as 
 Iclalia. 
 
 Could Erceldoune have seen afar as Surrey saw his mis- 
 tress, the magic glass would not have brought him such 
 secure and happy peace as came with the vision of Greral- 
 dine. Late into the dawn, as the night-express plunged 
 through the heart of France downward to where Marseilles 
 lay beside the southern sea, through the cold clear night, 
 the plains white with sheeted snow, the black and spectral 
 woods, and the sleeping hamlets, with the pointed towers 
 of chateaux and inanoirs rising against the leaden clouds, 
 behind him the city that Julian loved sparkled under a 
 million lights, strangely altered since the days when Julian 
 wrote in adoring phrase of the studious and tranquil re- 
 tirement of his austere and beloved Lutetia. The bright 
 tide of Parisian life was at its gayest in the first hours of 
 the mid- winter morning ; and in one of its richest quarters 
 an opera-supper was at the height of its wit and of its 
 brilliancy. The guests had come from the opera-ball. The 
 dominoes, sparkling with silver violets, gold bees, diamond 
 clusters, and glittering stars, were tossed down on the 
 couches with the Venetian masks, being no tinsel costumes 
 of the Passage des Panoramas, hired for a night, but the 
 silk and satin elegancies of a court costumier, for men who 
 wore these trifles at the masked fetes of the Tuiieries, in 
 the Colonna palace in Carnival, aud at the Veglione with 
 noble maskers of Florence. The supper-room was a long 
 and handsome chamber, hung with rose- silk flowered with 
 silver, with crystal chandeliers, flashing globes of light, 
 and with a meal of the choicest extravagance on the table, 
 about which half a dozen men and but one woman were 
 gathered. 
 
 She alone there at the head of her table, with her 
 bouquet lying idly by her little army of deep claret-glasses, 
 broad champagne goblets, and tiny spiral mousselines for 
 liqueurs was well worth'a host of women less fair. Marie 
 de Eohan when Buckingham and Holland and Lorraine, 
 and all that glittered greatest at two courts, were at her 
 feet, and even the Iron Cardinal, in the censure of his 
 blackest enmity, could not wholly keep his eyes from being 
 dazzled by the shrine of the arch-intriguer's golden hair 
 waa not more beautiful than she. Many would have 
 
go IDALIA, 
 
 added, also, that the Duchesse de Chevreuse was not more 
 dangerous. 
 
 That her form and her face were perfect was not half 
 nor a tithe of her resistless charm ; it lay in still more than 
 these : in every glance of her eyes, blue-black like the ga- 
 zelle's ; in every slight smile that crossed her proud lips ; 
 in all the sunlit lustre on her hair ; in all the attitudes of 
 her southern grace ; in every movement, accent, and ges- 
 ture of one who knew to its uttermost the spells of her 
 power, and was used to have that power courted, flattered, 
 and obeyed. Her loveliness was very great ; but, great as 
 it was, it was comparatively forgotten beside so much that 
 was of still rarer fascination : the patrician ease, the silver 
 wit, the languor and the laughter, the dignity and the non- 
 chalance, the brilliance and the eloquence, which turn by 
 turn gave their changing sorcery to her. The innocence 
 and fawn-like shyness of a young girl in her earliest spring 
 may be charming in a pastoral ; but in real life they are 
 but awkward and tame beside the exquisite witchery, tho 
 polished insouciance, the careless disdain, the cultured 
 fascination of a woman of the world. And these were 
 hers in their utmost perfection ; a woman of the world she 
 was in the utmost meaning of the words, and all of victory, 
 of power, and of beguilement that the world could give 
 were added to the beauty of Idalia, Countess Yassalis. 
 
 Men passing her in the open air gazed after her, and 
 felt a sudden giddy worship for what they only saw one 
 moment to lose the next ; men who held themselves, by 
 age or coldness, steeled to all the glamour of her sex, fell 
 before her. A few low lingering words from her lips, a 
 breath of fragrance from her laces, the disdain of her deli- 
 eate scorn, the caress of her soft persuasion, the challenge 
 of her haughty indifference, the sorcery of her sovereign 
 smile these at her will did with men as they would : in- 
 toxicated them, blinded them, wooed them, bound them, 
 subdued their will, their honour, and their pride ; fettered 
 their senses, broke their peace, gave them heaven, gave 
 them hell, won from them their closest secret, and drew 
 them down into the darkest path. A power wide and 
 fatal ; a power that she was said, and justly, to have used 
 with little scruple. "Who was she, what was she, this 
 beautiful enchantress ? 
 
THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY. 91 
 
 In one word she was ' Idalia.' 
 
 Her supper-room perfumed, mellowly lighted, served 
 without ostentation or display, yet, in truth, as extrava- 
 gantly as any court banquet, with summer fruits though 
 it was mid -winter, with wines imperial palaces could not 
 have eclipsed, with hookah-tubes curled through the arms of 
 the lounging-chairs, and lazily floating in their great bowls 
 of rose-water was sought with that eagerness for the en- 
 tree which is only found when, for far different attractions, 
 men seek either the salons of a princess of the ton or of 
 an empress of the demi-monde, the legitimate leader of the 
 aristocracies, or the yet more potent lawgiver, Anonyma. 
 There was a cosmopolite gathering about her table ; the 
 Prince of Yiana, a Neapolitan; the Count Phaulcon, a 
 Greek ; the Graf von Lilmarc, a. Hungarian ; the Marquis 
 de Beltran and the Marechale d'lvore, both of Paris ; and 
 one Englishman, Victor Vane. Here, at three o'clock in 
 the morning, with the wine just flushing their thoughts 
 with its warmth, and the scented smoke of the narghilis 
 curling out in languid aerial clouds, they supped a la 
 JR.egr.nce with ouf? ot the fairest women of her time ; and 
 she, lying bach, with her Titmn-hke draperies floating out 
 like the deep hu'ed plumage of some tropic bird, toying 
 with her bouquet of rose japonicas, stooping her lips to 
 tho purple depths ol her Kousillori, or the light sparkles of 
 her Moselle, giving her .siniit; to one, her wit to another, 
 letting the wine stft&J tho caution from their .speech, and 
 the frngraut vapour charm the secrets from their heart, 
 knew that her beauty drew them down into its charm and 
 chain, her creatures and her captives, and let the revelry 
 Hash on around her, brilliant as the aiglettes in the dis- 
 carded dominoes; and, while they supped with her in the 
 dawn of the Paris morning, weighed them each and all at 
 their worth. 
 
 Like the jewels that glistened pbove her fair fore- 
 head, they had DO value in her eyes save this what 
 they were worth. 
 
 Yet, if ever there were OD any face, there were in hers, 
 a haughty power in the arch of the classic brows, a 
 generous grace in the smile of the proud lips, a fearless 
 dignity in the gaze of the long lustrous eyes. Looking on 
 her, he who should have had force to resist her beauty 
 
92 IDALIA* 
 
 would have still said, ' If this star have fallen from heaven, 
 it is great still even in it fall.' 
 
 The Lost Pleiad of fable may sink downward through 
 the darkness of an eternal night, and become one of the 
 women of earth, earth- stained, earth-debased, but the 
 light of forgotten suns, the glory of forsaken worlds, will 
 be upon her still. It might be so here. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 * PASSION EOEN OF A GLANCE.' 
 
 "WiTH his rifle resting against his knee, its butt bedded 
 in the moss, Erceldoune sat alone a few months later on, 
 in the warm Turkish night, on the Bosphorus shores. He 
 had been shooting sea-gulls, jackals, or a stray hill deer, if 
 such came within range, through the last half of the day, 
 while waiting for return despatches in Constantinople, and 
 was now resting on a boulder of rock under a cypress, in 
 his white burnous and sun-helmet, the Monarch, a fine 
 English chestnut, straying loose at his side, a pile of dead 
 game at his feet, and the starlight full on his face, as his 
 eyes looked seaward thoughtfully. 
 
 A year had gone by since he had stood before the altar- 
 piece in Monastica, and he was no nearer to either aim of 
 his twofold quest. Power, patience, vigilance, inquiry all 
 had failed to bring him on the track of his assassins ; 
 masked nobles, reckless adventurers, political secret agents, 
 whichever they were, they had had wit and wisdom to 
 organise their plot so that no trace was left of it and them, 
 and they were beyond all reach of justice, as it seemed, 
 for ever. And of the woman, to whom his only clue was 
 the fairness of her face, he had learned nothing. Shadowy, 
 fugitive, lost in mystery, fantastic as a madman's dream, 
 the hold she had gained upon his thoughts was so utterly 
 foreign to them that it was the stronger once admitted 
 there. Speculation was wholly antagonistic to him his 
 nature was forcible, single, vigorous ; that he acted greatly 
 when great occasions arose, was due to the mould in which 
 his character was naturally cast, not to any premeditation 
 
'PASSION BORN OF A GLANCES 93 
 
 nr previous contest and sifting of principles ; he lived, as 
 All bold men do, meeting accident or emergency as it came, 
 content with the activity of the present, looking very 
 rarely to anything past, never to anything future. To sift 
 moral problems, to torture himself with theoretical 
 questions, was what would no more have occurred to Ercel ., 
 doune than to have sat twisting ropes of the Bosphorue 
 sand; hence the poetic unreality of the memory which 
 possessed him was so abhorrent and antagonistic to his 
 whole temperament that it gave a deeper colouring to his 
 life, once received, than it would have done to any other to 
 which it had been less alien. Mental disquietude, moral 
 tumult, were unknown to him ; a shadowy pursuit, a 
 speculative meditation, were no more in consonance with 
 his character than it would have been to study the stars 
 for Chaldean knowledge of things obscure. Therefore it 
 was with the stronger force and the more unbelief that 
 Erceldoune felt that a well-nigh mythical mystery had 
 power over him, and touched his heart, and stirred his 
 thoughts, as no living woman had ever done through the 
 varied course of his life. 
 
 So sacred had the vision of his ministering angel become 
 to him, so intimately interwoven with holiness, loftiness, 
 purity, with the compassion of the luminous eyes, and the 
 hush of the convent solitudes where her picture hung, that 
 to have seen her at the entrance of the Opera had given 
 him a sharp and unwelcome recall to the fact of how 
 utterly he followed a phantom ; how utterly he knew 
 nothing of the woman who had wound herself into his 
 thoughts. 
 
 The face which he had seen in the haze of golden light, 
 in what he had deemed his dying hour, the loveliness that 
 he had found afresh, only fresh to lose it, in the softness of 
 the Sicilian seas, among the heat, the noise, the maskers, 
 the false brilliants, false flowers, false laces, false beauty 
 of the Eigolbochade ! it gave Erceldoune a bitter re- 
 vulsion. True, there might be nothing in it to do so; she 
 might go thither, not to the lawless whirl of the stage, but 
 simply to the" boxes as a spectator of the scene below ; he 
 knew this was common enough with proudest and purest 
 of women. Still, it revolted him ; Ins memory of her, his 
 belief in her, was as of a life as unlike and as above the 
 
94 WALIA. 
 
 world, as the stars that shone now across the sea above the 
 classic shores where old Olympus rose. It was an instinct, 
 Jan impulse, a folly, never analysed, only felt; but to think 
 ' of her, in the gas and throngs of the masked midnight 
 'gathering, had given him much such a shock as an artist, 
 ! soul-devoted to his art, would feel if he could come sud- 
 1 denly on a E/aphael or Correggio Madonna made the sign 
 and centre of a riotous casino, or flung by a drunken 
 soldier as .worthless loot into the flames of a bivouac fire. 
 This woman, all unknown though she was, had become the 
 single poetic faith, the single haunting weakness of a pas- 
 sionate and earnest temperament, of a changeful and self- 
 sustained life ; to have seen her at the Bal de 1' Opera 
 grated jarringly on both. 
 
 He thought of it now, and the thought was" full of tem- 
 pestuous (pain to him ; to find in her a leader of the arti- 
 ficial worlds of fashion ; a coquette, worn, brilliant and 
 chill as her own diamonds, with every smile a beautiful lie, 
 with every glance a demand for accustomed homage, would 
 be scarce better than to find in her one of the cancan wor- 
 shippers of the Opera throng, a debardeur in rose and 
 silver, laughing through her velvet mask of Venice ! Of 
 all places, of all hours, were there none in the width of the 
 world, in the vastness of time, to have found her in at the 
 last than at midnight in the Rue Lepelletier ? Who was 
 she? What. was she this phantom which pursued him ? 
 He wandered restlessly, as he did often in lonely moments 
 like these, while he sat looking down the Bosphorus as the 
 lights gleamed in the distance among the cypress and 
 orange groves of the city of the Moslem, and the far-off 
 cry of the Imaum wailed deep and mournful through the 
 silence, chanting the evening prayer 01 the faithful. 
 
 As he sat thus he did not notice or hear a man approach 
 him on horseback, riding slowly along the sea-shore, un- 
 armed, and lightly chanting a little French air a hand- 
 some, careless, graceful Greek, whose saddle reveries 
 seemed of the lightest and brightest as he swayed a bunch 
 of Turkish lilies idly in his hand. His roan mare's hoofs 
 she was a Barbary sank noiselessly in the sands ; and 
 Erceldoune did not lift his head ; he sat motionless under 
 the cypress, resting on his rifle, which the starlight falling 
 fitfully on the white folds of the Arab cloak and the 
 
'PASSION BORN OF A GLANCES 95 
 
 Benibrandt darkness of his face, as Ms head was bent 
 down and his eyes gazed seaward. The rider came nearer, 
 the hoofs still noiseless on the loose soil ; and the hummed 
 song on his lips broke louder, till he sang the words clearly 
 and mellowly on the air, in the mischievous truth of 
 Dufresny's chanson : 
 
 * Deux epoux difc un grand oracle, 
 
 Tout d'mi coup deviendront heureux, 
 
 Quand deux epoux, pas un miracle, 
 Pourront devenir veufs touts deux.' 
 
 The voice fell on Erceldoune's ear, rich, harmonious, 
 soft as a woman's contralto the voice that had given the 
 word to ' kill the Border Eagle.' He started to his feet, 
 flinging back his burnous ; in the silvery silent Eastern 
 night they met once more, and knew each other at a 
 glance. There is no instinct so rapid and so unerring as 
 the instinct of a foe. With an oath that rang over the 
 seas, Erceldoune sprang forward, as lions spring, and 
 covered him with his rifle ; swift as an unconsidered 
 thought, Phaulcon wheeled and dashed his spur into his 
 mare's flanks, which sprang off at a headlong gallop a 
 hundred paces in advance by that second's start. In an 
 instant the other caught at the loose rein of his English 
 horse, flung himself into saddle at a leap, and tore down the 
 Bosphorus shore, his rifle levelled, the bridle between his 
 teeth, the Monarch racing at full speed. They were in 
 chase, the pursuer and the pursued. 
 ' Halt ! or you are a dead man.' 
 
 The challenge rolled through the night out and away to 
 the Bosphorus. The sole answer of the Greek was to dash 
 the rowels again into his roan's sides, and tear on without 
 other thought than flight, tasting all the long bitterness of 
 death with every time that the beat of the gallop grew 
 closer behind him, with every moment that the shriek of the 
 bullet might whistle down on the wind and the shot pierce 
 his heart from the hand he had once thought picked bare to 
 the bone by the vultures, and buried safe in Moldavian 
 snows. 
 
 The blood coursed like fire through Erceldoune's veins, 
 every muscle in him strained like those of a gallant hound 
 in chase ; he longed, as the hound longs, to be at the throat 
 of his flying foe ; he had a mortal debt to pay, and a deadly 
 
96 ID ALT A. 
 
 wrath to pay it with ; the life of his murderer lay at his 
 mercy, and he panted with brute thirst, perhaps to take 
 it, and trample it out on the sands in a just and pitiless 
 vengeance. Yet he did not fire. 
 
 All that was boldest and truest in him refused to let him 
 do as he had been done by forbade him to shoot down an 
 unarmed man. 
 
 With the hoofs now thundering loud on barren rock, now 
 scattering in clouds the loosened sand, now trampling oub 
 the fragrance from acres of wild myrtles and basilica, he rode 
 on in hot close chase, the bridle held in the grip of his teeth, 
 his rifle covering his assassin, while Conrad Phaulccn fled for 
 his life. A single shot, from an aim which never missed, 
 and the coward would be slain as he would have slain, would 
 die the death that he would have dealt ; a single ball sent 
 screaming, with its shrill hiss, crash through his spine, and 
 he would drop from the saddle dead as a dog. The Greek 
 knew r that as well as the man who held his life in his hands, 
 to take it when he would ; and the sweat of his agony ga- 
 thered in great drops on his brow, the horror of his death- 
 blow seemed to him to quiver already through all his limbs, 
 and as he turned in his saddle once, once only, he saw the 
 stretching head of the Monarch within fifty paces, the face 
 of his pursuer stern and dark as though cast in bronze, and 
 the long lean barrel of steel glistening bright in the moon- 
 light, lifted to deal him the fate he had dealt. 
 
 Onward while the chant of the Muezzin grew fainter 
 and fainter, and the lighted mosques of Stamboul were left 
 distant behind ; onward through the night, lit with a mil- 
 lion stars, and all on fire with glittering fire-flies ; onward 
 down the beach of the luminous phosphor-radiant sea, along 
 stretches of yellow sand, under beetling brows of granite, 
 over rocky strips foam-splashed with spray, through fields of 
 sweet wild lavender, and roses blowing rich with dew, and 
 tangled withes of tamarind tendrils, and myrtle thickets 
 sloping to the shore, and netted screens of drooping orange 
 boughs, all white with bloom ; onward they swept hunter 
 and hunted in a race for life and death. 
 
 The G-reek was always before him ; now and again they 
 well-nigh touched, and the foam from his horse's bit was 
 flung on the steaming flanks of the inare he chased; DOW 
 and again the dull thud of the hoofs thundered almost side 
 
PASSION BORN OF A GLANCES 97 
 
 by side as'they scattered sand and surf, or trampled out the 
 odorous dews from trodden roses. His enemy's life lay in 
 the hollow of his hand; he saw the womanish beauty of 
 Phaulcon's face, all white and ghastly with a craven terror, 
 turned backward one instant in the light of the moon, and a 
 fierce delight, a just vengeance heated his senses and throbbed 
 in his veins. He panted for his foe's life, as he hunted him 
 on through the hot Asian night, as the lion in chase may 
 pant for the tiger's ; all the passions in him, rare to rise, 
 but wild as the wildest tempest when once roused, were at 
 their darkest, and the creed which chained them, and forbade 
 him to fire on a man unarmed, served but to make each 
 fibre strain, each nerve strengthen, with the fiercer thirst to 
 race his injurer down, and side to side, man to man hurl 
 him from his saddle and fling him to earth, held under his 
 heel as he would have held the venomous coil of a snake, 
 imprisoned and powerless, till its poisonous breath was 
 trodden out on the sands. 
 
 They rode in hard and fearful chase, as men ride only for 
 life and death. 
 
 The surf flashed its salt spray in their eyes as they 
 splashed through the sea-pools girth deep in water ; startled 
 nest-birds flew with a rush from bud and bough, as they 
 crashed through the wild pomegranates; white winged gulls 
 rose up with a shrill scream in the light of the moon, as the 
 tramp of horses rang out on the rocks, or scattered the 
 sands in a whirling cloud. There was a savage delight to 
 him in the breathless ride, in the intoxication of the odours 
 trampled out from trodden roses and crushed citrons, in the 
 fierce vivid sense of living, as he swept down the lonely 
 shore by the side of the luminous sea, hunting his murderer 
 into his lair ; the wolf in its own step'pes, the boar in its 
 own pine-forests, the tiger in the hot Indian night, the lion 
 in the palm-plains of Libya ; he had hunted them all in their 
 turn, but he had known, no chase like that he rode now, 
 when the quarry was not brute, but man. 
 
 The snorting nostrils of the Monarch touched the flanks 
 of the straining Barbary, the hot steam of the one blent 
 with the blood-flaked foam of the other. They raced to- 
 gether almost side by side, dashing down a precipitous ridge 
 of shore, entangled with a riotous growth of aloes and 
 oleander : Erceldo^ae saw his assassin was making for some 
 
 H 
 
gS ID ALT A. 
 
 known and near lair, as a fox hard pressed heads for covert, 
 and he thundered on in hotter and hotter pursuit, till the 
 steel of the rifle glittered close in Count Conrad's sight as he 
 turned again, his face livid with terror, and the breath of 
 the horse that was hunting him down scorching and noxious 
 against his cheek, like the breath of the bloodhound on the 
 murderer's. There were barely six paces between them, 
 crashing headlong down the sloping ridge, and through the 
 cactus thickets ; as he turned backward, with that dastard 
 gesture of pitiful despair, they looked on one another by 
 the white light of the moon, and the womanish fairness of 
 the Greek's face was ghastly with a coward's prayer, and the 
 dark bronze of his pursuer's was set in deadly menace, in 
 fierce lust of blood. Phaulcon knew why, with that lean 
 tube flashing in the starlight, he was still spared ; he knew, 
 too, that once side by side in fair struggle, he would be 
 hurled from his saddle, and crushed out under a just retribu- 
 tion, till all life was dead, as pitilessly, as righteously as men 
 crush out the snake whose fangs have bit them. 
 
 And the pursuit gained on him. Erceldoune rode him 
 down, dashing through the wilderness of vegetation, with 
 the surf of the sea thundering loudly below, and a loathing 
 hate, a riotous joy seething through his veins. The horses 
 ran almost neck by neck now, nothing between them and the 
 billows lashing below but a span's breadth of rock and a frail 
 fence -of cactus. One effort more, and he would be beside 
 him. The wild bloodshot eyes of the mare were blinded with 
 the foam flung off the Monarch's curb, and his own arm was 
 stretched to seize his assassin and hurl him out to the waters 
 boiling, beneath, or tread him down on the rock under his 
 feet, while he wrung out his confession in the terror of 
 death. He leaned from his saddle ; his hand all but grasped 
 his enemy in a hold Phaulcon could no more have shaken 
 off than he could have the grip of an eagle, or the fangs of a 
 lion : he was even with him, an<} had run him to earth in 
 that wild night-race down the Asian shore. Then suddenly, 
 with a swerve and a plunge as the spurs tore her reeking 
 flanks the mare was lifted to a mad leap, a wall of marble 
 gleaming white in the starlight, and rising straight in face 
 of the sea ; she cleared it with a bound of agony, and the 
 dull crash that smote the silence as she fell, told the price 
 with which she paid that gallant effort of brute life. His 
 foe was lost 1 
 
'PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE. 9 99 
 
 A fierce oath broke from his lips and rang over the seas. 
 As he put the Monarch at the leap, he reared and refused 
 it ; a second was already lost, an eternity in value to him 
 whom he pursued. His face grew dark all that was worst 
 in him was roused and at its height ; he wheeled the hunter 
 and rode him back, then turned again and put him full 
 gallop at the barrier, nursing him for the leap ; the marble 
 wall rose before them, clothed with the foliage of fig and 
 tamarisk trees ; he lifted the horse in the air, cleared the 
 structure, and came down on the yielding bed of wild 
 geranium that broke the sheer descent. 
 
 On the ground lay the Barbary mare, panting and quiver- 
 ing on her side : the saddle was empty. 
 
 A darkness like the night came upon Erceldoune's face 
 as he saw that his enemy had escaped him a darkness 
 closely and terribly like crime on his soul. 
 
 Wolf, and boar, and lion, he had chased them all to their 
 lair, and brought them down, now and again, a thousand 
 times over, by the surety of his shot, by the victory of his 
 strength. His secret assassin hunted and run to earth, at 
 his mercy and given up to his will through the whole length 
 of that race down the Bosphorus waters, had outstripped 
 nis speed, had baffled his vengeance, and was let loose again 
 on the world with his name unconfessed, with his brute 
 guilt unavenged, lost once more in the solitudes of the night, 
 in the vastness of the Ottoman empire! A second more, 
 and his hand would have been at the throat of this man : he 
 would have hurled under his feet the dainty silken beauty 
 of the coward who was thief and murderer in one, and 
 would have crushed the truth from his throat and the craven 
 life from his limbs under the iron grind of his heel, giving 
 back vengeance as great as his wrongs. A second more, 
 and the traitor who had laughed with him in good fellowship 
 in the Parisian cafe, and butchered him in cold blood in the 
 Danubian solitudes, would have answered to him for that 
 work. Now the Barbary mare lay riderless at his feet, and 
 before him, around him, stretching dim in the distance, were 
 thickets of myrtle, labyrinths of cactus, dense groups of 
 oleander, of palm, of pomegranate, where his quarry had 
 headed for a known covert, or had found one by chance, and 
 from which it was as hopeless to draw him again as to un- 
 earth a fox once outrun the hounds* scent, or pursue a stag 
 that had once swam the loch. , H 2 
 
*->0 ID ALIA. 
 
 A curse broke again from Erceldoune's lips, that the dis- 
 tant wail of the Imaum seemed to mock and fling back, as 
 he rode the Monarch headlong down into the wilderness of 
 shrubs and flowers, trampling the boughs asunder, crushing 
 luscious fruit and odorous blossom under the horse's hoof's, 
 searching beneath the shadows and under the tangled aisles 
 of foliage for the dastard who must be refuged there ; one 
 dusky glimpse of a crouching form, one flash of the starlight 
 on a hidden face, and he would have fired on him now with- 
 out a moment's check ; his blood was up, his passions were 
 let loose, and the Greek might as well have sought for leni- 
 ency from the jaws of a panther as for mercy from Erceldoune 
 then, had he ridden him down in his cover and dragged him 
 out in the still Eastern night. 
 
 He rode furiously hither and thither through the thickest 
 glades, and where the shadows were deepest, searching for 
 that to which he had no clue, in chase of a quarry which 
 every turn he missed, every clump of shrubs he passed, 
 every screen of aloes whose spines his horse refused to 
 breast, might hide and shelter from his vengeance. Nothing 
 met his eye or ear but the frightened birds that flew from 
 their sleep among the piles of blossom, and the shrill hiss of 
 the cicada, scared from its bed in the grasses. In the leafy 
 recesses and the winding aisles of those hanging gardens 
 overlooking the Bosphorus, a hundred men might have been 
 secreted, and defied the search of one who was a stranger to 
 the ground, and was cheated at every turn by the fantastic 
 shadows of the moonlight and the palms. His foe had 
 escaped him ; before the dawn broke he might have slipped 
 down to the shore and be far out at sea beyond the Darda- 
 nelles ; or, if the gardens were the known lair for which he 
 had purposely headed in the race along the beach, he would 
 be safe beyond pursuit wherever he made his den. 
 
 Erceldoune dropped the bridle on the chestnut's neck and 
 let him take his own pace ; a terrible bitterness of baffled 
 eifort, of foiled wrath was on him a passion, like a weapon 
 which recoils, hits the one who holds it hard. This man's 
 life had been in his hands, and had escaped him ! and the 
 unexpiated vengeance rolled back on his own heart, fierce, 
 heavy, dark, almost as though it were twin-crime with what 
 it hacl hitherto failed to punish. A night-assassin, only of 
 the viler stamp because of the gentler breed, went through 
 
'PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE. 1 107 
 
 the world unbranded and unpunished, while honest men 
 died by the score of cold and famine in the snows of Cau- 
 casus and the streets of cities ! Erceldoune' s teeth ground 
 together ; when they met again, he swore it should be for 
 shorter shrive and deadlier work. 
 
 The Monarch, with his head drooped and the steam 
 reeking from his hot flanks, took his own course over the 
 unknown ground, and, turning out of the thickets, paced 
 down a long winding aisle of cedars : the night was perfectly 
 still, nothing was heard but the surging of the Bosphorus 
 waters, nothing was stirring save the incessant motion of 
 the fire-flies, that sparkled over all the boughs with starry 
 points of light. Erceldoune had no knowledge where he 
 was, except that the sea was still beside him, and he let his 
 horse take his own way. Suddenly, through the dark masses 
 of the cedars, a light gleamed, which came neither from the 
 fire-flies nor from the moon, but from the Turkish lattice- 
 work of a distant casement. 
 
 Was that where his foe had found covert ? He raised 
 the Monarch's drooping head with the curb, and urged him 
 at a canter down the cedar aisle, the noise of the hoofs 
 muffled in the grass that grew untrimmed, as though the 
 wild luxuriance of the gardens had long been left untouched. 
 Sultan's palace, Queen's serail, sacred mosque, or Moslem 
 harem, he swore to himself that he would break, down its 
 gates, with the menace of England, and have his murderer 
 delivered up to him, though he were surrounded by an Emir's 
 eunuchs or harboured in the sanctuary of the Oda itself. 
 Eor anything that he knew, the light might glitter from the 
 dwelling where his enemy and all his gang had made strong- 
 hold, or the place might swarm with Mussulmans, who 
 would think there was no holier service to Allah than to 
 smite down the life of a Erank, or the latticed window might 
 be that of a seraglio, into whose anderun it was death for a 
 man and a Giaour to enter. But these memories never 
 weighed with Erceldoune: he was armed, his blood was up, 
 and, if his foe were sheltered there, he vowed that all the 
 might of Mahmoud, all the yataghans of Islam, should not 
 serve to shield him. 
 
 A flight of steps ending the cedar-walk stopped the chest- 
 nut's passage ; above ran a terrace, and on that terrace 
 looked the few lattice casements allowed to a Turkish dwell- 
 
102 IDALtA. 
 
 ing, whose light from within had caught his eyes. He threw 
 himself out of saddle, passed the bridle over a bough, and 
 went on foot up the stairs. Erceldoune's rifle was loaded ; 
 he had on him, too, the hunting knife with which he had 
 grallocked the hill deer ; and he went straight on into the 
 den of the assassins, as he believed. Foolhardy he was not ; 
 but he had found sinew and coolness serve him too well in 
 many an avatar, east and west, not to have learned to trust 
 to them, and he had resolved, moreover, to go through with 
 this thing cost what it might, bring what it would. 
 
 He hurried on the terrace, laden with the scarlet blossoms 
 of the trumpet-flower and japonica, and heavy with odours 
 from the nyctanthus and musk-roses trailing over the stone ; 
 a door stood open on to it, leading into the large court 
 which forms the customary entrance of a Turkish house ; he 
 paused a moment and looked through ; there was only a dim 
 light thrown on its walls and floor, and there was no sound 
 but of the falling of the water into the central fountain. 
 He passed the threshold and entered, the clang of his step 
 resounding on the variegated mosaic of the pavement : its 
 own echo was the only sound which answered for its still- 
 ness the place might have been deserted. But the court 
 opened into a chamber beyond, flooded with warm, mellow 
 light, its domelike ceiling wreathed with carved pomegran- 
 ates, while another fountain was flinging its shower upward 
 in the centre, and the fragrance of aloes wood filled the air 
 from where it burned, like incense in a brazier ; a picture, 
 full of oriental colouring. "With his rifle in his hand, his 
 white burnous flung behind him, and his single thought the 
 longing which possessed him to unearth his foe, and have 
 his hand upon his throat, he swept aside the purple dra- 
 peries that partially shadowed the portico, and passed within 
 the entrance. 
 
 A woman rose from her couch in the distance, startled, 
 yet with the look of one who disdains to give its reins tc 
 tear as a sovereign would rise were her solitude desecrated ; 
 and he paused, his steps arrested and his passions silenced, 
 as in ancient days he who came to slay in the deadliness of 
 wrath uncovered his head and dropped his unsheathed sword, 
 entering the holy shrine at whose altar his foe had taken 
 sanctuary. His enemy was forgotten he stood before 
 Idalia. . . . . 
 
PASSION BORN OF A GLANCJS. 103 
 
 He saw her in the flood of amber light that fell upon the 
 lustre of her hair, on the white folds of her dress with its 
 hem of gold, on the scarlet blossom of the roses clustering 
 about her feet, on the aromatic mist of the aloe wood burn- 
 ing near and in an instant he had crossed the marble that 
 severed them, his head uncovered, his hand disarmed, his 
 eyes blinded. 
 
 1 At last! at last!' 
 
 And he had never known how strong had become the 
 power, how eager had grown his quest, of the memory which 
 had pursued him, until now, when he bowed before her, 
 when his lips were on her hand, when a hot joy that he had 
 never known swept through his life, when in that sudden 
 meeting his gaze looked upward to the face which had 
 mocked him a thousand times, from the blue depths of sea 
 waves, in the tawny stretch of Eastern plains, in the still- 
 ness of starry nights and the darkness of convent aisles, and 
 now at length was found. 
 
 She drew herself with haughty amazed anger from him ; 
 she saw her solitude violated by the abrupt entrance of an 
 armed man when the night was so late that the chant of the 
 Imaum was calling to prayer ; she saw a stranger, by his 
 dress an Arab, bend before her in homage that was insult. 
 She wrenched herself away, and signed him back with a 
 gesture too grand in its grace for fear, and in her eyes a 
 glance which spoke without words. 
 
 Then, as he raised his head, she saw the features which 
 she had last beheld in what had seemed their death hour, 
 while up to hers gazed the eyes that but for her succour the 
 vulture's beak would have struck and torn out for ever ; 
 then she knew him and over her proud loveliness came a 
 sudden flush, a softness that changed it as by a miracle ; 
 and she looked down upon him with that glance which he 
 had seen and remembered through the dizzy mists of deli- 
 rium, and had given to the altar-picture at Monastica. 
 
 'You/' 
 
 It was but one word ; but by that word he knew that as 
 he had never forgot, so he had not been forgotten. 
 
 He bent lower yet, till his lips touched her hand again. 
 
 4 At last ! I thought that we should never meet ! And 
 new I have no words. To strive to pay my debt were 
 hopeless; Grod grant the day may come when I can show 
 
104 ID ALIA. 
 
 you how I hold it. You saved my life ! you shall command 
 it as you will.' 
 
 His words broke from his heart's depths, and in the rapid 
 breathless tide of emotion, strongly felt and hard to utter. 
 Pew women would have failed to read in them that, with 
 his bold, keen, dauntless nature, self-reliant, danger-tested 
 though it was, there went a faith that would be loyal to 
 his own utter ruin, once pledged and given, and a tender- 
 ness passionate and exhaustless, through which he might 
 be lured on to any belief, dashed down to any destruction. 
 A dangerous knowledge ; there are scarce any women to 
 be trusted with it. 
 
 Silence fell between them for the moment, where she 
 stood beside the scarlet roses of the fountain, with the 
 heavy aloes perfume rising round, and at her feet, bowed 
 low before her, the man whose life was owed to her by so 
 vast a debt a stranger and unknown, yet bound to her 
 by the golden bonds of service that had loosed and freed 
 him from his grave. All the glory of her beauty was 
 deepened and softened as she looked on him, startled still, 
 and hardly conscious of his words ; and Erceldoune gazed 
 upward to her face, with a dim mist before his sight, as he 
 had never gazed before upon the face of woman. He had 
 forgotten all in that luminance of light, that glow of colour, 
 that delicious dreamy fragrance. 
 
 Remembrance returned to him as she released her hands 
 from his hold, and drew slightly from him. They could 
 not meet as strangers, while betwixt them was the tie of a 
 life restored, and the memory of that hour of awful peril 
 in which she had been his saviour. But he had come, 
 armed and alone, by violent entrance into her solitary 
 chamber in the lateness of the night ; and on her face was 
 the look of one to whom, insult was intolerable and all fear 
 unknown then he remembered what had brought him 
 thither, and spoke ere she could speak. 
 ' Pardon me for the rude abruptness with which I have 
 broken on you ; nothing can excuse it save the truth. I 
 followed, as I thought, one of my Moldavian assassins. I 
 hunted him down the Bosphorus, and lost his track in the 
 gardens here. I fancied 
 
 ' Your assassins ? here ? ' 
 
 * Doubtless it was an error of mine!' he broke in hastily. 
 
1 PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE. 1 105 
 
 That this house could be his murderer's lair was impos- 
 sible, since it was hers, and he forbore to tell her how 
 closely he had hunted his quarry to her presence, lest he 
 should give her alarm. ' I rode him down into a wilder- 
 ness of palm-trees and cactus, and missed his trail in the 
 darkness the coward was unarmed, I could not fire on 
 him, and he escaped me. I saw a light gleam through the 
 cedars ; and I forced my entrance ; then I forgot all 
 even forgot what my own violence must appear since it 
 led me to you ! ' 
 
 His voice dropped and softened as he spoke the last 
 word. The pitiless passion which had alone possessed him 
 as he had dashed aside the draperies and forced his way 
 into what he had believed the covert of the man he hunted 
 was outweighed and forgotten. Even while he spoke he 
 had no memory but for her. 
 
 She shuddered slightly, and glanced into the dim twi- 
 light gloom of the court on to which her chamber opened. 
 
 6 If you tracked him into these gardens, he may be there, 
 or may have hidden here. Search have my people with 
 you let them take torches, and seek through the gardens. 
 'JSTo one can have entered ; but the grounds are a wilder- 
 ness ' 
 
 * More likely he has escaped to the sea- shore ; and all I 
 know, or care now, is, that he has served to bring me 
 here ! ! my Grod, if you knew how I have sought you ! 
 and now that we have met, what can I say ? Nothing 
 that will not leave me deeper your debtor than before.' 
 
 1 Say 110 more. You owe me nothing. Who would not 
 have done for you the little that I did.' 
 
 ' You perilled your life to save mine, and mine is owed 
 to you if a man's life was ever owed for angel work,' broke 
 in Erceldouiie, while the force of a new and strange soft- 
 ness, trembled through his voice as he stood alone in the 
 stillness of the night with this woman, of whom he knew 
 nothing nothing, save that she filled his soul and his 
 senses with a sweet fierce joy that had never touched them 
 before, and that he had been rescued from his grave by 
 her. hand. 
 
 Over her face swept a look almost of pain. 
 
 1 Call nothing I did by that name. And why should 
 you feel it as a debt, as a merit even ? A little cold water 
 held to a stranger's lips ! It is not worth a thought.' 
 
106 IDALIA. 
 
 1 It was worth my life, and with my life I will pay it, it 
 you will take the payment, be it made in what guise it 
 may/ 
 
 They were no empty words of courteous requital ; they 
 were an oath to the death, if need be. She was silent, 
 while her glance dwelt on him where he stood, reared now 
 to his full stature, in the amber flood of the lamps, the 
 snowy folds of the burnous flung back, and on his face a 
 grandeur from the stormy passions an instant ago lashed 
 to their height, blent with the eager light with which he 
 looked on her. Then she held her hand out to him, with 
 the beautiful impulse of a proud and gracious nature 
 touched and bending with a sovereign grace. 
 
 ' I thank you for your words. There is no question of 
 debt now ; they more than pay the little I could do to serve 
 you in your peril. We cannot meet as strangers ; let us 
 part as friends.' 
 
 The words were, even in their gentleness, a sign of dis- 
 missal. He had broken in on her abruptly, and the night 
 was late. He bowed low over her hand as we bow over 
 that of an empress. 
 
 * Part ! True ; I come unbidden here ; I have no right 
 to linger in your presence : but Ave cannot part until I 
 know that we shall meet again. I have not found to-night 
 what I have sought so long unceasingly and hopelessly, 
 only to-night once more to lose it.' 
 
 She drew back slightly, and her face grew paler, while 
 over its brilliance swept a troubled feverish shadow. She 
 answered nothing. 
 
 ' Tou can know nothing of me now, but at least you will 
 consent to know more ? ' he pursued. ' A name alone tells 
 little ; yet had I one by which to seek the saviour of my 
 life, it would not have been so long before you had heard 
 mine.' 
 
 In the hot night, in the perfumed stillness, in the sud- 
 den revulsion from the violence of vengeance to the wild 
 sweetness of this woman's presence, words far different 
 reeled through his thoughts and rose to his lips ; but they 
 were held back by his own sense of their madness, and by 
 the dignity, nameless yet resistless, which surrounded her. 
 
 * You would know my name ? It is Idalia Vassalis.' 
 She tittered it almost in defiance, yet a defiance which 
 
 had a profound sadness in it, like the defiance of the slave, 
 
'PASSION BORN OF A GLANCE. 1 107 
 
 6 And why conceal it so long ? Can you not think what 
 it was to owe so great a gratitude to you, yet to be left in 
 such strange ignorance of my preserver that, for anything 
 which I could tell, we might never have met on earth ? ' 
 
 1 1 had reasons for desiring my own name untold/ she 
 answered coldly, as though interrogation were unknown to 
 her. ' Besides, I never thought that you would have any 
 remembrance of me.' 
 
 ' To have lost remembrance I must have lost the life you 
 rescued.' 
 
 The brief words said a volume ; she knew they were no 
 offspring of hollow courtesy, but a passionate truth broken 
 up unbidden from a character in which a bold and noble 
 simplicity prevailed over all that the world had taught, in 
 motive, in purpose, in action, and in speech. To under- 
 stand her, might for years bewilder and mislead the man ; 
 to understand him, the few moments of that night sufficed 
 to the woman. 
 
 1 It is few remember as you do/ she said ; and the soft 
 lingering richness of her voice, with an unspoken melan- 
 choly vibrating through it, thrilled through him. ' Life is 
 no great gift given back to merit gratitude ! But, while 
 we lose time in words, your murderer will escape. If you 
 chased him to these gardens, there is no outlet seaward. 
 Take my people with you. Some are Albanians, and will 
 serve well and boldly under need. Let the grounds be 
 searched, for my safety if not for your own.' 
 
 While she spoke she rang a hand-bell; a negress obeyed 
 the summons an Abyssinian, clothed in scarlet and white. 
 
 1 Bid Paulus and his sons take arms and torches, and 
 wait without on the terrace/ said the mistress to her slave, 
 who gave the salaam silently, and left the chamber. i The 
 men will be faithful to you/ she resumed to Erceldoune. 
 'Let them accompany you home ; if your assassins be in 
 Turkey, the Bosphorus shores cannot be safe for you alone. 
 No ; you will not refuse me ; you can set little store on 
 the life you say I gave you back if you would risk it wan- 
 tonly so soon.' 
 
 ' My life will be dearer and richer to me from to-night.' 
 
 The words broke from him on impulse and almost 
 unawares, as he bent before her in farewell : he could not 
 linger after his dismissal ; to have disputed it would have 
 been impossible, for there was about her that nameless 
 
I08 ID ALIA. 
 
 royalty which is its own defence, and wnich no man ever 
 insulted with impunity, or insulted twice. 
 
 She avoided all notice of his words as she gave him her 
 adieu, speaking, as she had hitherto done, in French. 
 
 He bowed over her hand, but he held it still. 
 
 4 And to-morrow I may have permission to return, and 
 seek to say all for which I have no words to-night ? The 
 debt that you disclaim must, at least, be sufficient bom 
 between us for us not to part as strangers ?' 
 
 Looking upward he saw a certain hesitation upon her 
 face ; her eyes were suddenly darkened by a shadow it 
 were hard to describe, and she was silent. Chivalrous in 
 his courtesy to women, pride was too strong in him for him 
 to sue when he was repulsed, to entreat where he was un- 
 desired. He released her, and raised his head. 
 
 1 It is not for me to force my presence on you. Pare- 
 well, then, and take, once for all, my gratitude for a debt 
 that it has pleasured you to embitter.' 
 
 The words were proud, but they were also pained ; they 
 were the terse, unstudied phrases of a man who was 
 wounded, but who could not be lowered, and would not be 
 angered ; they served him better, and touched her more 
 keenly, than more servile or more honeyed utterances 
 would have done. She smiled with a certain amusement, 
 yet with a graver and a gentler feeling too. 
 
 'Nay, you need not read my silence so. Come here 
 again if you wish.' 
 
 Just then the clang of the Albanians' arms announced 
 their readiness on the terrace without. He bowed down 
 once more before her, and left her standing there, with the 
 clusters of the roses at her feet, and the colour of the rich 
 chamber stretching away into dim distance around her 
 as she had suddenly broken on his sight when he had 
 dashed back the purple draperies in pursuit of his as- 
 sassin. 
 
 And he went out into the night with one thought alone 
 upon him. He felt blind with the glow of the light, in- 
 toxicated with the incense of odours, dizzy with all that 
 lustre of maze and delicate hues, of golden arabesques, of 
 gleaming marbles, and of scarlet blossoms ; but what had 
 blinded his sight and made his thoughts reel were not these, 
 but was the smile of the woman who had suddenly lit his 
 
RITTER TANNHAUSER. IOQ 
 
 life to a beauty which he had passed through half the 
 years that are allotted to man never having known or cared 
 to know. 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 HITTER TANNHAUSER. 
 
 OP his foe there was no trace. 
 
 The Monarch stood undisturbed, with the bridle flung 
 over the cedar bough, and the Barbary mare lay motionless, 
 with her right fore-leg twisted under her and broken. Of 
 his foe there was no trace ; and he rode on silently down 
 the Bosphorus shore back into Pera, with the Albanians 
 running by his horse's side, their torches throwing a ruddy 
 glare over the moonlit sea and silvered sands, and on their 
 own picturesque dresses and handsome classic faces, as 
 they held on to his stirrup-leather. 
 
 A few moments before, and he had had no thought save of 
 the blood-thirst with which he had ridden his enemy down 
 the shore, and of the just vengeance of an unpardonable 
 wrong ; now he had no memory save one. 
 
 With the morning he rose, with but this one thought 
 still he would see her again. "With the early dawn, 
 while the sound of the drums was rolling through the 
 mists, as they heralded the Commander of the Faithful 
 going to prayer, he was plunging into the gray depths of 
 the Bosphorus, sleep beyond his bidding. He knew that 
 for hours yet he could not go to her ; but he watched the 
 sun in intolerable impatience for it to travel faster on its 
 way. He walked alone to and fro the silent shore in a 
 dream that was filled with her memory, and dead to all 
 else. He did not pause to analyse what he felt, not even 
 to wonder at it ; his life was launched on the tempestuous 
 sea of passion, and he lived in a trance of feverish 
 intoxication, restless pain, and sweet idolatry. What 
 avail how great had been his strength before? It only 
 served to fling him down in more utter captivity now. 
 
 Far sooner than ceremony would have allowed him, he 
 rode down the same path by which he had pursued the 
 Greek the night before; but of him he had no more 
 
110 ID ALIA. 
 
 thought than if he were blotted from his life, when once 
 more he looked upon her, a woman fitted for a throne. 
 
 She did not give him her hand, but she smiled that 
 smile which gave its light to her eyes yet more than to her 
 lips ; and he thought that she must hear the beating of his 
 heart it had never throbbed so thick and fast when he 
 had given the word for his own death- shot in the Car- 
 pathian pass. He had never felt himself stricken strength- 
 less and powerless, blind and dizzy with a thousand new 
 emotions, as he felt now. So had another bold Border 
 chief, the Night Eider of the Marches, been conquered 
 when Bothwell stood before his Queen 
 
 His thoughts were full of fever ; his life seemed con- 
 fused, yet transfigured. To have thrown himself at her 
 feet, and gazed there upward to her in silence and in wor- 
 ship, would have been to follow the impulse in him. She 
 knew it ; his eyes spoke all on which his lips were perforce 
 dumb ; he did not think how much they betrayed him ; he 
 did not dream how much they told to a woman who had 
 wakened so much love that its faintest sign was known to 
 her of the tumult in his heart, of the glory in his life, of 
 the madness in his soul, which were so mingled and so 
 
 nameless to himself. 
 
 In that moment the whole heart of the man, in its brave 
 
 truthfulness, its bold manhood, its headlong faith, and its 
 
 awakening passions, was open before her as a book. She 
 
 knew her power over a dauntless, loyal life : how would 
 
 she use it ? 
 
 She let her glance dwell on him for a moment those 
 
 lustrous changeful eyes, whose hue could never be told, 
 
 calmly meeting the passion of his own, calmly reading and 
 
 watching the type and the worth of this life, which through 
 
 her was still among the living. 
 
 * Have you found no trace of your assassin ? ' she asked 
 
 him carelessly. ' They told me there were no signs of him 
 
 on the shore last night.' 
 
 ' I forgot him. I have only remembered that he brought 
 
 me here/ 
 
 1 It is not many who would follow so generous a code as 
 
 yours. You have a deathless memory for gratitude, a 
 
 forgiving oblivion of injury.' 
 
 ' Hush, do not give me credit ihat is not mine. As for 
 
RITTER TANNHAUSER. ill 
 
 gratitude, it is not that only which has made my life know 
 no memory save the memory o you.' 
 
 His voice trembled; the words escaped him involuntarily ; 
 ue was scarcely conscious what he said. She bowed with 
 that dignity which repulsed without rebuking the meaning 
 of the words. 
 
 I You do me far too much honour. The little I did ' 
 in common human charity merits, as I said before, 
 neither thanks nor memory. Tou stay in Constantinople, 
 I suppose ? ' she continued, with that ease which was 
 almost cold cold, at least, compared to the tumult of im- 
 passioned impulses, unconsidered thoughts, and newly-born 
 emotions which were warm and eager in the heart of her 
 listener. It checked him ; it stung and chilled him. 
 
 I 1 am waiting for home despatches,' he answered her ; 
 ' I am a Queen's courier, as you may have heard. You are 
 living here ? ' 
 
 1 Only for a while ; some months a few days, I do not 
 know which it may be. You, who are so splendid an artist, 
 must find constant occupation in the East.' 
 
 ' I ? I am little of an artist, save when my horse or my 
 rifle are out of reach. We of the old Border rarely 
 carved our names in any other fashion than by the 
 sword.' 
 
 She saw how little his thoughts were with his words, as 
 she met again the burning gaze of eyes that told far 
 more than he knew. Their language was too familiar 
 to her to move her as it would have moved a woman 
 less used to its utterance ; it was a tale so old to her. 
 She sighed a little impatiently, a little wearily ; she was 
 unutterably tired of love. What was intoxication to 
 him was but a thousand-times told story to her. And yet 
 she saw that this man would suffer, and she foresaw that 
 he would suffer through her. She pitied him, as it was 
 not in her commonly to pity. 
 
 c I saw you in Sicily, surely ? ' he pursued, ' for one mo- 
 ment, as you passed in a lateen-boat ? J 
 
 * I was in Sicily a year ago ; I daresay you might have 
 seen me.' 
 
 ' You travel much ? ' 
 
 ' Who does not in our days ? ' she answered, with careless- 
 ness, but carelessness that veiled a refusal to speak further 
 
112 ID ALIA. 
 
 of herself, which was impenetrable. She had every grace 
 of womanhood, but beneath these she had a haughty vnd 
 courtly reticence that was impassable. 'Travel has one 
 great attraction it leaves little room for reflection. You 
 like it yourself ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I like it. A courier's suits me better than any life, 
 fjxcept a soldier's, would have done. However, it was not 
 with me a matter of preference ; I was ruined ; I was glad 
 of any post." 
 
 He said it frankly, and with the indifference which his 
 decayed fortunes really were to him ; but he saw that she 
 was rich, he heard that she was titled, and he would not 
 form her friendship under false colours, knowing that his 
 own title gave him a semblance of wealth and of station he 
 had not. 
 
 She smiled slightly ; there were both wonder at his hon- 
 esty and comprehension of his motives in that smile. The 
 candour and integrity of his nature were very new to her, 
 and moved her to a wonder almost kindred to reverence. 
 
 ' You are rich, I think,' she said a little wearily. 4 You 
 have strength, liberty, manhood, independence, honour ; 
 how many have forfeited or never owned those birthrights ! 
 You chose very wisely to take a wanderer's freedom rather 
 than the slavery of the world.' 
 
 Erceldoune shook himself with a restless gesture, as an 
 eagle chained shakes his wings. 
 
 Ich. diene nicht Vasallen ! ' 
 
 he muttered in his beard. 
 
 She laughed, but her gaze dwelt on him in sympathy with 
 the fiery independence of his nature. 
 
 * Never the vassal of a slave ? Then never be the slave 
 of a woman ! ' 
 
 He looked at her, and there was something wistful in the 
 look. He wondered if she knew her power over him, and 
 if she made a jest of it. He could not answer her with 
 that badinage, that gay light homage, that subtle flattery, 
 to which she was accustomed ; he felt too earnestly, too 
 deeply ; a man of few words, save when keenly moved or 
 much interested, he could not give himself to the utterance 
 of those airy nothings while all his life was stirred with 
 passion he could not name. 
 
RITTER TANNHAUSER. 113 
 
 At that moment the great Servian hound entered through 
 the open window from the terrace, and stood looking at 
 him with its wolf-crest up, its fine eyes watchful and 
 menacing, and a low angry growl challenging him as a 
 stranger. It was a magnificent brute, massive in build, 
 lithe in limb, pure bred, and nearly as tall as a young deer. 
 
 Erceldoune turned to him and stretched out his hand. .; 
 
 ' Ah, there is my gallant friend. I owe him a debt too.' 
 
 The animal stood a second looking at him, then went and 
 laid down like a lion couchant at her feet. 
 
 She laid her hand on his great head a hand of exceeding 
 fairness and elegance, with the sapphires and diamonds glit- 
 tering there, which Mother Veronica had noted with a re- 
 cluse's quick appreciation of worldly things. 
 
 ' You must forgive him if he be 'discourteous ; he has so 
 often been my only champion, that he is apt to be a little 
 rash in his chivalry. 1 
 
 4 1 honour him for his fidelity. But your only champion ! 
 Where was the chivalry of the world, to leave such a post 
 to a dog ? ' 
 
 1 Where ! In idle vows and poets' dreams, I imagine ; 
 its only home in any time, most likely. The E-itter Tann- 
 hauser swore his knightly homage in the Venusberg, but 
 ere long he turned on her who gave him his delight; 
 
 " Venus schone Fraue rneiOj 
 Ihr eeyd eine Teufelinne ! " 
 
 The German legend is very typical.' 
 
 ' Tannhauser was a cur ! ' said Erceldoune, with an elo- 
 quent warmth in his voice rather than in his words. ' What 
 matter what she was ? what matter whence she came ? she 
 was the sovereign of his life ; she had given him love, and 
 glory, and delight ; she was his. It was enough enough 
 to lose a world for, and to hold it well lost/ 
 
 He paused suddenly in the passionate poetic impulse on 
 which he spoke, which had broken up in his heart for the 
 first time, utterly alien, as he believed, to his nature, to his 
 temperament, to his will. It was of her and of himself 
 that he thought, not of the old Teutonic Minnesinger's 
 legend of Tannhauser ; and the rich glow of the sunlight, 
 slanting across the mosaic pavement, shone in the dark 
 eagle lustre of his eyes, and lent its warmth to the Murillo- 
 ]ike bronze of his cheek. I 
 
114 ID ALIA. 
 
 She was a woman of the world ; that noble truthfulness, 
 that gallant faith, that knightly earnestness were new and 
 very strange to her. They touched her. 
 
 'If Tannhauser had loved like that who knows ? even 
 she, the Teufelinne, might have been redeemed. She could 
 not have been faithless to such faith/ she said half musingly, 
 rather following out her thoughts than addressing him ; and 
 in her voice there Was a vague pathetic pain. 
 
 Mad words rose to his lips in reply words that he had 
 to hold down in silence ; the room seemed dizzy round him, 
 the odours of the flowers reeled in his brain as though they 
 were narcotics ; he watched, like a man half-blinded, her 
 hand wander among the scarlet blossoms, and toy with the 
 waters of the fountain. It was a delirium ; and, for all its 
 feverish pain, he would not have exchanged it to have back 
 the happiest and most tranquil hour of his past. He had 
 dreamed of her, till he had loved her as utterly as ever a 
 man loved a woman ; he was in her presence at last ! and 
 all love that before might be but a dream became at once 
 with giant growth a passion. She did not with him at 
 least seek her power ; but such power was hers in its 
 widest magnitude of empire ; and she was a little weary of 
 it, as sovereigns are weary of their crowns. 
 
 * Ton give fresh air the preference, will you come into 
 my gardens? They are very wild,- but I like them the 
 better for that,' she asked him, as she rose with that half- 
 languid grace which bespoke something of oriental blood in 
 her, and moved out on to the terrace. 
 
 The gardens were, in truth, untrimmed as the neglect of 
 years could make them, but they had been originally palace 
 grounds, and all the colour and luxuriance of unchecked 
 vegetation made them beautiful, with their wilderness of 
 myrtle, cactus, and pomegranate, and their stretches of un- 
 trained roses blooming round the splashing waters of the 
 marble and porphyry fountains. 
 
 ' Little has been done here for years, and yet thetfe is a 
 loveliness in them not to be had in trimmed and trained 
 chateau gardens,' she said, as she turned so that the sun 
 fell full on her face with its delicate haughty lustre, its 
 richness and fairness of hue. 
 
 ' Yes ! there is a loveliness,' he answered her, as his eyes 
 looked down into hers, ' greater than I ever believed in 
 before.' 
 
RITTER TANNHAUSER. US 
 
 She laughed a little ; slightly, carelessly. 
 
 6 What enthusiasm ! So great a traveller cannot, surely, 
 find anything so new and striking in a wild Turkish garden ? J 
 she said half amusedly, half languidly, a trifle ironically, 
 purposely misapprehending his words. 
 
 The look came into his eyes that had been there before, 
 when she had bade' him never to be the slave of a woman ; 
 proud, and yet wistful. 
 
 ( I do not know that ! ' he said almost bitterly ; * but I 
 know that the gardens may be as fatal as those of TJhland's 
 Linden-tree. You remember how the poem begins ? ' 
 
 The words took an undue effect on her ; resentment came 
 on her, haughty inquiry into her eyes, that she turned full 
 on him in some surprise, some anger, and yet more, as it 
 seemed to him, disquiet. Then all these faded, and a pro- 
 found sadness followed them. 
 
 ' Yes, I remember/ she said calmly. ' Take warding by 
 Wolfdieterich, and do not lie under the linden ! Eather, 
 to speak more plainly, and less poetically, never come 
 where you do not see where your footsteps will lead you. 
 You know nothing of me, save my name ; leave me with- 
 out knowing more. It will be best, believe me far best.' 
 
 She paused as she spoke, as they moved down the avenue, 
 the roses strewing the grass path, and the Bosphorus 
 waves flashing through the boughs. The singularity of 
 the words struck him less at that moment than the in- 
 junction they gave him to leave her. Leave her ! in the 
 very moment when his quest had been recompensed ; in the 
 first hour when, at last in her presence, at last in her home, 
 the fugitive glory of his dreams was made real, and he had 
 found the woman who had literally been to him the angel 
 of life. 
 
 Eeneath the sun-bronze of his^face she saw the blood 
 come and go quickly and painfully ; he paused, too, and 
 stood facing her in the cedar aisle, with that gallant and 
 dauntless manhood which lent its kingliness to him by 
 nature. 
 
 ' Best ? For which of us ? ' 
 
 ' For you.' 
 
 1 Then I must refuse to obey.' 
 
 * Why ? Eefuse because it is for yourself that I have 
 epoken ? ' 
 
 i 2 
 
n6 ID ALIA. 
 
 * Yes. If my presence jeopardised you, I must obey, 
 and rid you of it ; if I alone be concerned, I refuse obe- 
 dience, because I would give up all I have ever prized on 
 earth save honour to be near what I have sought so 
 long, and sought so vainly.' 
 
 It was all but a declaration of love to a woman of whom 
 he knew nothing, save her beauty and her name. She read 
 him as she would have read a book, but she did not show 
 her knowledge. 
 
 ' You are very rash,' she said softly, without a touch of 
 irony now. ' I have said truly, I have said wisely, it will 
 be best for you that our friendship should not continue 
 should barely commence. If you persist in it, the time 
 will, in every likelihood, come when you will condemn me, 
 and reproach yourself for it. I speak in all sincerity, even 
 though I do not give you my reasons. You consider very 
 generously that you owe me a debt ; it would be best paid 
 by obeying what I say now, and forgetting nie, as if we had 
 never met.' 
 
 She spoke with the courtly case of a woman of the 
 world, of a woman used to speak and to be obeyed, to guide 
 and to be followed ; but there was a certain inflection of 
 regretful bitterness in her voice, a certain shadow of 
 troubled weariness in her eyes, as if she did send him from 
 her without some reluctance. They were strange words ; 
 but she had known too many of the multiform phases of 
 life to have any feminine fear of singularity or of its impu- 
 tation, and had passed through unfamiliar paths with a 
 fearless, careless grace wholly and solely her own. 
 
 His frank eyes met hers, and there was in them a pas- 
 sionate pain. 
 
 ' You bid me pay my debt in the only coin I cannot com- 
 mand. Obey you, I will not. Porget you, I could not.' 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 * Twenty-four hours' absence soon supplies any one with 
 oblivion ! ' 
 
 ' It is a year since I saw you in the Sicilian boat, yet ^1 
 have not forgotten. I shall not while I have life/ 
 
 His voice was very low ; he was wounded, but he could 
 not be offended or incensed by her. 
 
 She bent her head with a sweet and gracious gesture of 
 amends and of concession. 
 
RITTER TANNHAUSER. 117 
 
 ' True ! Pardon me ; I wronged you. Nevertheless, in- 
 deed rather because you remember so well I still say to 
 you, Gro, and let us remain as strangers ! ' 
 
 All that was noblest in her spoke in those words : all 
 that lingered, best and truest, in her, prompted them. She 
 wished, for his peace, that he should leave her, because she 
 knew his heart better far than he himself; she wished 
 now, at the least that he whom she had rescued should be 
 spared from all shadow from her, from all love for her ; she 
 wished now, at least to save him. From what ? From 
 herself. 
 
 Yet it was not without pain on her side also, though 
 that pain was concealed, that she spoke. 
 
 He looked at her steadily, the earnest, open, loyal, un- 
 artificial nature of the man striving in vain to read the mo- 
 tive and the meaning of the woman, and failing, as men 
 mostly do. 
 
 His face grew very white under the warm brown left 
 there by Asian and Algerian suns. 
 
 ' If you command it, I must obey. My presence shall be 
 no forced burden upon you. But you cannot command on 
 me forgetfuluess, and I could wish you had been merciful 
 before, and left me to die were I lay.' 
 
 Unconsidered, spoken from his heart, and the more pro- 
 found in pathos for their brief simplicity, the words moved 
 her deeply, so deeply, that tears, rarest sign of emotion 
 with her, that she had never known for years, rose in her 
 eyes as they dwelt on him ; her lips parted, but without 
 speech ; she stood silent. 
 
 The day was very still ; sheltered by the cedars from the 
 heat, the golden light quivered about them ; there was !'no 
 sound but of the cicada among the pomegranate leaves, and 
 of the waves breaking up against the marble palace stairs ; 
 neither ever forgot that single hour when on one word the 
 future hung. His eyes watched her longingly ; he did not 
 ask who she was, whence she came, for what reason she 
 thus bade him go from her ; he only remembered the glory 
 of her loveliness, and the words in which she had said, * Go, 
 and let us remain henceforth as strangers.' 
 
 4 Answer me, madame/ he said briefly, ' do you, for your* 
 self, command me to leave you ?' 
 
 Tor myself? ~N~o, I cannot command you- it is only 
 for your sake ' 
 
Il8 ID ALIA. 
 
 She paused. "What was, in truth, in her thoughts it 
 would have been impossible to put in clear words before 
 him ; she could not tell this man that what she feared for 
 him was the love that he would feel for herself; and what 
 she had said sufficed to give back to his heart its restless 
 tumult of vague joys, sufficed to make the present hour in 
 which he lived full of sweet intoxication. 
 
 ' Then, since not for yourself you command, for myself I 
 refuse to obey ; refuse, now and for ever come what will-' 
 ever to be to you again as a stranger.' 
 
 The tremor was still in his voice, but there were in it, 
 too, the thrill of a triumphant gratitude, the reckless resolve 
 of a tropic passion : she knew that the die was cast, that to 
 send him from her now would serve but little to make her 
 memory forgotten by him. She knew well enough that 
 forgetfulness was a treasure for evermore beyond the reach 
 of those who once had loved her. 
 
 t Be it so ! We will have no more words on the matter, 
 she said carelessly, as she passed onward with a low light 
 laugh ; her temperament was variable, and she did not care 
 that he should see that new unwonted weakness which had 
 made her eyes grow dim at the chivalry and pathos of his 
 brief words. ' The fantasies of Uhland have made us speak 
 as poetically as themselves. My counsels were counsels of 
 wisdom, but since Wolfdieterich will rest under the linden, 
 he must accept the hazard! How calm the Bosphorus is, 
 the waves are hardly curled ! There is my boat at the foot of 
 the stairs ; it is not too warm yeV^iP" 1 *^ an hour on the sea 
 if you would like to take the oati. 
 
 A moment ago and she had forbade him any knowledge 
 of her, and had sought to dismiss him from her presence ; 
 now she spoke to him familiarly and without ceremony, with 
 the charm of those first bright sweet hours of communion 
 when strangers glide into friends ; that hour which either, 
 in friendship or in love, is as the bloom to the fruit, as the 
 daybreak to the day, indefinable, magical, and fleeting. 
 
 The caique rocked on the water, half hidden under the 
 hanging boughs of myrtles at the landing-stairs, while the 
 sea lay calm as a sun-girded lake, nothing in sight except a 
 far-off fleet of olive-wood feluccas. And with one stroke of 
 the oars among the fragrant water-weeds, the little curled 
 gilded sea-toy floated softly and slowly down the still gray 
 
HITTER TANNHAUSER. 119 
 
 waters that glistened like a lake of silver in the sun. 
 Erceldoune was in as ecstatic a dream as any opium-eater. 
 She had cast away whatever thoughts had weighed on her 
 when she had bade him leave her; a step once taken, a 
 decision once given, she was not a woman to vacillate in 
 farther doubt or in after-regret, she was at once too proud 
 and too nonchalant. She had bidden him, in all sincerity, 
 remain a stranger to her ; he had refused to obey, and had 
 chosen to linger in her presence. She let his will take its 
 course, and accepted the present hour. The vessel dropped 
 down the Bosphorus in the sunlight so smoothly, that a 
 lazy stroke of the oars now and then sufficed to guide it 
 along the shore, where the cypress and myrtle boughs 
 drooped almost to the water, and the heavy odours of jasmine 
 and roses floated to them from the gardens across the sea. 
 Lying back among her cushions, so near him that he could 
 feel the touch of her laces sweep across him as the breeze 
 stirred them, and could see the breath of the wind steal 
 among the chestnut masses of her hair that was drawn back 
 in its own richness from her brow and fastened with gold 
 threads scarce brighter than its own hue, the fascination of 
 Idalia a danger that men far colder and better on their 
 guard than he found themselves powerless against gained 
 its empire on him, as the spell of the Yenusberg stole on the 
 will and the senses of the mailed knight Tannhauser. With 
 a glittering gaiety when she would ; with a knowledge of 
 the world, varied, it seemed, almost beyond any woman's 
 scope ; with the acquisition of most languages and of their 
 literature, polished and profound to scholarship ; with a 
 disdainful, graceful, ironic wit, delicate, but keenly barbed ; 
 and with all these a certain shadow of sadness, half scornful, 
 half weary, that it gave to her at times an exquisite gentle- 
 ness and a deeper interest yet, she would have had a fatal 
 and resistless seduction, without that patrician grace of air 
 and form and that rarity of personal attractions which made 
 her one of those women whom no man looks on without 
 homage, few men without passion. With the ease which 
 long acquaintance with the world alone gives, she spoke on 
 all topics lightly, brilliantly, the languor or the satire of one 
 moment changed the next to the poetry or the earnestness 
 which seemed GO lie full as much in her nature ; and even 
 while she spoke of trifles, she learnt every trait, every touch 
 
120 ID ALT A. 
 
 of his life, his character, his fortunes, and his tastes, though 
 he never observed or dreamt of it though he never noted 
 in turn that in it all no word escaped her that could have 
 told him who she was, whence she came, what her past had 
 been, or what her present was. The frank, bold, loyal nature 
 of the man loved and trusted, and had nothing to conceal. 
 She, of penetration as keen as she was in tact most subtle, 
 read his life at will, while her own was veiled. 
 
 The caique dropped indolently down the shore, the oars 
 scarcely parting the bright waters, the warmth of the day 
 tempered by a low west wind, blowing gently from the Le- 
 vantine isles, spice-laden with their odour. With the rise 
 and fall of the boat, with the perfumes of rose gardens 
 borne on the air, with the boundless freedom of cloudless 
 skies and stretching seas, there were blent the murmur of 
 her voice, the fragrance of her hair, the glance whose 
 beauty had haunted him by night and day, the fascination 
 of a loveliness passing that even of his remembrance. It 
 seemed to him as if they had been together for ever, 
 drifting through the glories of an Avillion ; as if, until 
 now, in all his life he had never lived. He was like a man 
 in enchantment ; the world seemed no longer real to him, 
 but changed into a golden and tumultuous dream. 
 
 Time, custom, ceremonies, all grew vague and indiffer- 
 ent; it seemed to him as if he had loved this woman 
 for an eternity. The passion suddenly woke in him 
 would have broken its way into hot unconsidered words, 
 but for that light chain lying on his love and binding 
 it to silence, which only gave it more tenacity and more 
 strength. She would not have been what she was to 
 him could he have approached her with familiarity ; 
 could he have sought her as his mistress she would 
 have fallen as his ideal. 
 
 No one could have called her cold who looked on 
 the brilliance of her beauty, on the light of her smile ; 
 ibut the languor with which she turned aside homage, 
 and let words of softer meaning glide oft her ear unnoted 
 or unaccepted, gave her an impenetrability, a nonchalance, 
 a serenity, that was as impassible as coldness, x 
 
 * I may return to-morrow ? ' he asked her, when she 
 at last had made him turn the caique back, and had 
 tacitly dismissed him 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 12 1 
 
 He spoke briefly ; but his voice was verj low, and 
 there was entreaty in the tone that pleaded far more 
 than a honeyed phrase would ever have done with her. 
 Her eyes dwelt on him a moment, once more with that 
 profound undefinable look of pity. 
 
 i Yes ; since you wish. I shall be happy to see you 
 at dinner, if you will do me the honour. Adieu ! ' 
 
 She bowed, and moved to leave him. Something in 
 his look as he answered her made her pause as she swept 
 away, and, stirred by a sudden impulse (impulse was 
 rare with her), she waited an instant and held out her 
 hand. 
 
 He took it, and, bending his head, touched it with his 
 lips as reverently as a devotee would kiss his cross. She 
 laughed a little as she drew it gently away. 
 
 ' We are not in the days of Castilian courtesies ! Fare- 
 well until to-morrow ! ' 
 
 And with that graceful negligent movement which gave 
 her so languid a charm, she passed away from him into 
 the villa; and for Erceldoune the sun died out of the 
 heavens, and all its beauty faded off the bright earth 
 about him. 
 
 He spent the remaining hours of the day alone alone 
 till long after nightfall pushing a boat far out to sea, 
 and letting it float at hazard, in the sunset, in the twilight, 
 in the phosphor brilliance of the moon, till the chant 
 of the Muezzin rang over the waves with the dawn. 
 His existence seemed dreamy, unreal, transfigured ; he 
 neither heeded how time went nor what he did, but 
 lay leaning over the side of his boat, gazing all through 
 tlie night at the lighted lattices of her windows, where 
 they glittered through the cypress and myrtle woods. 
 He was in the first trance of a passion he had scorned. 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 THE SOYEEEIGtf OF THE KOTJND TABLE. 
 
 ALL the day Erceldoune spent aimlessly : he took his 
 rifle and went over wild tracts of outlying country he 
 never asked, or knew, where but he scarcely fired a 
 
122 ID ALIA. 
 
 shot ; the hours seemed endless till they brought the 
 evening ; and he walked on and on through sear de- 
 serted valleys, and over hills thick clothed with the 
 sombre cypress, with little object except to throw off the 
 fever in him by exhausting exercise and bodily fatigue. 
 The tumultuous happiness and the restless disquiet he 
 felt were alike new to him. He was not a man easily to 
 be the fool of his passions, or to let loose his judg- 
 ment in their intoxication; he had held them down in 
 almost as stern a curb as any of the iron knights of 
 the Calatrava; and now, in solitude, and in the calm- 
 ness of morning, he saw his own peril and his own mad- 
 ness as he had not in the enchantment of her presence, or 
 in the impassioned fantasies of the night. He loved her ; 
 he did not disguise it from himself ; he was not likely to 
 mislead either his own mind or others by the veil of a 
 specious sophistry ; and in the freshness and the abandon- 
 ment of those first hours there came the chillier memory 
 of the bidding she had given him to leave her and re- 
 main a stranger to her. Fear and doubt were alike alien 
 to him. Yet, in calmer reason, he could not but remember 
 that such words must have their motive in some cause he 
 could not fathom ; that their mere expression had been 
 strange, and argued of mystery, if not of evil. She had 
 spoken nothing of herself ; there remained still unex- 
 plained, unguessed at, the cause she had had for the con- 
 cealment of her name at Monastica, or of her presence at 
 all in those barbaric Moldavian wilds. Who was she ? 
 What was her history ? He could not tell. Not even 
 did he know whether she were wedded or unwedded; 
 whether his love could ever bring him any chance of 
 happiness through it, or whether it were already forbid- 
 den and doomed to be its own misery, its own curse. He 
 knew nothing. And alone on the hill- side, with the 
 vulture wheeling abovehead in the noon skies, and the 
 cypress thickets stretching downward to the precipice 
 beneath his feet, a quick shudder ran through his blood. 
 Had he had the mastery of his life so long only to yield it 
 up now to break in a woman's hands ? Had he believed in 
 and followed the ideal of his dreams only to suffer through 
 her, and be divorced from her at the last ? 
 
 He ground the butt of his rifle down into the loose 
 "black soil. 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 123 
 
 1 It is too late^now,' he said unconsciously aloud. ' She 
 saved my life ; she shall claim it if she will. Come what 
 may, I will believe in her.' 
 
 It was a loyal and gallant oath, pledged to the sun- 
 burnt solitudes and the blue cloudless skies. Was she 
 for whose sake it was sworn worthy of it ? 
 
 The world would have told him no, and, being questioned 
 why, would have answered in three words : 
 
 1 She is Idalia.' 
 
 Anything of doubt, of depression, of pain, that had 
 mingled with the tumult of his thoughts through the day 
 swept far away when the hour came for him to go to her 
 again. One of the Albanian men-servants ushered him 
 through the hall and into the magnificent chamber, which, 
 once the Oda of an anderiin, served now as the reception- 
 room of the villa. The curtains were drawn back ; the 
 blaze of light dazzled his sight; and his eyes, eagerly 
 glancing through the vastness of the space for the Countess 
 Vassalis, met instead the eyes of Victor Vane. 
 
 His first sensation was one of intense disappointment ; 
 the next of intolerable impatience ; the third of reckless 
 hatred. He did not pause to remember how improbable 
 it had been to think that she would have invited him alone 
 to dine at her table ; how unreasonable it was to suppose 
 that a titled woman of so much youth and so much bril- 
 liance could live in solitude the life of a recluse; how 
 natural it must be that she was acquainted with a man of 
 fashionable repute and aristocratic habits, who lived chiefly 
 abroad, and knew almost every continental family of note. 
 He remembered none of these things ; he only realised his 
 disappointment; he only saw before him the colourless 
 face of the guest he had once entertained, and to whom he 
 had felt that quick contemptuous dislike which a noted 
 rider, an untiring sportsman, a desert hunter, and a 
 traveller impervious to fatigue, was certain to conceive for 
 a delicate dilettante, an idle flaneur, a ruse silken speculator 
 and courtier, such as Vane appeared to him. 
 
 Something in the very attitude of this man, moreover, 
 as he leant against a marble console playing with a scarlet 
 rose, and humming a Spanish bolero to himself, suggested 
 the familiarity of custom, of intimacy ; he looked like one 
 in his own home ; not less so from the way in which he 
 
T24 IDALIA. 
 
 advanced to Erceldoune, with, a cordial pleasant smile of 
 welcome. His smile was, indeed, always very sweet, and 
 of a rarely winning promise. 
 
 A.h, Sir Eulke charmed to renew our acquaintance. 
 I was delighted to hear from the Countess that she expected 
 the pleasure of seeing you this evening. I assure you I 
 have never forgotten your most comforting hospitality on 
 the moors ; my only regret is that we have not come across 
 each other before.' 
 
 ' You do me much honour, and have a long memory for 
 a mere trifle.' 
 
 Idalia had announced his acquaintance with her to 
 Victor Yane. They had talked of him then. He could 
 not, would not, have spoken her name to friend or 
 stranger. 
 
 * The Countess tells me that you think you met about 
 here one of your Moldavian assassins,' pursued the other, 
 not noticing, or not seeming to notice, the coldness with 
 which his advances were met. ' I am not surprised ; so 
 many rascals come eastward. I hope you will be able to 
 track the fellow.' 
 
 ' My only regret is that I did not shoot him down.' 
 
 The answer was brief and stern. He could have shot 
 down the man before him. 
 
 k ' Ah, great pity you didn't. Chivalry is wasted on these 
 condottieri. I have seen too much of the scamps in Italy. 
 That was a strange affair that in the Carpathians ? Motive 
 was political, I should suppose.' 
 
 ' Probably. Politics is the hospital for broken 
 scoundrels.' 
 
 Yane laughed softly and merrily. He was a poushed 
 gentleman and a polished diplomatist, and never betrayed 
 it if he were hit. 
 
 ' True enough. Jused to busy myself with politics once 
 on a time ; but, on my soul, I found myself in such bad 
 company that I was glad to throw up the cards and leave 
 the tables. Voila ! two of my best friends ! Allow me 
 the honour of introducing them to one who, before long, I 
 hope, will let me claim him to make a trio. The Count 
 Laraxa ; Baron Falkenstiern Sir Fulke Erceldoune.' 
 
 Erceldoune looked at the two men Hungarian and 
 Thessalian. There was nothing of the adventurer or the 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 125 
 
 chevalier d' Industrie, however, about either of them ; they 
 were of courtly breeding and of genuine rank. 
 
 ' Idalia is not here ? ' said Laraxa, after the introduction, 
 to Victor Vane, who gave him the slightest possible silencing 
 glance of warning as he answered : 
 
 1 She will be in in a moment, I dare say.' 
 
 Erceldoune crushed his heel into the softness of the 
 carpet with a passionate oath suppressed. "What was this 
 man to her that he had title to call her by her familiar 
 name ? what the other, that he had a right to receive her 
 guests and speak of her actions ? At that moment Diomed 
 threw open the broad double doors. In the flood of sun- 
 shine still pouring in through the western windows there 
 came Idalia. 
 
 She swept toward them with the dignity and grace of a 
 woman long accustomed to homage wherever she moved, 
 and familiar with it to weariness. She gave the same 
 reception to all, without a shade of difference that could 
 have flattered any, except that, when dinner was announced 
 as served, with a slight bend of her head she signed Ercel- 
 doune to her, and laid her hand on his arm. She might 
 have felt the quick tremor that ran through his frame at 
 that signal of her preference, at that light touch of her 
 hand ; she did see the gladness and gratitude that shone 
 in his eyes as they gazed on her ; and a sigh unconsciously 
 escaped her a sigh not for herself, but for him. 
 
 They passed into a large vaulted chamber, the walls of 
 white marble, the draperies and couches of scarlet, the 
 matting a silken amber tissue, the ceiling in fresco with 
 wreaths of grapes and pomegranates raised in gold, and at 
 one end a lofty fountain flinging its spray up among 
 flowers. 
 
 ' "Who is that ? ' muttered Laraxa. 'A magnificent man, 
 and she seems to favour him. Is he prey ? ' 
 
 i No ; he is a beggared Queen's messenger. Besides 
 don't you remember the name ? he was Count Conrad's 
 Border Eagle. Take care what you say before him.' 
 
 Laraxa lifted his eyebrows. 
 
 ' Why, in Heaven's name, is he here ? ' 
 
 ' Idalia's caprice ! You remember, she saved his life j 
 but, take care, he may overhear,' 
 
 4 But if Conrad- ' 
 
126 WALIA. 
 
 ' Conrad is at Athens by now. Chut! 9 
 
 The table was round, so that there was no place of pre- 
 cedence except the right hand of the hostess. The dinner 
 was of as much sumptuousness and elegance as if it had 
 been served in Paris ; and the various Albanian, Negro, 
 and Turkish attendants gave the entertainment an Arabian- 
 like effect, heightened by the Eastern character of the 
 confectionery and the Eastern fruits and flowers. The 
 still lingering sunset glow was shut out, and the chamber 
 was illumined with y/ax-lights in crystal or in candelabra 
 at every point. Everything about her spoke of no 
 ordinary wealth, and had the air, moreover, of habitual 
 luxury, even of habitual extravagance. It might be only 
 surface deep ; but that surface, at least, was brilliant. 
 
 ' My table is round, like Arthur's,' said Idalia, with a 
 smile as she sank into her chair. ' There should be no pre- 
 cedence at a dinner-table ; equality, at least, should exist 
 over soups and entrees ! 3 
 
 1 "Where the Countess Vassalis is, can there fail to be a 
 place of honour ? ' 
 
 She laughed softly. 
 
 ' Tou would have me say, like the O'Donoghue, " "Where 
 Jam, is the head of the table. " That was a truer and 
 . haughtier pride than would have lain in a struggle for pre- 
 cedence. The answer always pleased me.' 
 
 ' And yet you are for equality, Madame ? ' said Victor 
 Yane, with a significance in the tone that did not He in the 
 words. 
 
 A certain contempt came into her eyes and a slight flush 
 on her cheeks. 
 
 'My fancies, at least, remain patrician; a woman is 
 never compelled to be consistent,' she said, with a negligent 
 indifference. 
 
 Tet no physiognomist who had studied the proud curve 
 of her beautiful lips, or the firm mould of her delicate chin, 
 would have said that inconsistency, or any need to take 
 refuge in it, could ever be attributed to the Countess Vas- 
 salis, whatever other errors might lie at her score. 
 
 6 "What can that man be to her ? ' thought Erceldoune, 
 while the dark colour flushed over his brow. Vane had 
 not been named as any relative. There was no difference 
 in her manner to him from her conduct to others, yet ho 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE, it* 
 
 had about him a nameless familiarity, graceful and polished 
 like all his actions, which seemed to betoken in him either 
 some sway over her or some accepted tie to her. Could he 
 be her lover her husband ? The blood grew like ice in 
 Erceldoune's veins as the thought glanced across him. He 
 felt dizzy, blinded, sick at heart, and drank down uncon- 
 sciously the great goblet glass of champagne beside him 
 that they had filled. The wine that he was u^ed to drink 
 like water felt now like so much fire ; the fever was in his 
 life, not in the liquid. 
 
 The dinner was as choice and seductive a one as that 
 with which the fair intriguing Queen of Aragon subdued 
 the senses and stole the allegiance of Villena. There was 
 a shadow of melancholy still on the hostess ; but the 
 dazzling glitter of her wit gained rather than lost by that 
 certain disdainful languor half scorn, half weariness 
 which was more marked in her that evening than when she 
 had been with Erceldoune alone in the sunny silence of 
 the Bosphorus. A woman far less conscious of her power 
 than she was conscious of it would have known that all 
 these men loved her, and were, even if unknown to them, 
 each other's rivals. But the knowledge gave her no more 
 sort of embarrassment than if they had been guests of her 
 own sex. She was well used to all conquest ; used to men 
 in all their moods and all their passions ; used to intoxicate 
 them with a smile, to subdue them with a glance. She 
 took little wine, touching each variety with her lips ; but 
 once or twice she drank a single draught of hot chartreuse 
 a fiery liqueur that her sex rarely choose and with it 
 drove away the shadow that seemed on her, and abandoned 
 herself to the gay glitter of the hour. Watching her, he 
 could have fancied, had not the thought been too fantastic, 
 that she had taken the chartreuse as men take hot wines 
 to shake off thought, and give their spirits recklessness* 
 Yet what, he mused, could this woman, with her splendour, 
 her power, her youth, and her fascination, desire that she 
 had not ? "What could be the canker at the core of that 
 purple and odorous pomegranate flower of her life ? 
 
 The various courses were served admirably ; and ha 
 might have been dining at a palace for the lavishness of tne 
 banquet. There was great brilliance, too, in the ighfc 
 versation; for in her presence every one strove to.e lost 
 
 K 
 
128 ID ALIA. 
 
 There was considerable freedom in the topics and in the 
 wit, though never actually sufficient to become license ; 
 but now and then there were flashes of jest at which Ercel- 
 doune ground his teeth ; they were a profanation to his 
 ideal a taint on his angel. Unconsciously he had so 
 idealised and etherealised her in his thoughts, that a soil of 
 earth on her would defame if it were too late to dethrone 
 her. ' That is not the tone in which men speak before a 
 hostess they reverence/ he said in his soul, with fiery 
 bitterness, while he glanced at her to see if she resented it. 
 She lay back with her beautiful languor, laughing softly, 
 slightly. She was either too familiar with it to note it, or 
 if she felt resentment did not display it. 
 
 When only the Turkish and Levantine fruits and crystal- 
 lised confections remained on the table in their silver 
 baskets, which dainty statuettes of Odalisque slaves and 
 Greek girls held up in a shower of flowers, hookahs were 
 brought round by a Nubian to each of the guests. 
 
 ' We have permission to smoke in your presence, then, 
 Madame ? ' said Erceldoune, as the porcelain narghile was 
 set beside him. 
 
 She looked up in slight surprise, as though the solicita- 
 tion were new to her. 
 
 1 O yes. It is as necessary to you after dinner as your 
 cup of coffee. Is it not ? ' 
 
 ' It is always welcome, since you have the compassion to 
 allow it,' he answered her, as he raised the long a-mber- 
 tipped tube. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 ' Of course why not ? That Latakia. I believe, is good ? 
 All the rest of ir, they tell me, was bought up by the 
 French Legation.' 
 
 ' It is excellent ; full fragrance, but very soft. Apropos 
 of the Chancelleries, at which of them shall I have the hon- 
 our of meeting you most ? As yet, you, know, I am in 
 ignorance of your nation.' 
 
 He spoke with the natural carelessness of so natural a 
 question ; the Countess Vassalis, as he deemed, must be 
 v nown by the representatives of all the great Powers. A 
 w pdow of impatience came on her face, a defiant hauteur 
 no or eyes ; 
 
 in herein w ^ mee ^ ^e at none of the Embassies/ she said 
 d coldly. 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 129 
 
 And in that moment Erceldoune saw Idalia as he had 
 never seen her before ; saw in her a certain grandeur of 
 disdainful defiance, a certain outlawed sovereignty as ot 
 one life against the world. 
 
 c The Countess Idalia has come to the East for rest/ in- 
 terposed Victor Vane, with his musical, gliding voice. ' How 
 is it possible to obtain it if you go en penitence to those 
 tedious travesties of little courts, his Excellency's recep- 
 tions ? Visiting your ambassador is, I think, one of the 
 severest penalties of foreign residence.' 
 
 ' Our representative will consent, I daresay, to release 
 you from it if you petition him ; or most likely he will not 
 notice your choice de briller par votre absence ,' said Ercel- 
 doune curtly. 
 
 He knew the explanation was a diplomatic lie ; he was 
 tortured with bitter impatience to know why the man made 
 himself her apologist, or had claim to explain her actions ; 
 his thoughts were in a conflict of conjecture as to the cause 
 of her exclusion from the Embassies for exclusion he 
 believed it, by the look that for one instant he had seen 
 upon her face. 
 
 The access of vivacity and abandon which a considerable 
 amount of wine drunk and the introduction of tobacco in- 
 variably produce, flowed into the conversation ; its gaiety 
 grew very gay, and though there was still nothing that was 
 licentious, there was a tone in it not customary before 
 women of rank ; the anecdotes had a Breda aroma, the 
 epigrams had a jockey-club flavour, the equivoques were 
 fitted for a little gilded supper cabinet in the Maison 
 Doree ; such a freedom in any other hour would have added 
 to its piquance and its savour to Erceldoune as to all other 
 men, but it now lashed him into vehement pain and in- 
 censement ; it brought the breath of the world -and of a 
 very profane world on the woman of his dreams, it de- 
 secrated and almost dimmed the beauty of his ideal. Out 
 of the mists of death he had once wakened to see her face 
 in the haze of the sunlight ; the face of an angel, the face 
 of his altar-picture at Monastica. When he sat here in the 
 perfume and lustre of the Eastern chamber, with theodoura 
 of wines and flowers, and spices and incense, with the 
 glitter of gold and azure, of silver and scarlet, with light; 
 laughter and light wit on the air, he seemed to have lost 
 
 K 
 
130 ID ALIA. 
 
 her again lost her more cruelly. Even while close beside 
 him, the richness of her heauty, the glance of her eyes, the 
 touch of her trailing dress, the gleam of the diamonds on 
 her hair, heightened her loveliness and heightened his pas- 
 sion, till the night seemed full of wild tumult to him, of 
 fierce delight, and of as fiery a pain, there was still on him 
 that deadly nameless sense of some impending loss. She 
 was nothing to him, worse than nothing, if she were not 
 what he believed her. Alas, where was there ever man or 
 woman who reached the spiritualised standard of an idealic 
 love ? 
 
 The lustre and splendour of the chamber, the artistic 
 mingling of colour, the rich wines, the dreamy perfumes, 
 the scented narcotics, these were all, he knew, the studied 
 auxiliaries of a woman whose science was to beguile. But 
 he dashed the accursed suspicion from him as quickly as it 
 rose ; he had sworn to believe in her, he would believe in 
 her. 
 
 When she at last rose and left the dinner-table, her guests 
 rose too. and followed her, A timepiece was striking 
 twelve when they entered the salon. 
 
 ' We have been long enough at dinner to satisfy Brillat- 
 Savarin,' said Idalia, glancing at it. ' Do you like cards, 
 Sir Fulke ?' 
 
 1 1 think no man could say honestly he did not, though 
 it is the most dangerous of pastimes,' he answered her with 
 a smile. 'I have seen its evils in South America, where, as 
 in Pizarro's time, the old proverb still holds good, and they 
 " game away the sun before it rises." ' 
 
 ' Many do that over other things than play, and before 
 they know what their sun is worth,' she said with that pro- 
 found sadness which now and then checkered her careless 
 brilliance with so dark a shadow. e We will have some bac- 
 carat, then. I am fond of play when it is high enough.' 
 
 ' I should not have thought that.' 
 
 She looked at him with a smile; she knew Ms reasons 
 as well as though he had uttered them ; there was something 
 of irony, more of melancholy in the smile. 
 
 6 No? But it is true all the same. Why should it not 
 be? High play is excitement, and it whirls thought 
 away.' 
 
 ' But you should have no thoughts that are pain,' 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 131 
 
 c Those are idle words. There are few lives without pain, 
 there are none without reproach.' 
 
 She turned from him with something of impatience, and 
 as her Albanians wheeled the card-table nearer, sank into 
 her couch, drawing some cards to her. She looked a woman, 
 to lean over a balcony in a starlit southern night, and listen 
 to a poet's cancion, or a lover's whisper stealing up through 
 the murmurs of the leaves with the reverend worship of 
 Petrarca ; not one to need the feverish excitation of the 
 gamester's reckless hazards. Who was she, what was 
 she this mystery whom men called Idalia ? he wondered 
 ceaselessly in eager unrest. 
 
 The baccarat commenced. 
 
 She played with the skill of her country, if that country 
 were Greece, as her name implied ; played like one accus- 
 tomed to control chance by proficiency : but also with that 
 alternate listlessness and eagerness which marks those who 
 seek it as a distraction from those who crave it out of 
 avarice. It was its excitement that was grateful to her, the 
 rapid changes aud chances. When she lost, she lost with an 
 absolute indifference, and she staked her gold with a lavish 
 extravagance that seemed to disdain speculation. Once or 
 twice Erceldoune almost thought that she sought to guide 
 the success of the hazard towards himself; if so, she 
 succeeded ! he won considerably, to his own displeasure, and 
 she did not. Over and over again, when the current of 
 chance ran for her, she lost it, either listlessly, with that 
 careless scornful weariness peculiar to her, or with a 
 recklessness that made her throw large sums away while she 
 laughed over a bon-mot. Two hours passed rapidly in the 
 whirl of the game, leaving him winner of some heavy sums. 
 Her eyes rested on him a moment, on the dark soldier-like 
 grandeur of his head, which the rich colours and light of the 
 room behind him threw up, as a noble Spanish head by 
 Murillo might be thrown up on an illuminated background 
 of gold and scarlet ; then, at a slight pause in the game, she 
 rose, sweeping her laces about her. 
 
 6 Play on by yourselves, rnes amis, as long as you will. I 
 am constant to nothing the privilege of a woman! and I 
 shall take a cup of coffee.' 
 
 They all rose, as of course she knew that they would, aud 
 gathered about her, while two Nubians brought round trays 
 
 K 2 
 
132 ID ALIA. 
 
 of Mocha and bonbons. It had been her caprice that Ercel- 
 doune should be a gainer by the baccarat, and she had 
 secured her point without any semblance of effort. Tho 
 expression used by more than one to her concerning him had 
 impressed her with the idea that his necessities for money 
 were far greater than they were. 
 
 Taking their coffee, they stood about her by the marble 
 basin of the fountain. As the night grew late, as the wine 
 and the incense and her constant presence added heat to 
 their mutual rivalry, the band of courtesy began to loosen, 
 the instinctive jealouy that was rife among them began to 
 seethe up in covert words and bitter ironies. Erceldoune 
 resented their presence, they resented his ; even the bright 
 soft harmony always characteristic of Victor Yane began to 
 show a gleam of constraint and impatience beneath it. Any 
 watcher might have seen that it needed but very slight 
 provocation, a very little more license, to remove the curb 
 that lay on them, and to let their enmity break into feud, 
 mere strangers though they were to one another. She saw 
 this, but it excited in her no passing agitation even, no 
 thought of difficulty ; she was used to see the strongest 
 tempests at riot, and to control them, if she cared to do so, 
 with a glance or a word; often she let them destroy them- 
 selves by their own violence. Now, she left them, and ran 
 her hands over the keys of the grand piano which stood near 
 the fountain, and with hardly a chord of prelude sang a rich 
 Eomaic ode, a mountain song with the old war-fire of Hellas 
 in it. Her voice was of an exquisite beauty, highly 
 cultivated and eloquent as any Pasta's, and it rang through 
 the silence, throbbing on the air, and echoing far out to the 
 night, where it was answered by the beating of the waves 
 and the music of the nightingales among the roses. 
 
 Those round her were stilled as by a sudden spell. She 
 sang on, scarcely pausing, grand, mournful impassioned 
 chants, now Koniaic, now Sicilian, now Venetian ; songs of 
 the nations, of the poets, of the hours of freedom, of the 
 glories that were gone from Hellas and from Home ; songs 
 of a profound pathos, of an eternal meaning. Neither 
 IVIozart nor Beethoven, ever gave richer melodies than were 
 those poems brought from the past, from the peoples, from 
 the heart of dying nations, and from the treasures of their 
 pdrished liberties. 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 133 
 
 Erceldoune leant agaiust the white shaft of the marble 
 walls, with his head bent; music always had power over 
 him and it gave her back all the divinity of his dreams, all 
 the power of his lost ideal. Never, since the first moment 
 when she had stooped to him with that one word * You ! ' 
 had he seen her look as she looked now ; those were the 
 eyes that had bent above him with an angel's pity, when he 
 had lain dying in the sunlight. Anything of her empire 
 that had been hazarded in the past few hours she recovered 
 tenfold ; anything of abhorrent doubt that had stolen into 
 his loyalty and faith to her was swept away and forgotten. 
 
 He believed in her he worshipped her ! Not less so, 
 when with a shock of surprise, and all the Border blood 
 warming in him, he heard her sing the Scottish sonnet, beau- 
 tiful and living still as the waters of the Esk by which it 
 was written : 
 
 * Sleep, silence, child, sweet father of soft rest, 
 Prince, whose approach peace to all mortals brings, 
 Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, 
 Sole comforter of minds that are opprest, 
 Lo ! by thy charming rod all breathing things 
 Lie slumbering with forgetfulncss possest.' 
 
 The words, only the sweeter for the lingering softness of 
 the foreign accents, came to his ear like the breath of his 
 mountain air over the heather ; as they died off the air he 
 leaned eagerly forward . 
 
 ' You know our poems ? You believe that beauty may 
 come even out of our rugged glens ?' 
 
 ' Surely every one knows Drummond ? The gentle Cava- 
 lier who died of his Master's death ? You must often have 
 seen Hawthornden, I suppose?' 
 
 'It was my favourite haunt in my boyhood, though I 
 believe I thought more of the birds I shot in the glen, and 
 the water-fowls of the Esk, than of Drummond himself at 
 that time.' 
 
 'And yet there was Patria in every line of your face 
 when you heard his sonnet just now,' she said, with a smile. 
 
 ' Ah ! you know that Pope says, 
 
 " A Scot would fight for < Christ's Kirk o' the Green.' " 
 To hear any of the old ballads is like hearing a trumpet call 
 
134 ID ALIA. 
 
 besides Drumrnond's words on your lips ! I cannot tell you 
 what they were to me/ 
 
 He paused abruptly, the silence more eloquent than any 
 words could have been. 
 
 ' You have never heard rne speak English,' she said care- 
 lessly. * In truth, if you will pardon me, it is the language 
 I like least. Its low Dutch, with all the exotic additions 
 that have grown on it, is too hard for my lips ; and I have 
 rarely had occasion to use what knowledge I possess of it. 
 Apropos of Scottish poetry, are you descended from the 
 Ehymer?' 
 
 * We believe him to have been of the same race ; but 
 what is known of him is so enveloped in legend, that it is 
 hard to trace. Thomas himself has grown almost mythical, 
 though " Syr Tristam " is immortal.' 
 
 * Yes ! because Syr Tristam's folly is repeated by all men 
 through all ages.' 
 
 ' Eolly ? It merits a better name ; it was, at least, fide- 
 lity ?' ' 
 
 * Eolly ! Eidelity ! They are synonyms for love. Eun 
 vaut Pantre? 
 
 ' "Would you never, then, believe in passion as enduring 
 as Tristam's ? ' 
 
 ' Eor Ysonde, who is another man's wife ? O, yes ! that 
 is a very common feature. The love is so charming because 
 it is forbidden ! ' 
 
 The evening was very still ; the stars shining in myriads 
 above the cypress and ilex woods, the heavy odours of roses 
 and basilica on the air, and through the boughs of the 
 cedars silvery gleams and flashes of the phosphorescent 
 water. She left her seat as she spoke, and went out on to 
 the terrace, and leaned a moment ever the marble wall. 
 
 'How cool, how tranquil! And we spend such a night 
 over hot wines, and idle jests, and feverish play ! ' 
 
 To his heart, to his Iips 5 rose words in unison with that 
 sweetness of the night, born from the intoxication of the 
 hour : as though she felt them ere they were uttered, and 
 would have them remain unspoken, she leant slightly 
 toward him. 
 
 1 Gro home by yourself with none of them, if they invite 
 you. I don't mean/ she added, with a laugh, ' because 
 they will knock you down to steal your winnings ! They 
 are not so low as that jet I ' 
 
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE. 135 
 
 The whisper was low and very rapid ; surprise was the 
 dominant feeling that it awoke in him, joined with some- 
 thing of a vivid wondering delight she thought of his wel- 
 fare ! 
 
 4 Your wish is my law,' he answered her. ' Do with my 
 Vlfe what you will it is yours.' 
 
 i No. Not mine. It is a noble trust ; never give it 
 rashly.' 
 
 There was a step beside them. 
 
 6 A beautiful night, indeed, 5 said Victor Vane. A pic- 
 ture of Grherardo, and a poem of Hafiz ! Certainly we 
 never know what stars are till we couie to the East.' 
 
 ' Never,' said Idalia, turning to him ; ' and now you may 
 return to Stamboul by their light. After their poetry come; 
 their practical uses. I shall dismiss you all now ; I am 
 tired. G-ood-night.' 
 
 Lightly as the words were spoken, eagerly as they longed 
 to dispute the dismissal, unscrupulous, at least, as were 
 some of those about her, all were constrained to obey her 
 command all were powerless to remain in her presence. 
 Erceldoune was the first to accept her dismissal ; he would 
 not offer her even so much insult as would have been 
 implied in hesitation, and he took his farewell of her in- 
 stantly and almost in silence. 
 
 Vane followed him with his glance. 
 
 ' Why have you taken to patronise that Border moss- 
 trooper, madame ? ' he asked, with a slight satirical laugh. 
 ' He is nothing but a courier, and has only an owl's roost at 
 home that foxes burrow in, and cobwebs keep furnished. 
 He is a rough rider and a wild shikari, nothing else ; they 
 are odd titles to your preference.' 
 
 She looked him steadily in the eyes. 
 
 ' He is a frank and gallant gentleman ; that is, perhaps, 
 as strange a one ! Ifc may be odd that I should care to see 
 an honest man by way of variety ; but since it is my caprice, 
 harm him at your peril.' 
 
 Her guests were gone. 
 
 In solitude she sank down in the depths of a couch, with 
 the light still playing on the diamonds in her hair, and her 
 eyes watching the fall of the showering spray into the basin 
 of the fountain, where scarlet roses swayed into the lily- 
 laden waters. She gave a weary, restless sigh as she thrust 
 
136 IDALIA. 
 
 back the bright masses of her hair farther from her temples, 
 and, leaning her cheek on her hand, gazed absently into 
 the glancing surface. There was something of release, 
 something of regret, something of self-reproach in her 
 attitude and in her thoughts ; though these were checked 
 by and mingled with a careless ironic triumph, and a royal 
 habit of command and of disdain. 
 
 ' Have I done more wrong ? ' she said half aloud, while 
 her proud head fell. ' Greater wrong than ever ! He is 
 loyal and lion-hearted a brave chivalrous gentleman : he 
 should not come among us ! The others can play at 
 diamond cut diamond ; the others are fairly armed, and 
 have but their weapons turned against them. But he is of 
 different mould : he will suffer he will suffer terribly ! ' 
 
 CHAPTEE XL 
 
 TAIEY-GOLD. 
 
 IN the full noon heat of the next day heat that brooded 
 on the hills and glistened on the sea, in which the leaves 
 and the flowers drooped, and the sails of the feluccas hung 
 .stirless Idalia moved slowly and thoughtfully up and 
 down her reception-room, the sunlight straying in 
 checkered rays through the chinks of the shutters, and 
 falling fitfully across her. The wolf-hound followed her 
 step for step ; there was not a sound except the falling of 
 the fountains and the buzzing of a little humming-bird 
 tangled among the flowers. There was a certain shadow 
 on her, but it was not that of grief still less was it that 
 of any tremulous effeminate sorrow ; it was haughty, un- 
 restful, with much of doubt, much of rebellion, much of 
 disdain in it the shadow that was on the Eeine Blanche in 
 the fetters of Potheringay, on Marie Antoinette in the 
 presence of Mirabeau. There was an intense scorn in the 
 dark, soft lustre of her eyes the eyes of a G-eorgian or a 
 Greek. She was netted closely in, in a net partially of 
 her own past weaving ; self-reproach was not the least 
 keen of many regrets that were heavy upon her, and the 
 world was against her ; but she was not vanquished nor 
 intimidated. 
 
 She came and paused before an open cabinet; on whose 
 
FAIRY-GOLD. 137 
 
 writing-stand lay a pile of letters. Her eyes rested on the 
 one that lay uppermost, and read its lines for the second 
 time with disdain, revulsion, pity, impatience, and loathing 
 all mingled in her glance. 
 
 * He always wants money ! He would give his soul for 
 money ; and yet he throws it away as idly as the winds ! ' 
 she thought, while her hand absently caressed the great 
 head of the hound. ' Well ! he can have it. I will 
 always give him that. I would give it him all down to 
 the very diamonds if he would leave me free, if he would 
 cut away every link of the past, if he would go and never 
 let me see his face again.' 
 
 Yet still, though there was much of profound dejection 
 and heart-sickness at her life upon her, there was no fear 
 in it, and no sadness that had not as much disdain. She 
 laid both hands on the dog's broad forehead, and looked 
 down into his eyes. 
 
 ' O, Sulla ! when one life is chosen, is there no escape 
 into another? If we accept error in blindness once, is 
 there no laying it down ? Plutarch has written, " When 
 \ve see the dishonour of a thing, then is it time to renounce 
 it." But what can we do if we cannot if it stay with 
 us, and will not forsake us ? How can I be free from 
 it?' 
 
 But bondage was not submission ; and she was like the 
 Palmyran or Iceman queens made a slave, but all a sove- 
 reign still. 
 
 A humming-bird flew against her, and, frightened, tan- 
 gled itself among her lace. She put her hand over it and 
 caught it, stroked smooth the little ruffled wings, laid her 
 lips gently on its bright head, and, opening one of the lat- 
 tices, loosed it and let it fly into the sunny air. 
 
 * Liberty ! Liberty ! It is worth any sacrifice,' she said 
 half aloud, as she watched the bird's flight through the 
 gardens and outward to the sea. 
 
 At that moment a Nubian slave threw open the broad 
 double doors of jaspar at the end of the chamber, the 
 hangings before it were flung aside, and Erceldoune en- 
 tered her presence. 
 
 She had said that it would be best that he should remain 
 absent ; yet he was not in error when he thought that the 
 emile she had given him last night was scarcely so sweet- 
 
138 IDALIA. 
 
 as that she gave him now. He seemed half her own "by 
 title of that death-hour in which she had felt for the faint 
 beatings of his heart, and had watched beside him in the 
 loneliness of the Carpathians. She could not forget that 
 this man's strong life would have perished but for her. 
 
 He owed her a debt the debt of faith, at the least. 
 Whatever she might be to others, to him she had been as 
 the angel of life. Moreover, there was in Idalia, over- 
 lying the proud earnestness that was in her nature, a cer- 
 tain nonchalance a certain languid carelessness that 
 made her look little beyond the present hour, and change 
 her temperament as immediate influences prevailed. The 
 tradition of birth gave her some blood of the Commneni 
 in her veins ; and the insouciance of an epicurean, with 
 the haughty power of imperial pride, were blent in her as 
 they had been in Manuel. Therefore, since he had chosen 
 to put aside her first warning, she allowed him now to 
 come as he would. 
 
 As for him, life was a paradise a delirium ; and he gave 
 himself up to it. The earth had eternal summer for him, 
 and wore an eternal smile. He sat near her in the shaded 
 light and sweet incense of the chamber, while they spoke 
 of things that served to veil the thoughts burning beneath 
 his commonest words ; they strolled through the cedar 
 aisles, and through the fields of roses, as the heat of the 
 day faded, and the breeze began to stir among the splen- 
 dours of the flower- wilderness ; they passed the sunset 
 hour on the sea, watching the day die out in glory, and 
 the fire from the west glow over the Marmora waves, and 
 tinge the distant snow-crests of Mount Ida and Olympus. 
 
 "When the little caique floated slowly homeward down 
 the waters, the evening star the star of Astarte had 
 risen. Through the opened windows of her villa the lights 
 of the banqueting-room glittered, and the table stood 
 ready served, with the Albanians and Nubians waiting 
 about it. She bade him stay, if he would, and he was her 
 only guest. Had her wines been opium-drugged, they 
 could not have brought him dreams more fatally fair a 
 lulled delight more sure to wake in bitterness than they 
 gave him now. The charms for every sense, the beauty of 
 the chamber, the odours of the flowers, the oriental 
 languor pervading the very air all that he had felt the 
 
FAIRY-GOLD. 139 
 
 night before he felt tenfold now : then a passionate jea- 
 lousy, a restless doubt, had haunted him ; now he was 
 alone, and on him only did her smile glance, did her eyes 
 fall. 
 
 There was on her to-night an infinite gentleness, a gra- 
 cious sweetness, often tinged with sadness, though often 
 bright, brilliant, and illumined with all the grace of talent. 
 But at the same time there was the sovereignty which, in 
 her solitude, guarded her as an empress is guarded in a 
 Court, which made her as secure from words of warmer 
 tinge than what she chose to hear, as she was carelessly 
 disdainful of the precise customs of the world. He felt 
 that she forbade him to approach her with any whisper of 
 love ; he knew that to take advantage of his admission to 
 her solitude, to give any utterance to the passion in him, 
 would be to be banished from it then and for ever. He 
 felt this though she never spoke, never hinted it ; and 
 even while the restriction galled and stung him most, he 
 most revered her for it, he most honoured and adored in 
 her the holiness of his ideal. 
 
 There was a difference in her from the evening before ; 
 while her gaiety was less, the darker shadow was also far 
 less upon her. She had scarcely touched the wines, and 
 of play she did not speak ; it might be but the * hope 
 which out of its own self creates the thing it longs for,' 
 but he could have believed that for the few hours of the 
 present she had resigned herself to happiness happiness 
 in his presence. The thought seemed wild to him, base- 
 less and vain even to madness ; he told himself that it was 
 a presumptuous folly, and he felt that her gentleness to 
 him, her smile upon him, were only such feeling as a 
 woman might well testify, in mere pity's sake, to one 
 whom she had found in deadly peril, and to whom she 
 had restored life on the very brink of the grave. And, 
 indeed, there was a haughty, weary, royal grace always in 
 her, which would have made a man, far vainer than Er- 
 celdoune could ever become, long doubt his own power 
 ever to move her heart. 
 
 He asked nothing, heeded nothing, doubted nothing. 
 He moved, acted, spoke, almost as mechanically as one in 
 the unconsciousness of fever. It was love of which men 
 have died before now ; not of broken hearts, as poets say, 
 
140 . ID ALIA. 
 
 but of its intoxication, and its reaction, as in a death- 
 draught of opium or digitalis. 
 
 She divined well enough all that was muttered on hk 
 lips. She let his love be fostered by all of scene, time, 
 place, and the spells of her own loveliness that a studied 
 coquette could have devised, yet she repressed any ex- 
 pression of that love as a woman of the world alone can 
 do, without any word that was cold, any glance that was 
 rebuke, yet proudly, distinctly, and beyond resistance. 
 
 She followed the impulse, the caprice perhaps, of the 
 moment, without definite purpose or thought at all. For 
 the last eight years men had never approached her save to 
 love ; it was a thousand-time-told tale to her. If her 
 heart had lost his freshness, or its pity, there could be 
 little marvel in it, even though there were much blame. 
 
 The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep 
 and sonorous, calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour 
 before midnight. She listened dreamily to the echoes that 
 seemed to linger among the dark foliage. 
 
 1 1 like those national calls to prayer,' she said, as she 
 leaned over the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered 
 among the mass of leaves as the diamond sprays glistened 
 in her hair. ' The Ave Maria, the Vespers, the Imauin's 
 chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn 
 before sleep, or before the sun ; -you have none of those 
 in your chill islands ? You have only weary rituals, and 
 stuccoed churches, where the " Pharisees for a pretence 
 make long prayers ! " As if that was not the best the 
 only temple ! ' 
 
 She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her 
 face was that graver and gentler look which had come 
 there when she sang. 
 
 1 1 have held it so many a time,' he answered her, 
 * lying awake at night among the long grass of the Andes, 
 or under the palms of the desert. It was a strange de- 
 lusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there 
 are still his own the forests and the mountains. But do 
 not call my country cold ; we are not cold ; there are 
 bold lives among us ; and we can love too well for our 
 own peace.' 
 
 His voice had a rich melody in it, and was unsteady 
 over the last words ; in his eyes, as they burned in the 
 
FAIRY-GOLD. 141 
 
 shadows of the night, she saw a passion as intense as ever 
 glowed under the suns of Asia, the stronger for the rein 
 in which it was still held. 
 
 She was silent a moment, then she laughed a little j 
 very softly. 
 
 * Do not repudiate coldness ; it is the most precious 
 gift the fates give, if it be not the most poetic. R/e- 
 meniber what your namesake of Erceldoune found when 
 ^he Elf -Queen granted him his prayer ; where he thought 
 he held an angel he saw a loathsome shadow. T&e legend 
 covers a wise warning. 
 
 ' Ay ! but even while the horror of the shadow and 
 the treachery were on him he had faith in her; and his 
 faith was justified ; it gave him, in reward, his bright, im- 
 mortal love.' 
 
 She turned her head and looked at him, gently, pity- 
 ingly, almost tenderly. 
 
 1 Ah ! you are too loyal for this world, far too loyal to 
 spend your heart on any woman's love. It is only fairy- 
 gold, believe me, which, if you took it, would turn ashes 
 in your hand. And now, a safe ride homeward to you, 
 and good-night.' 
 
 She held her hand out to him with a sweet and gra- 
 cious gesture, the more marked in her because she never 
 gave her hand in familiar salutation ; he bent over it, and 
 touched it with his lips, a lingering kiss in which all his 
 silenced heart spent itself. 
 
 She did not rebuke him ; she had not power to speak 
 coldly or chidingly to the man whose life was owed her, 
 whose head had rested in his dying hour on her bosom. As 
 he rode slowly out down the cedar avenue that passed in 
 front of the terrace, he looked up ; she was leaning still 
 over the marble parapet, her form distinct against the 
 dark masses of myrtle foliage, the brilliance of the 
 moonlight shining full upon her from the sea. She gavfl 
 him a farewell sign of her hand as he bowed to his saddle, 
 such as from her palace-prison Queen Ysonde might have 
 given to her lover ; and Erceldoune went on through the 
 fragrant night, his horse's feet beating out rich odours 
 from the trailing leaves, dizzy with that riot of hope, joy, 
 belief, and desire, which is too tumultuous and impatient 
 for happiness, but yet is happy beyond all that the 
 
142 IDALIA. 
 
 world holds. She remained long in her solitude upon the 
 terrace, gazing down into the shelving slopes of leaf and. 
 blossom, where the fire-flies made the woodland as star- 
 studded as the skies. 
 
 'It is too late now he would never forget now] she 
 murmured. 'I tried to save him, and he would not be 
 saved.' 
 
 Saved from what ? Saved from her. 
 
 A little while before, and in her own gardens at 
 Naples, a brave boy, in the brightness of his youth, had 
 been run through the heart in a rapier duel for her 
 sake ; and she had not felt a tithe so much pain as lay 
 on her now 5 so much weary, passionate, and vain regret. 
 Then many had called her heartless, and the mother of 
 the dead boy had cursed her with pitiless curses ; none 
 would have called her heartless now. 
 
 For seven or eight days time came and passed away, 
 spent thus. He sought her in the warm amber noons, 
 stayed with her amid the wilderness of roses, and drifted 
 with her down the sunny sea along the Bosphorus shore, 
 and left her only when the midnight stars rose over the 
 minarets of the city of Constantine. He met no one in 
 her Turkish villa, and she let him come in this familiar un- 
 broken intercourse as though it were welcome to her ; as 
 though, indeed, their friendship had been the long-accus- 
 tomed growth of years. He asked nothing, heeded noth- 
 ing : he never paused to recall that there was any defiance 
 of custom in the intercourse between them, or to note 
 that she, with her wealth and her splendour, was as utterly 
 alone as though she were a recluse of Mount Athos ; he 
 never observed that she kept silence on all that could have 
 explained her presence in Moldavia, or given him account 
 of the position and the character of her life ; he never 
 noticed, he never recollected ; he was lost in a day-dream 
 of such magic that it lulled him to oblivion of everything 
 save itself, and all criticism, all reason, all doubt, were as 
 impossible in him as insult and outrage to her. His own 
 nature w^as one too boldly free, too accustomed to the 
 liberty of both action and thought, too little tolerant of 
 the ceremonials and conventionalities of the world, to be 
 awake to the singularity of her reception of him as others 
 might have been. Moreover, while she allowed him this 
 
. FAIRY-GOLD. 143 
 
 unrestrained communion with her, he would have been a 
 vainer man far than Erceldoune who could have flattered 
 himself that this was done because her heart was touched ; 
 or who should have brought on him his exile for ever by 
 warmer entreaties for a softer joy than friendship. While 
 untrammelled by any of the bonds of conventionality, 
 while accustomed to a liberty of thought, of speech, of 
 act that brooked no dictator, while distinguished by a 
 careless negligence of custom and of opinion that was 
 patrician even while it was boheuiian, Idalia still kept the 
 light but inexorable rein upon his passion, which forbade 
 him to pass the bounds that she tacitly prescribed to him. 
 He was a bold and daring man enough ; in his early 
 days he had been steeped in vice, though he had learned 
 to loathe it ; he was impassioned in his pursuit of her as 
 any lover that the Asian suns had ever nurtured to their 
 own heat. But he loved her as William Craven loved the 
 Winter Queen, as George Douglas the White Queen. 
 
 One who should not have cared for her if such there 
 could have been would have found an infinite variety, an 
 endless charm in her companionship. She had travelled 
 in most countries, she was familiar with most nations, she 
 had knowledge of the classic and the oriental literatures, 
 deep to a scholar's scope, and warmed with a picturesque 
 hue of an imagination naturally luxuriant, though the 
 world had joined with it an ironic and contemptuous 
 scepticism that gave the keenness of wit, side by side with 
 the colour of a poet, to her thoughts and to her words ; she 
 understood men pitilessly, human nature unerringly ; none 
 could have palmed off on her a false mask or a glossed 
 action ; she had seen and known the world in all its intri- 
 cacies ; the variety of her acquirements was scarcely so 
 singular as the variety of her experience, and the swift 
 change of her mood, now grave to melancholy, now care- 
 less to caprice, now thoughtful with a profound and philo- 
 sophic insight into the labyrinths of human life, now gay 
 with the nonchalant and glittering gaiety of bohemian 
 levity, gave her much of inconstancy, it is true, but gave 
 her infinitely more of charm and enchantment. 
 
 Evening fell once more, closing |in the eighth day that 
 their intercourse had thus passed ou since the night when 
 "he had found her as he had hunted the Greek to her 
 
144 ID ALIA. 
 
 gardens; they had lingered without moving in the ban* 
 queting-room, the wines and flowers and fruits still stand- 
 ing on the table, no light stronger than the clear vivid 
 moonlight shining on the freshly-cut flowers that strewed 
 the ground, the frescoes of the pomegranates that wreathed 
 the hall, the scarlet hues melting away in the shadow, and 
 the tall slender column of the fountain flinging its foam 
 aloft. Idalia leant back among the cushions, the dazzling 
 play of her words ceasing for awhile ; the moon's rays 
 touching the proud arch of her brows, the clusters of her 
 hair bound with a narrow gold band of antique workman- 
 ship, the voluptuous softness of her lips, and the dark un- 
 fathomable lustre of her eyes that met his own, burning 
 with the eloquence he felt forbidden to put into words, 
 but were not moved by them ; they did not droop, as wo- 
 men's often do, beneath the fire in his, they passed on 
 from him to rest dreamily on the distance where the domes 
 of Santa Sophia rose against the stars, and the lighted 
 minarets glittered among the cypress groves of the Moslem 
 city. 
 
 ' It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity 
 that beautiful Constantinople ! ' she said musingly. 
 ' The East and the "West what an empire ! More than 
 Alexander ever "grasped at what might not have been 
 done with it ? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with 
 Roman power and Gothic force ; if there had been a hand 
 strong enough to weld all these together, what a world 
 there might have been ! ' 
 
 c But to have done that would have been to attain the 
 Impossible ? ' he answered her. t Oil and flame, old and 
 new, living and dying, tradition and scepticism, iconoclast 
 and idolator, you cannot unite and harmonise these an- 
 tagonisms ? ' 
 
 She gave a sign of dissent. 
 
 ' The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because 
 he binds them all to his own genius. The Byzantine em- 
 pire had none such ; the nearest was Julian, but he be- 
 lieved less in himself than in the gods ; the nearest after 
 him was Belisarius the fool of a courtesan , and he was 
 but a good soldier he was no teacher, no liberator, no 
 leader for the nations. John Vatices came too late. A 
 man must be his own convert before he can convert others. 
 
FAIRY. GOLD. 145 
 
 Zoroaster, Christ, Mahommed, Cromwell, Napoleon, be- 
 lieved intensely in their own missions ; hence their in- 
 fluence on the peoples. How can we tell what Byzantium 
 might have become under one mighty hand ? It was torn 
 in pieces among courtesans, and parasites, and Christian 
 fanatics, and Houmousians and Houmoiousians ! I have 
 the blood of the Coinmneni in me. I think of it with 
 shame when I remember what they might have been.' 
 
 1 You come from the Koman Emperors ? ' 
 
 ' The Roman Emperors ? ' she repeated. ' "When the 
 name was a travesty, an ignominy, a reproach ! When 
 Barbarians thronged the Forum, and the representative of 
 Galilee fishermen claimed power in the Capitol ? Yes ; I 
 descend, they say, from the Coinmneni; but I am far 
 prouder that, on the other hand, I come from pure Athe- 
 nians. I belong to two buried worlds. But the stone 
 throne of the Areopagus was greater than the gold one 
 of Manuel.' 
 
 * You are the daughter of Emperors ? You are worthy 
 an empire.' 
 
 His were the words of no flattery of the hour, but of 
 a homage as idolatrous as was ever offered in the fair 
 shadows of the Sacred Groves of Antioch to the goddess 
 from whom she took her name. And there was a great 
 pang at his heart as he spoke of them ; he thought of the 
 only thing on earth he called his own, those crumbling 
 ruins to the far westward, by the Cheviot range, where 
 the scarlet creepers hid the jagged rents in the walls, and 
 owls roosted where princes once had banqueted. 
 
 ' An empire ! I thought so once,' she answered with a 
 low slight laugh. ' I had dreams of the sceptre of my 
 ancestors, of the crown of the Violet City, of Utopias 
 here, where east and west meet one another, and nature 
 would give us a paradise, if men did not make us a hell. 
 Dreams dreams youth is all a dream, and life too, some 
 metaphysicians say. "Where shall we wake, I wonder, 
 and how for the better? It is to be hoped so, if we 
 ever wake at all, which is more than doubtful.' 
 
 There was an accent of sadness in the opening words, 
 but the rest were spoken with that irony which, while it 
 was never bitter, was more contemptuous than bitterness 
 in its half languid levity. He looked at her with a 
 
 L 
 
146 ID ALIA. 
 
 rague and troubled pain there was so much in the com- 
 plexity of her nature that was veiled from him ; seeing 
 her life but dimly, there was so much of splendour, so 
 much of melancholy in it, that exiled him from her, and 
 that oppressed him ; the more magnificent her lineage 
 or her fortunes, the farther she was from him. 
 
 { You have one empire already,' he said almost abruptly, 
 in the tumult of the suppressed thoughts in him ' a 
 wider one than the Byzantine. You can do what you will 
 with men's lives. I have nothing, I can lose nothing, ex- 
 cept the life you gave me back ; but if I had all the 
 kingdoms of the earth, I would throw them away for ' 
 
 The eagerness in his voice dropped suddenly, leaving 
 the words unfinished ; he crushed them into silence with 
 a fierce effort. She glanced at him with that graceful 
 negligence with which she silenced all she would not hear. 
 
 'No kingdom would be a tithe so peaceful as your 
 manhood and your honour. Never peril those for any 
 woman; there is not one worth the loss.' 
 
 The flash of a giddy, exultant, incredulous rapture ran 
 like lightning through his veins for a moment. She had 
 softly repulsed, but she had not rebuked him ; she had 
 known at what his words paused, and the smile she had 
 given him had a light in it that was almost tenderness. 
 He did not ask, he did not think, where his hope began 
 or ended ; he did not weigh its meaning, he dared not 
 have drawn it to the light, lest close seen it should have 
 faded ; he only felt 
 
 ' So my eyes hold her ! "What is worth 
 The best of heaven, the best of earth ?' 
 
 ' There it lies ! ' she pursued dreamily, resting her eyes 
 on the distant minarets and roofs of Constantinople, ris- 
 ing clear and dark in the lustre of the moon, undimmed 
 by even a floating cloud. ' And all its glories are dead. 
 The Porphyry-chamber and the Tyrian dyes, the Pan- 
 dects and the Labarum, the thunder of Chrysostom and 
 the violets of child-Protus they could not make the city 
 live that had dared to dethrone Eome. The hordes o"i 
 the Forest and the Desert avenged the wrongs of the 
 Scipii and the Julii. It was but just ? ' 
 
 6 As the soldiers of Islam avenged the gods of Greece. 
 
FAIRY. GOLD. J .; 7 
 
 Aphrodite perished that Arians mi ,lit rage, and the beau- 
 tiful my thus was swept away that hell and the devil might 
 be believed instead. "When the Crescent glittered there, 
 it half redressed the wrongs of your Olympus.' 
 
 * And we reign still ! ' 
 
 She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, 
 where the sea-line of the JEgean lay, while in her eyes | 
 came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love. j 
 
 6 Greece cannot die. No matter what the land be now, 
 Greece our Greece must live for ever. Her language 
 lives ; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it 
 in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar, the 
 humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from 
 her schools. The poet comes to her for all his fairest 
 myths, his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. The 
 sculptor looks at the broken fragments of her statues, 
 and throws aside his calliope in despair before those 
 matchless wrecks. From her soldiers learn how to die, 
 and nations how to conquer and to keep their liberties. 
 No deed of heroism is done but, to crown it, it is named 
 parallel to hers. They write of love, and who forgets the 
 Lesbian ? They dream of freedom, and to reach it they 
 remember Salamis. They talk of progress, and while 
 they talk they sigh for all that they have lost in Acade- 
 mus. They seek truth, and while they seek, wearily long, 
 as little children, to hear the golden speech of Socrates, 
 that slave, and fisherman, and sailor, and stonemason, and 
 date-seller were all once free to hear in her Agora. But 
 for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of 
 the Eenaissance, Europe would have perished in its Gothic 
 darkness. They call her dead : she can never die while 
 her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the new 
 nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of 
 grace that they can claim. Greece dead ! She reigns in 
 every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty 
 treasured, in every liberty won, in every godlike life and 
 godlike death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, 
 Would be barbarian now.' 
 
 "Where she stood, with her eyes turned westward to the 
 far-off snows of Cithaeron and Mount Ida, and the shores 
 which the bronze spear of Pallas Athene once guarded 
 through the night and day, the dark light in her eyes 
 
 L2 
 
148 ID ALIA. 
 
 deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow 
 it seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered 
 Pericles. 
 
 He looked on her, with the glow of passion on his face, 
 made nobler by the poet's thoughts that were awakening 
 in him. He was silent, for his heart was lulled with the 
 oppression of his love, as the great forests are silenced 
 before the storm. 
 
 She had forgotten his presence, standing there in the 
 hush of the midnight, with the Byzantine city to the 
 eastward, and to the west the land that had heard Plato ; 
 her thoughts were far away among the shadows of the 
 past, the great past, when the lo Triumphe had been 
 echoed up to the dim majesty of the Acropolis, and the 
 roses had drooped their fragrant heads on the gracious 
 gold of Alcibiades' love-locks. 
 
 He knew that he was forgotten, yet his heart did not 
 reproach her ; she was far above him, in his sight far as 
 the stars that shone now above Athens : and his love was 
 one that would take neglect and anguish silently, without 
 swerving once from his loyalty. He would have laid his 
 life down to be pressed out in agony, so that it should 
 have given her one passing moment of pleasure, as a rose 
 is thrown under a woman's foot to be crushed as she 
 steps, that dying it may lend a breath of fragrance to the 
 air she breathes. 
 
 6 You are born with genius, you are made for sove- 
 reignty, and I have nothing that is worthy to bring you, 
 he said long after, while his voice sank very low. i Only 
 only remember, if ever you need it, one man's life will be 
 yours to-be lost for you.' 
 
 She started slightly where she leaned, with her musing 
 eyes resting on the west ; she had forgotten his presence, 
 and his words, though they told her no more than she 
 knew, startled her still with their suddenness. The look 
 of disdainful pain that he had seen before came on her 
 j face the disdain was not for him but the smile that 
 already to him was the only sun the world held lingered 
 on her lips a moment. 
 
 j c A year's pain to a true Ivfe a day's pain, an hour's 
 were far more than mine were worth. The daughter 
 of emperors you called me the daughter of men who 
 
FAIRY. GOLD. 149 
 
 gained away their birthright, and played with diadems as 
 idiot children play with olive-stones ! Is there much 
 greatness there ? G-enius ! if I have it, I have sold it, 
 shamed it, polluted it. As for you, I have had so many 
 die for me, I am tired of the shadow of the cypress ! ' 
 
 Strange though the words were, 110 vanity of power 
 spoke in them, but a fatal truth, a mournful earnestness, 
 tinged by, deepened to, remorse ; the shadow of the cypressi 
 seemed to fall across the brilliancy of her face as she ut- 
 tered them. 
 
 * Then will you let me live for you ? ' 
 
 The words escaped him before he knew they were ut- 
 tered, before he realised all they meant, before he was 
 conscious what he offered and pledged to a stranger who, 
 for aught he knew or could tell, might be the head of 
 an illustrious race, the wife of one of the royal chiefs of 
 the Levant or of the East, or might be anything that 
 Europe held of what was most evil, most fatal, most dan- 
 gerous in her sex. 
 
 She looked at him with a long, earnest, unwavering 
 look. 
 
 'It is well for you that I will not take you at your 
 word. No ! your life is a noble, gallant thing ; treasure 
 its liberty, and never risk it in a woman's hands,' 
 
 The calmness with which she put aside words that had 
 been nothing less than a declaration of the love he bore her, 
 the serenity with which her gaze had dwelt on him, were 
 not those of a woman who did or who would give him 
 answering tenderness ; yet the tone, the glance with which 
 she had spoken had not been those of one to whom he was 
 wholly indifferent, or to whom his words had been repug- 
 nant. It seemed as though she would never let him come 
 to her as a lover, yet as though she would never let him 
 free himself from the sway of her fascination ; she refused 
 his homage with easy and delicate grace, but she refused 
 it so that she showed that the man who had been saved by 
 her in the depths of the Carpathian Pass had her interest 
 and had her pity. 
 
 Noting and for once having compassion for the deadly 
 pain that she had dealt, she smiled on him ; she talked 
 to him of a thousand things with her rich and graphic 
 eloquence, that charmed the ear like the flowing of music, 
 and often sank to silence that only lent it rarer charm ; 
 
150 IDALIA. 
 
 she sang the chants of Each, of Pergolesi, of Mozart; 
 she let him stay with her till night had closed over the 
 distant mosques and courts of Constantinople, and she 
 "bade him good-night, leaning again over the marble para- 
 pet of the terrace, with the moonlight full upon her, as 
 she gave him such a sign of adieu, just so proud, just 
 so gentle, as Mary Stuart might have given to her Warden 
 of the Marches while yet she knew his love and would not 
 yield him hers. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 
 
 y ET ere many moments passed another succeeded him ; 
 a head cooler than his felt the charm of the scene and the 
 hour, a pulse slower than his beat time fast, under the chal- 
 lenge of Idalia's eyes. 
 
 His rival was alone with her. 
 
 Erceldoune set no store on any single quality he pos- 
 sessed ; was ignorant indeed of much of his own value ; 
 acted greatly not seldom, but never thought so by any hazard ; 
 did straightly, instinctively, and without preface or ornament 
 that which seemed to him the need of the hour, the due of 
 his manhood ; held his course boldly and carelessly among 
 men, caring nothing for their praise, as little for their cen- 
 sure ; had quick fiery blood in him that took flame rapidly 
 had, on the other hand, much earnestness, much tenacity 
 much tenderness, more far than he knew ; had kept through 
 his wandering life a heart singularly unworn, a mind singu- 
 larly without guile ; was naturally prone to good faith in 
 men and incapable of base suspicion, and was certain when- 
 ever he did love to love to his own destruction, as such 
 natures not seldem do. His rival was his reverse in every 
 quality cool, wary, impenetrable under an airy semblance 
 of nonchalance, vain, with the pardonable if overweening 
 vanity of unusual powers firmly conscious of themselves, 
 inordinately ambitious, but even that in a keen, critical, and 
 studiously systematic manner, the Anglo- Venetian thought 
 Erceldoune nothing more than a fine animal physically, and 
 nud half a fool mentally, underrating what was dissimilar to 
 
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 151 
 
 himself with an error not uncommon with minds of his 
 stamp, when their disdainful egotistic measurement has not 
 been corrected b j the experiences of a long life. Yet widely 
 diverse though they were, and utterly contrasted in every 
 iota, the one who never resisted his passion, and never 
 thought of her save with such chivalrous trust and absolute 
 self-abandonment as were instinctive to his temperament, 
 was scarcely more a prey to it than the other, who with his 
 love, blended a thousand threads of policy, design, covetous 
 intrigue, and hated it for having stolen on him, hated it for 
 halting on his lips, hated it for levelling him with the herd 
 he had so contemptuously despised ; hated it because, for 
 the first time, he had found a talent stronger, a logic surer, 
 a perception keener and subtler, and a courage more daring 
 and careless than his own ; because, in fine, he had 
 found his master, and found it in a woman. 
 
 This, a knowledge not easily to be pardoned by one like 
 him, made a certain acrid jealousy, a certain smartened 
 bitterness, tinge even the passion into which she had sur- 
 prised him, when the dark eyes of Idalia glanced over him 
 and read thoughts he had fancied unbetrayed by speech or 
 sign, or when her careless ironies smote him back with the 
 polished, piercing weapons of his own sceptic indifference, 
 his own unyielding philosophies, which were as real in her 
 as they had been till late in him. 
 
 For many years this woman had been but a name to him ; 
 only a name, through a succession of hazards, that had time 
 after time kept their meeting deferred ; but a name that 
 had given her a personality to him, and had been interwoven 
 with many of the more critical essays and enterprises of 
 his career. 
 
 Moving through the gore-stained, artillery-trodden maze 
 of Lombardic fields, where in some unrewarded skirmish 
 young, eager, patriotic lives had been shot down by the 
 troops of Austria, gasping to their latest breath ' Italia fara 
 da se ! ' he had stood beside some shattered wreck of brightest 
 manhood that have fallen there, down head-first into the 
 yellowing wheat, and when he had thought all life was dead 
 in that broken mass, above which the tangled corn-stalks 
 nodded and met in summer winds, he had caught a last sigh 
 in which the name of Idalia was blent with the name oi! 
 Italy, and died together with it down the Lombard breeze. 
 
152 IDALIA. 
 
 Travelling crace through Bussian steppes of snow, in the de- 
 cline of the year, when all nature was perishing, and the 
 great bleak versts of whitened plain stretched out unbroken 
 to Siberian desolation, he had found a prisoner working in 
 fetters a haggard, blear-eyed, scarcely human thing, livid 
 with the hue of the lead-mines, disfigured with the ravages 
 of frost-bite, idiotic, with a strange dull stupor, that made 
 him utter incessantly, as he toiled in a gang, one word alone ; 
 and he had known that in this wretched creature was the 
 wreck of what once had been the finest, the most fiery, the 
 most glittering of all the aristocratic soldiery of Poland ; 
 and that the word he muttered ever as he laboured was that 
 which had been his ignis fatuus, his idol, his ruin Idalia. 
 In his own Venice he had once seen a terrible struggle ; it 
 was when a mere lad of Venetia, a child of seventeen years, 
 with the clear wild noble eyes of a young eastern colt, had 
 been brought in, among others who were ' rebels,' and given 
 over to the rods that he might tell who his chiefs and his 
 comrades were ; the boy was frail of make, and weakened 
 with gunshot wounds, and he reeled and fell thrice under 
 the rain of Austrian blows, but his teeth clinched on hi& 
 tongue, and bit it through, so that no speech should pass it, 
 and when the strokes told at last more mortally than those 
 who lashed him knew, he smiled as he murmured, though 
 his mouth was full of blood, ' Tell her I died silent ! ' and 
 he who had heard had sent the farewell message to Idalia, 
 at whose bidding that silence was kept. Once on the brow 
 of a steep hill, looking over the Moravian highlands, with 
 the wide wastes of barren grasslands, mingled with jagged 
 piles of bare rock or stunted larches, with here and there 
 the sharp peaks of a pine-belt to break the outline, and the 
 angry lustre of a red evening fading out in the hot autumn 
 skies, he had seen a Monarch, the centre of a little knot of 
 cuirassier officers, draw near, and look hardly and eagerly 
 across to the westward, where, far as the eye could reach, 
 a dark shadow, like a hovering bird above the stony plains 
 marked the place where the Uhlans rode down on a fugi 
 tive's wake ; and when, reeking and breathless and spent, 
 the troopers dragged their wearv horses backward without 
 the prize they had pursued, he nad heard the Kaiser mut- 
 ter in the gloaming of the night, * I would give a province 
 for that one woman ! ' and that woman had been Idalia 
 
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 153 
 
 She hsd been long thus a name on his ear, and in his schemes, 
 and when at last she had become known to him, he had 
 learned to wonder no more at the name's magic. 
 
 To tell her this he had never ventured, really audacious 
 as his temper was : circumstances united them closely in 
 some things, but with all his tact and all his daring, he had 
 never been able to seduce himself into the self-flattery of 
 deeming that she would heed his love-words. She heard 
 so many, the story had no attraction for her ; and apart 
 from his own sense of how contemptuously careless she was 
 of how men suffered for her, was the reluctance of chafing 
 pride to acknowledge that he also paid the life-coin of his 
 surrender to one who could tempt like Calypso, and remain 
 cold as Casta Diva while her spells worked. 
 
 Yet he could not restrain one mark of the passion 
 jealousy as he sat that night beside her in the dining-hall 
 of the Turkish villa, and stretched himself from his pile of 
 cushions to liffc from the carpet a white riding glove that 
 caught his eye where it lay. 
 
 1 A stray waif of our beggared laird's, is it not, madame ? 
 He has been here to-day ? ' 
 
 ' If you mean Sir Eu'lke Erceldoune, he only left an hour 
 or so ago. I wonder you did not meet him.' 
 
 'No; I saw nothing of him. The Moldavian bullet did 
 him good service, since it has won him so much of your 
 interest. He should be vastly indebted to it ! ' 
 
 She laughed a little. 
 
 ' Surely a shot in the lungs is not so very pleasant a 
 matter that a man need be grateful for it ! ' 
 
 1 Are there not many who risked shots far more mortal 
 than his in the mere hope to win what they never did, but 
 he does your pity ? ' 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly. 
 
 ' Why should you imagine I pity him ? Have you not 
 seen him here ? ' 
 
 The emphasis spoke more than volumes could have done. 
 Her companion bowed his head. 
 
 ' True ! The real mercy would have been exclusion ! 
 Yet pity him you do, miladi, since you bade me " harm him 
 at my peril ! " ' 
 
 She looked at him such a curiously fixed regard, that had 
 a hundred meanings in it. 
 
154 ID ALIA. 
 
 ' Let us make an end of this fencing,' she said quietly : 
 'There are none here to dupe. We can speak frankly. 
 We have done this man quite evil enough without bringing 
 more upon him ! ' 
 
 * "We ! I fail to apprehend you ' 
 
 i She gave a little gesture of impatience. 
 
 'Monsieur, you have not known me very long, or you 
 would know me too well to attempt those tactics. Evasion 
 answers nothing with me, and why should we attempt it ? 
 Our cause is the same, and we both are equally aware that 
 this brave-hearted gentleman was the prey of its viler adhe- 
 rents.' 
 
 ' But' 
 
 ' Pardon me ; I have said we both know it. I have 
 grace enough to blush for it : and you ? ' 
 
 For the moment a faint flush of shame kindled over his 
 face; he was for the moment silenced, embarrassed, un- 
 certain how to reply 5 he had never dreamed that his share 
 in the Carpathian attack which his intelligence had directed 
 unseen, though his hand was not active nor his complicity 
 divulged in it had been suspected by her, and he was now 
 almost, for the first time in his life, astray in the twilight 
 of bewildered doubts, of intricate apprehensions. 
 
 She laughed slightly again. 
 
 ' Ah ! I told you you did not know me ; you thought 
 you had deceived me! Well, never seek that again. A 
 man once did : a man of Leghorn ; he was clever and vain ; 
 he said to himself, " Altro, a woman! and they obey her? 
 I, for one, I will not ; I will blind her." And he thought 
 he was strong enough. He stole away, like the fox that he 
 \vas, and carried his scheme with him his scheme to treat 
 with Austria unknown to us : unknown, he thought, to the 
 very walls of the room he slumbered in, to the very river 
 reeds he walked by, he thought himself so strong. But I 
 learnt it.' 
 
 * And then ? ' 
 
 6 Then ! Why then I taught him what such an error 
 cost.' 
 
 ' And that cost was ? ' 
 
 She smiled a little ; and in her eyes gathered a certain 
 darkling, retrospective, scornful memory. 
 
 ' What he merited. It had been better for him that he 
 had never been born.' 
 
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 155 
 
 A chill of something tuat was almost fear passed over 
 the listener's cold, keen, courageous nature. He, too, held 
 that which was concealed from >:er, if she avenged treachery 
 thus. 
 
 ' Vengeance, madame ? ' he said, scarcely caring what tri- 
 viality of speech served to screen hio thoughts. * Surely 
 nothing so barbarous lingers amid so nruch worldly wisdom, 
 nothing so ferocious harbours amid so much divine witchery P 
 
 ' Eevengeful ! No ; I do not think I am that, though one 
 knows ill one's own errors. It is easy to forgive ; we 
 scorn where we pardon, but we pardon because we scorn. 5 
 
 She spoke musingly, with a grave and weary meditation, 
 as though memory, and not his words, usurped her ; then 
 suddenly she shook away any darker remembrance thac 
 dwelt with her, and turned full on him brilliant penetrating 
 eyes of half-contemptuous questioning. 
 
 * Some of you it was who wrought that glorious piece of 
 honest work in the Carpathians. You see they were afraid 
 that I should know their scheme ; they stole out to do it in 
 darkness ; they thought that I should never learn it. But 
 it all came to me, simply enough. I found their victim and 
 saved him ; and when Marc Lassla dragged himself hall* 
 dying to my lodge in the mountains, and gasped us out a 
 lame history of a bear-play, telling us that young Vlistchnow 
 lay dead in the woods from the brute's embrace, the whole 
 was clear enough to me. The dying man's and the dead 
 one's injuries were both no bear's wounds, but the fruit ot 
 pistol bullets ; and though Lassla breathed his last in an 
 hour or so, saying no more, 1 knew well enough that they 
 bad both been shot down by the Scot, and that the planned 
 attack had been done by my people by mine.' 
 
 There was a deadly bitterness in the last words, an 
 ominous meaning, such as might have run through Catherine 
 of Russia's speech when she found a vassal faithless. 
 
 ' Your people ! ' 
 
 His surprise was admirably feigned, but it did not 
 deceive her. 
 
 1 Never trouble yourself to assume ignorance,' she said, 
 with a certain amusement at his discomfiture. * You knew 
 Very well of the plan.' 
 
 ' On my honour ' 
 
 * Have we any of that quality among us to swear by ? * 
 
156 ID ALIA. 
 
 ' JSTay ! as a gentleman, as a man, I declare to you I know 
 nothing of it.' 
 
 She bowed her head ; courteously, as one too highly bred 
 to accuse him ; carelessly, as one too worldly-wise to believe 
 him. 
 
 * Nothing,' he averred, irritably mortified by that un- 
 spoken incredulity. * You may believe me, madame ; from 
 my policies, if not my virtues, I am totally opposed to every 
 sort of violence ; deem it ill-advised, uncivilised, barbaric, 
 invariably give my veto against it. Eorce is the weapon of 
 savages ; learning has done little for us if we cannot find a 
 better, a surer, a more secret tool. To prevent the wild 
 spirits that join us from following their brute instincts, and 
 blundering headlong into unwise action, would be impossible. 
 You can do more than most ; but I doubt very much if you 
 have not oftentimes roused tigers whom even you could not 
 tame when once they had tasted of slaughter. The evil of 
 every national movement is that the majority, once allowed 
 to move at all, refuse to proceed by intellectual means, and 
 loose themselves at once to physical violence, in which 
 every good thing is lost, every temperate voice drowned. 
 It is this sort of fatal misconception from which such 
 criminal essays as that which attacked Sir iFulke Erceldoune 
 proceed. It is impossible to avoid their appearing alike 
 expedient and pardonable to a certain class of characters/ 
 
 The explanation was given with graceful ease, with elo- 
 quent address. She heard it with courtesy, also with in- 
 credulity. 
 
 ' Yes ; and that " class " serve as excellent weapons for 
 brilliant intelligences which need to use them excellent 
 scapegoats for such intelligences when they do not care to 
 appear in the intrigues they suggest.' 
 
 He felt the thrust, yet he parred it with seeming tran- 
 quillity. 
 
 6 That is but too true indeed, and the unscrupulousness is 
 not, alas, on the side of the mere mauvais sujets. Apropos, 
 madame, you know all things ; who then was the leader of 
 the Carpathian episode ? ' 
 
 A stern impatience passed for an instant over the splen- 
 dour of her face, mingled with something of more wounded 
 pain. 
 
 ' You must know too well whom I supposed to be so.' 
 
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND. 157 
 
 Tlie answer was very low ; there was a thrill of passionate 
 ghame in it. 
 
 4 Ah ! ' There was a whole world of gentle sympathy, of 
 profound comprehension, in the deep breath he drew. ' Was 
 he not then implicated ? ' 
 
 She lifted her head, and looked at him long arid steadily. 
 There was more than contemplation in the look. 
 
 ' You can better tell that than I.' 
 
 'No; indeed you wrong me, madame. May I hear what 
 you think yourself now we are on the subject ? ' 
 
 A scorn that she repressed in utterance flashed with 4 
 weary darkness in her eyes. 
 
 ' I would have sworn, Yes. He has sworn to me, by the 
 only name I ever knew him to hold sacred, No' 
 
 ' Why doubt him, then ? ' 
 
 ' Why ? Ask me rather why even on his oath believe 
 him!' 
 
 The impetuous disdain that burned through this retort 
 had a terrible scathing satire in it. He looked at her with 
 an admiration that was the more vivid because he thought 
 her intentionally deceiving him, and thought also the de- 
 ception so magnificently wrought out. 
 
 ' Ah, ma belle Comtesse,' he murmured, in his liquid flow- 
 ing Trench, that both habitually used, ' that you should 
 have to feel this ! that you should have to give such passion 
 of contempt to one so near to you! It is " Athene to a 
 Satyr." How is it that, with such an inspiration as you 
 beside him, Conrad has never ' 
 
 She interrupted him, with the ironical cold nonchalance 
 of her common tone resumed. 
 
 * Count Phaulcon is at least your friend, monsieur ; let 
 that suffice to dismiss his name. I suspected him ; I do 
 still suspect him. Did I think that he had been on the 
 Turkish shore last night, I should have certainty in him of 
 suspicion; but in saying this to you I say no more than I 
 have done, or shall do, to him himself.' 
 
 ' And to Monsieur Erceldoune ? ' 
 
 ' No.' The answer was rapid and peremptory. She 
 turned her head to him with something of the goaded im- 
 patience of a stag at bay mingling with her careless dignity. 
 ' How can you ask ? You have heard him say he will kill 
 his assassin if they ever meet. And he would be justified.' 
 
158 ID ALIA. 
 
 'And his "justification" would free you not a little. 
 Ah, where is there any sophism that will curve round to its 
 own point so deftly as a woman's ? ' thought her companion, 
 while he bent forward with a gentle deference in his air, a 
 hesitating sympathy in his tone. 
 
 ' Count Phaulcon is my very good friend, it is true, 
 madame ; and yet I scarcely think I deserved to be re- 
 minded of that by a rebuke, because I cannot choose but 
 regret that ' 
 
 ' Regret nothing at my score, monsieur.' 
 
 ' What ! not even that which you yourself regret ? * 
 
 When I tell you that there is such a thing ; not before. 
 
 ' You are very cruel ' 
 
 * Am I ? Well, I have no great liking for sympathy, 
 and not much need for it If one cannot stand alone, one 
 deserves, I fancy, to fall. Poets have made an idol and a 
 martyr of the sensitive plant ; their use of it is an unwise 
 allegory : to shrink at every touch, to droop at every stroke, 
 to be at the mercy of every hand, strange or familiar an 
 odd virtue that ! It would not commend itself to me.' 
 
 ' True. Is sensitiveness much, after all, except vanity 
 quick to be wounded, as the sea-dianthus that dies of a 
 finger thrust at it ? Believe me, I meant not to offer the 
 insult of pity, scarcely dared to intend the familiarity of 
 sympathy ; I merely felt forgive me if I say it I have 
 long known Conrad, I have but of late known you. Can 
 you not guess that the old and the recent friendship alike 
 tell me that you, despite all your pride, indeed because of 
 all your pride, are bitterly galled, are shamefully com- 
 panioned by a life unworthy you ? ' 
 
 He paused ; he had doubted in how far he might venture 
 even thus much ; for she was of a nature to which com- 
 passion is unendurable a thing to be shunned far more 
 than pain itself. He knew that already ; had he never 
 known, he would have seen it in the barely perceptible 
 quiver with which she drew away, as a high-hearted and 
 fearless, hound will take its mortal wound, and refuse a sign 
 of suffering. 
 
 ' You say a fact too plain for me to give it denial,' she 
 said chilly ; ' but it is also one that I must decline to discuss 
 with you. Let us talk of other matters.' 
 
 Even her companion's long-trained audacity was not bold 
 enough to force her on a theme she thus refused. 
 
' UND ICH ? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH ! ' ^59 
 
 ' Forgive me,' he murmured hurriedly ; ' it is hard some- 
 times not to speak out one's thoughts.' 
 
 * I thought the hardship rather lay in being sometime* 
 compelled to do so.' 
 
 6 You will jest ! ' 
 
 ' "Well, jests are better than tragedies. Life is always 
 jostling the two together.' 
 
 4 We are like enough to have one tragedy, madame, if that 
 hotheaded courier's suspicions point the same way as yours 
 do.' 
 
 He spoke irritably, inconsequently ; for he was both 
 checked and incensed. 
 
 ' It is not likely they will ever do so.' 
 
 ' Why ? Suppose merely suppose your fear aright, and 
 that Phaulcon and your new friend ever meet under your 
 roof ; what then ? ' 
 
 She did not reply for a moment, while a shadow of many 
 memories, tinged with something of a smile, passed over 
 her features. 
 
 * What then? Why then I should know the truth of 
 this matter, which Monsieur mon ami here refuses to tell 
 me.' 
 
 He felt the sting ; and he knew that he had better pro- 
 voke no more encounters with a woman's wit. And being 
 piqued he wronged her, as pique commonly wrongs those 
 who have provoked it, and thought that she knew far more 
 of this thing than even he himself. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 \ 'DIE QTTALST MICH ALS TYRANN ; UND ICH? ICH LIEB 
 DICH NOCH ! ' 
 
 WHEN he had left her, she leaned awhile over the terrace 
 parapet, with her eyes musingly dropped on the shelving 
 mass of myrtle-blossoms ; and as she stood there in her 
 solitude, a step hurriedly crushed the fallen leaves of 
 pomegranate flowers. Before she saw him, a man had 
 thrown himself before her, pressing his lips on the trailing 
 folds of her laces, kneeling there as, one tneels who sues 
 for life. 
 
160 ID ALIA. 
 
 1 Idalia ! ' 
 
 She started and looked down : and drawing herself from 
 his clasp with the gesture of her habitual haughty grace, 
 turned from him without a word, beading her head with a 
 silent salutation. 
 
 * Idalia, I have come only to look upon your face.' 
 
 The vibration of intense suffering in his voice made her 
 involuntarily pause; but when she spoke it was with a calm 
 indifference, a pointed meaning. 
 
 6 1 do not receive this evening, monsieur ; did not my 
 people inform you so ? ' 
 
 A quick shudder shook him. He it was who had worn 
 the badge of the Silver Ivy, and had answered Victor Vane 
 with three brief pregnant words ' To my cost ! ' To his 
 cost, his most bitter cost, he had loved her, arid he had 
 forced his way to her here in the quiet of the night. He 
 grasped again the hem of her dress, and held her there, 
 looking upward to that fair and fatal face in the radiance of 
 the full moon shining from the sea. 
 
 She had destroyed him ; but he could not look on her 
 without growing drunk with his own idolatry, as men grow 
 drunk with wine. 
 
 ' Idalia, have you no pity, no remorse ? You know what 
 you have made me, and you give me no mercy. Is your 
 heart stone ? ' 
 
 No change came on her face; she smiled with a negligent 
 disdain. 
 
 4 You have studied at the Porte St. Martin. That is not 
 the way we speak anywhere else in Paris.' 
 
 There was a contemptuous languor in the words more 
 cruel than the bitterest utterance in earnest would have 
 been ; with scenes and hours so vivid in his memory, in 
 which his love had been lavished at her feet and sunned in 
 her smile and welcomed by her word, they struck on him as 
 passing all that history had ever held of woman's traitorous 
 heartlessness. 
 
 Idalia was now what much evil done to her had made 
 her. 
 
 His hands clenched on her dress in a convulsive wretched- 
 ness. 
 
 ' Have you no heart, no soul, no conscience ? I laid 
 down all I had on earth for you ; I gave you my peace, my 
 honour, my abject slavery. And yet ' 
 
1 UND ICii ? 1CH LIEB DICH NCCH!' i6l 
 
 His voice died inarticulate, while the light from the fi#a 
 fell on his upturned face a face ef fair and gallant cast, of 
 ancient race and leonine blood, in the early prime of man- 
 hood, yet now worn, haggard, drawn, and darkened with the 
 hopeless passions that were loosening in him beyond all 
 strength to hold them. 
 
 She looked down on him, still without change of glance 
 or feature. It was a tale so often told to her. She drew 
 herself from him with her coldest indolence. 
 
 ' You came here to tell me this ? It was scarcely worth 
 while. Grood-evening.' 
 
 Like a deer stung by a shot he started to his feet, stand- 
 ing between her and the shafts of jasper that formed the 
 portico into the building; the endurance that had laid him 
 at her mercy, suffering all things for her sake, living only 
 in the light of her smile, and knowing no law but her desire, 
 broke its bondage now, and turned against her in fierce but 
 just rebuke, incoherent in its misery. 
 
 1 It is true, then, what they say. You have a heart of 
 bronze, a soul of marble ! You have that glory of your 
 loveliness only to draw men in your net and hurl them to 
 perdition. It is true, then, in worshipping you we worship 
 the fairest traitress, the most angelical lie that the world 
 ever saw. Have you ever thought what it is you do ? Have 
 you ever asked yourself what price we pay for the power 
 you hold ? Have you ever thought that you may tempt us 
 and betray us and destroy us once too often, till your very 
 slaves may turn against you ? ' 
 
 He stood alone with her in the lateness of the night, his 
 \vords incoherent and crushed between his teeth ; and she 
 knew that she had done him wrong which before now has 
 turned men into fiends, and has made them stamp out into 
 its grave the beauty that has beguiled them and betrayed 
 them. But she gave no sign of Fear ; her dauntless nature 
 knew fear no more than any Spartan knew it. Her con- 
 science alone smote her , a pang of remorse wakened in her. 
 She was silent, looking at him in the shadowy moonlight ; 
 she knew that she had ruined his life a high-souled 
 patriotic life, full of bright promise and of fearless action ; 
 a life laid subject to her, and broken in her hands as the 
 child breaks the painted butterfly. 
 
 ' Q-od ! ' he cried, and it was the involuntary cry of a great 
 
 M 
 
1 62 ID ALIA. 
 
 despair that broke his force down before the woman by 
 whom he had been fooled and forsaken, yet whom he still 
 worshipped but the more the more that he condemned her, 
 ' that such beauty should only veil a heart of steel ! If you 
 had ever loved, if ever you could love, you could not do such 
 treachery to love as this. I know you as you are now 
 now that it is too late ; and yet and yet 
 
 A single sob choked his voice ; he threw himself again at 
 her feet in the sheer blindness of an utter misery, his hands 
 clutching the folds of her dress, his lips pressed in kisses on 
 the senseless laces, conscious alone of the woman who now 
 had no more thought, or need, or tenderness for him than 
 the cold marble that rose above him into the starry stillness 
 of the Bosphorus night. 
 
 1 And yet there is no crime I would not take on me at 
 your word; there is no sin I would not sin for you. I know 
 you as you are ; and yet, so utterly in spite of all, I love 
 you. I came to-night to see your face once more. I go 
 to die for Italy. Say one last gentle word to me ; we shall 
 never meet again on earth.' 
 
 She stood there above him in the clear radiance shining 
 from the waters ; his words had struck deep to the core of 
 the remorse that was slowly awaking in her ; a profound 
 pity for him, as profound a loathing of herself, arose ; all 
 the gentler, purer, nobler nature in her was touched, and 
 accused her more poignantly than the most bitter of his ac- 
 cusations. She stooped slightly ; her proud instincts, her 
 habit of power, and her world of levity and mockery, made 
 her yield with difficulty, made her pity with rarity ; but 
 when she did either, she did them as no other woman 
 could. 
 
 She stooped slightly, and her eyes were heavy as they 
 rested on him. 
 
 'I have but one word: forgive me.' 
 
 And in that one word Idalia spoke more than could have 
 been uttered in the richest eloquence that could have con- 
 fessed her error and his wrong. Yet while she said it she 
 knew that both the sin and the injury were beyond all 
 pardon. 
 
 He looked up, hope against hope flashing in on him one 
 moment. It was quenched as soon as born ; her face had 
 pain on it ; but the light that he had once seen there was 
 gone there was no' tenderness for him. 
 
*UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH /' 163 
 
 His head sank again. 
 
 'Forgive! I would have forgiven you death ; I forgive 
 you more than death. But if you ever meet again one who 
 loves you as 1 have loved, remember me, and spare him.' 
 
 The generous answer died in his throat. Never again, he 
 knew, would he look upon the loveliness that had betrayed 
 him ; he knew that he was going to his death as surely as 
 though he sank into the sea- depths glistening below, and 
 that when he should lie in the darkness and decay of a 
 forgotten soldier's grave, there would be no pang of memory 
 for him in her heart; no thought that gave him pity or 
 lament in the life to which his own was sacrificed. 
 
 He looked yet once again upward to her face, as dying 
 men may look their last on what they treasure ; then 
 slowly, very slowly, as though each moment were a separate 
 pang, he loosened his hold upon her, and turned and went 
 through the shadows of the cypress, downward to where the 
 waves were drearily breaking on the strand below. 
 
 Where he had left her she stood silent, the moonlight 
 falling on the white marble about her, till from the sea the 
 lustre on her looked bright as day. In one thing alone had 
 he wronged her : she knew the weariness of remorse ; she 
 knew the tenderness of pity. 
 
 Though no sign had escaped her, each word of his accusa- 
 tion had quivered to her heart; he did not feel its truth 
 more bitterly than she. That upbraiding, poured out in the 
 solitude of the night, had stirred her heart with its con- 
 demnation ; it showed her what it was that she had done ; 
 it made her shudder from the fatal gift of her own dominion. 
 How had she used it ? 
 
 Again and again, till they had passed by her no more 
 noted than the winds that swept the air about her, the 
 anguish of men's lives, the fire of their passions had been 
 spent upon her, and been wasted for her ; she had won love 
 without scruple, embittered it without self-reproach; but 
 now her own heart for once was stirred. 
 
 1 What do I do ? ' she asked herself. ' Ruin their lives, 
 destroy their peace, send them out to their deaths ; and for 
 what ? A phantom, a falsehood, an unreality, that betrays 
 them as utterly as I ! The life I lead is but cruelty on 
 cruelty, sin on sin. I know its crime ; and yet I love its 
 sovereignty still. I am vile enough to feel the charm of 
 
 M 2 
 
164 IDALIA. 
 
 its power, while I have conscience enough to abhor its 
 work.' 
 
 The thoughts floated through her mind where she stood 
 looking over to where the sea lay, the dark outline of some 
 felucca alone gliding spirit-like across the moonlit surface. 
 
 The last words of the man who had left her seemed to 
 echo still upon the air; the summons of conscience, the 
 reproach of the past, the duty and the demand of the pre- 
 sent, all were spoken in them. Even as he had uttered 
 them she had thought of one whose fate would be the same 
 with this which now upbraided her and pleaded with her. 
 She knew that he should be spared. It might not be too 
 late to save him ; to save him from herself. 
 
 He who had left her to go out and find a soldier's death 
 on the blood-soaked plains of Lombardy stood between her 
 and the other life which she had once saved from such a 
 grave, and which now was in the first flush of faith that 
 held her rather angel than woman, and of love that had 
 sprung up full grown in one short night, like a flower 
 under tropical suns. 
 
 Better one pang for him at first than for a while the 
 sweetness of a cheated hope to end in lifelong desolation, 
 like that which had to-night risen before her, and arraigned 
 her for its ruin. 
 
 Most men in their passion love but their own indul- 
 gence ; but now and then there are those who love us for 
 ourselves; they should be spared,' she thought, still standing, 
 her face turned once more toward the sea. 
 
 They called her unscrupulous ; she had been so. They 
 called her heartless, merciless, remorseless, in all her poetic 
 beauty. There had been too much truth in the charge; 
 much error lay on her life, great ruin at her door; but of 
 what this woman really was her foes knew nothing ; and her 
 lovers knew as little. With neither was she ever what she 
 now was, looking on the white gleam of the surf where it 
 broke up on the sands below ; now, when she was musing 
 how to save again from herself him whom she had once 
 saved from the grave. 
 
 In the break of the morning Idalia rose, and, thrusting 
 back the green lattice of her casement, glanced outward at 
 the east. The loose silken folds of a Turkish robe floated 
 round b^ her face was palp with a dark shadow beneath 
 
'UND ICH ? ICH LIEB DICH NOCPI /' 165 
 
 the eyes, and her hair lay in long loose masses on her 
 shoulders, now and then lifted by the wind. She wa3 
 thinking deeply and painfully, while her eyes followed 
 mechanically the flight of white- winged gulls, as they 
 swept in a bright cloud above the water. The reproaches 
 that had been uttered to her a few hours before still had 
 their sting for her; the truths with which they had been 
 barbed still pierced her. 
 
 Proud, fearless, negligent, superbly indifferent to the 
 world's opinion, contemptuous of its censure as she was 
 careless of its homage, she still was not steeled against the 
 accusation of her own heart and conscience. She was no 
 sophist, no coward ; she could look at her own acts and con- 
 demn them with an unsparing truth ; though haughtily dis- 
 dainful of all censure, she tore down the mask from her own 
 errors, and looked at them fully, face to face, as they were. 
 Erred she had, gravely, passing on from the slighter to the 
 deeper, in that course which is almost inevitable, since no 
 single i'alse step ever yet could be taken alone. 
 
 The brightest chivalry, the noblest impulses, the most 
 unquestioning self-sacrifice, the most headlong devotion 
 these had all been wakened by her, and lavished on her. 
 What had she done with them ? Accepted them to turn 
 them to her tool ; excited them to make them her slaves and 
 her creatures ; won them and wooed them, with sorceress 
 charm to weigh them with cold cruelty at their worth, and 
 let them drift unpitied to their doom. 
 
 Those who had loved her had been no more to her than 
 this : beguiled for the value they were, betrayed to passion 
 that by it they might grow plastic to her purpose, bent to 
 her command. She, who had all the superb, satiric, con- 
 temptuous disbelief in suffering of a woman of the world, 
 still knew that, over and over again, the tide of grief had 
 broken up vainly against the disdain of her delicate pitiless 
 irony ; knew that over and over again a life made desolate, 
 a life driven out to recklessness and desperation, a life laid 
 down in the early glory of ambitious manhood, had been 
 sacrificed through her, ruined by her, as cruelly, as care- 
 lessly as a young child destroys the brightness of the 
 butterfly, the fragrance of the cowslip, in its sport of 
 snmuier-day chase or spring-day blossom-ball. And for 
 what ? For the sake of triumphs that had palled in their 
 
1 66 ID ALIA. 
 
 gaining; for the sake of gains that were Valueless now; for 
 the sake of a sovereignty that seemed to brand her forehead 
 with its crown ; for the sake of evil things that had worn a 
 fair mask, of freedom that had grown into slavery, of daring 
 that had said, ' Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.' 
 She had erred deeply ; all that was noblest, tenderest, 
 most generous in her nature and there was much still, 
 despite the accusers that could appeal against her knew it, 
 and did not seek to palliate it to herself. The career that 
 closed her in, once entered, as the net closes round the bird 
 it ensnares, had wearied her, had revolted her, had made her 
 pride contemn the part she played, her conscience plead 
 against the woe she worked, her nature, grand in its mould 
 and fearless in its courage, revolt from much that she had 
 once voluntarily sought and confessedly loved in the earlier 
 years when, it was fresh to her. And she was not happy ; 
 the simplicity of the aged recluse at Monastica had pierced 
 to a truth, that Paris and the world and the men who 
 glittered round her and adored her did not perceive. She 
 was not happy. With her brilliance, her power, her enter- 
 prise, the fineness of her intricate intrigues, the daring of 
 her constant adventures, the excitement of her incessant 
 changes, no morbid sentiment, no passive pensiveness could 
 have hold on her or be known to her ; but something deeper 
 than this was at her heart ; it was the melancholy of a mute 
 remorse, the unavailing and vainly-silenced lament of one 
 who finds that he has bartered his gold for stones. 
 
 Her eyes were weary in all their splendour, as they fol- 
 lowed the flight of the sea-gulls. She thought of what she 
 had been, when only sixteen seasons had warmed the lustre 
 of her hair, yet had made her Hellenic beauty in its early 
 blush and sudden maturity almost, even then, the beauty of 
 her present womanhood; she thought of herself as she had 
 stood one evening at sunset leaning down over the ivy- 
 mantled ruins of an antique bridge in Greece, looking across 
 to the ^Egean flashing in the light, and thinking of the cen- 
 turies far away in the distance of the past when those waves 
 had broken against the prows of Miltiades' galleys, and been 
 crowded with the fleets of Salamis; she remembered the 
 vivid and decorated eloquence that had wooed her then to 
 her present path, murmuring such bright words of liberty 
 and triumph, while the waters in their melody and the sun? 
 
'UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH !' l6f 
 
 set in its splendour seemed filled with the grand dead names 
 of Gracchan Eome and of Socratic Athens ; she remembered 
 how the proud imagination of her dawning life had leapt to 
 those subtle temptings as an arrow leaps from the bow into 
 the empyrean, and had seen in its ambitious and still child- 
 like dreams the sovereignty of Semiramis, the sway of As- 
 pasia, the empire of Maria Theresa, waiting in the future 
 for her. 
 
 Eight years had gone by since then, and she had known 
 the world deeply, widely, wisely ; she had been sated with 
 homage and with victory, she had wakened love almost 
 wherever her glance fell ; her hours had been filled with 
 vivid colour and incessant variety, with luxury and with 
 pleasure, with the life of an adventuress in its airy non- 
 chalance mingled with all the grace and elegance of patrician 
 tastes, and habits, and wealth. And yet she was not happy ; 
 for the fame she had was notoriety, the power she had was 
 used unscrupulously, in the core of the rose there was always 
 an asp, and in the depth of her heart there were disappoint- 
 ment, remorse, and dishonour. 
 
 1 And yet I was more sinned against than sinning,' she 
 mused. ' 1 was so young then, and I was allured with such 
 glorious beguilement. The regeneration of nations, the revo- 
 lution of empires, the striking off of the serf's fetters, the 
 redressing of every unjust balance, the conquest of empires 
 and liberties, the people's homage and the monarchs* 
 crowns those were what tempted me. It was the old fable 
 of Satan and Eve : " Eat of this fruit, and ye shall have the 
 knowledge of heaven and earth ;" "Believe in me, follow 
 me, and you shall have glory beside which Paradise is poor, 
 kingdoms beside which Eden is a desert." And I took the 
 fruit. How could I tell then that it would be all a lie ?' 
 
 The thoughts floated through her mind, leaning there 
 wearily against the lattice, while the early wind of the 
 warm dawn stirred the half-opened scarlet blossoms of the 
 japonica twining round it. But she was too integrally 
 proud to seek refuge or exculpation in self- excuses even in 
 her solitary reverie. 
 
 * Yet that is but half the truth/ she mused, while her 
 eyes still unconsciously followed the sweep of the sea-birda 
 out to sea. * I was sinned against then, in the first, but it 
 has been my own wrong since ; I have kept to error long 
 
l68 IDALIA. 
 
 since I have known it to be error ; I have loved my power 
 even while I despised its means and its ends ; I have felt 
 the intoxication of hazard till I have let it entangle me be- 
 yond recall ; I have known the evil I did, yet 1 have not 
 paused in it when I might ; I have seen the fatal issue of so 
 much, and I have gone on and on ; I have bound them, I 
 have blinded them, I have despoiled them, I have taken 
 their strength and their manhood, their faith and their 
 courage, their wealth and their genius, and ruined them all. 
 I have spared none of them ; I have betrayed so many. 
 That has not been done in ignorance that has not been 
 palliated with the excuse of youth scarce conscious what it 
 does/ 
 
 Her thoughts travelled far over past years, while the sun 
 rose higher, and while the man whose existence she had 
 given back dreamed of her with the waking of the day, as of 
 one so far above his love, that 
 
 1 No head save some world-genius should regfc 
 Above the treasures of that perfect breast.' 
 
 She remained still and silent at the casement till the distant 
 call of the drums, us the Soldan went up to the mosque for 
 the sunrise prayers, died softly away on the air. 
 
 ' I will save him at least. One sharp blow, and perhaps 
 he will forget. Pride will aid him : and if we never meet 
 again, I shall remain only a dream to him a dream with- 
 out pain,' she said half aloud. And for the moment a darker 
 shadow swept over her face ; she remembered loyal eyes 
 that had gazed their eager passion into hers .; she remembered 
 leonine strength that would have been felled into its tomb 
 but for her ; she remembered that the man who had sought 
 her with such untiring patience on the clue of one frail me- 
 mory would not forget in a day, in a year. But her resolve 
 was not shaken. 
 
 1 1 will save him if he will be saved ; he, at least, shall 
 have nothing to reproach me,' she thought, while she 
 watched the gray sea flash between the scarlet blossoms 
 of the japonica tendrils. Then she turned away from the 
 window, and rang a hand-bell that had once belonged to 
 Catherina Medici: like the one whose long, slender palm 
 had before touched the spiral column of its handle, she 
 
J UND ICH ? ICH LIED DICIi NOCH/' 169 
 
 nfvver hesitated in any course when her resolve was taken, 
 she never swerved when once she had decided. 
 
 The Nubian slave, who attended her wherever she tra- 
 velled as her maid, answered the summons from where she 
 stood in the ante- chamber. 
 
 ' Tell Paulus that I start for Naples this morning. He 
 knows what to do. I leave by ten/ 
 
 The Nubian bowed to the ground, and withdrew. Her 
 mistress stood beside the table where the bell was placed, 
 thoughtful still, with the shadow that had gathered on her 
 deepening in the purple light that fell through violet cur- 
 tains near. She was not a woman to whom regret was 
 familiar. Many would have said she was too heartless ; it 
 was rather because she had seen, and known, and pene- 
 trated too much to be lightly touched ; but a great tear- 
 less pain gathered in her eyes, and her hand closed with 
 a gesture of impatience on the sharp metal circle of the 
 bell. 
 
 'He will be stung to the heart and yet, better one 
 pang at once/ she said in her solitude. ' What could it 
 avail him. to know me more except to suffer longer ? ' 
 
 Her resolve was not changed ; vacillation was impos- 
 sible to her ; she had none of its weakness in her nature, 
 but a regret poignant and almost remorseful was on 
 her. She thought of the fearless fidelity with which he 
 had refused ever again to become as a stranger to her, 
 she thought of the fealty that she knew so well he bore 
 to her, that had looked out from the ardent worship of his 
 eyes in the calm of the Eastern night a few short hours 
 before. 
 
 And she was about to kill this at a blow, because the 
 prayer of another had pierced her heart and pleaded with 
 her to spare him, if it were not too late. 
 
 A new life had dawned on Erceldoune. 
 
 All his old habits of soldier-like decision, of sports- 
 manlike activity, were broken up ; he who had used to find 
 his greatest pleasures in the saddle and the rifle, in wait- 
 ing high up in a leafy nest for the lions to come down to 
 the spring to drink, and in riding wild races with Arabs 
 over amber stretches of torrid sand, in spending whole 
 days alone among the sedge-pools of the Border fowl, 
 and in bivouacking through a scorching night with Bra- 
 
170 IDALIA. 
 
 zilian guanchos, Lad now changed into the veriest dreamer 
 that ever let the long hours steal away, 
 
 * floating up bright forms ideal, 
 Half sense-supplied and half unreal, 
 Like music mingling with a dream.' 
 
 He lived in a land of enchantment, whose sole sunlight 
 was a woman's glance ; he gave himself up without a 
 struggle to the only passion that had ever touched his 
 life. Now and then forebodings swept over him; now 
 and then his own utter ignorance of the woman to whom 
 he was yielding up his destiny, smote him with a terrible 
 pang, but very rarely: in proportion to the length of 
 his resistance to such a subjugation was the reckless, 
 headlong force of his fall into its power. Moreover, his 
 nature was essentially unsuspecting ; and he had an old- 
 world chivalry in him that would have made it seem to 
 him the poorest poltroonery to cast doubt on the guardian- 
 angel who had saved him from the very jaws of death. 
 His mother, lost in his earliest childhood, had been of 
 Spanish race ; neglected by her lord, she had been left 
 to break her spirit as she would against the gray walls 
 of the King's Eest, longing for the perfume and the 
 colour and the southern winds of her home in the Vega, 
 while the Border moors stretched round her, and the 
 Cheviots shut her in until she died, like a tropic bird, 
 caged in cold and in twilight. A softness, inherited from 
 the tenderness and the enthusiasm of her southern blood, 
 was latent in her son, little as he knew it ; an un- 
 worldliness and trustfulness were in his nature, though he 
 did not perceive them ; and though his career had done 
 much to strengthen the lion-like daring and athlete's hardi- 
 hood of his character, on the other hand the picturesque 
 colouring and varied wandering in which his years had 
 been spent had done much to preserve the vein of ro- 
 mance within him, unworn while unsuspected. Nothing 
 had touched this side of his nature until now ; and now, 
 the stronger for its past suppression, it conquered him in 
 its turn, and ruled alone. 
 
 "When he left her that evening he could not sleep ; lie 
 rode far and fast through the late night, dashing down 
 into the interior, along sandy plains, and through cypress 
 groves, across stretches of tangled vegetation, and ovef 
 
' UND ICH ? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH /' 171 
 
 the rocky beds of dried-up "brooks, or the foam of tum- 
 bling freshets. The swift rush through the cooled air 
 soothed the fever in him ; his thoughts and his passions 
 kept throbbing time with the beat of the hoofs, with the 
 sweep of the gallop. He loved her. he thought. O God, 
 how he loved her ! 
 
 So long ago loved his namesake the Rhymer, when 
 under the tree of Erceldoune the Tree of G-rammarye 
 the sorceress lips touched his, and the eyes brighter than 
 mortal brightness looked into his own ; lips that wooed 
 him across the dark Border, eyes that dared him to brave 
 the Lake of Fire for her sake. Those old, old legends, 
 how they repeat themselves in every age, in every life ! 
 
 "With the dawn he came upon a pool, lying land-locked, 
 far and solitary, encircled with cedars and cypress and 
 superb drooping boughs, now heavy with the white blos- 
 soms of the sweet chestnut, and while his horse drank at 
 the brink, he threw himself in to bathe, dipping down into 
 the clear brown waters, and striking out into the depths 
 of green blossoming shade, while the swell of a torrent 
 that poured into it lashed him with its foam, cold even 
 in the East before sunrise, and hurled the mass of water 
 against his limbs, firm-knit, sinewy, colossal as the polished 
 limbs of a Roman bronze of Milo. As he shook the 
 drenching spray from his hair, and swam against the cur- 
 rent, looking upward at the sky where the dawn was just 
 breaking, all the beauty that life might know seemed sud- 
 denly to rise on him in revelation. There is an eastern 
 fable that tells how, when Paradise faded from earth, a 
 single rose was saved and treasured by an angel, who 
 gives to every mortal, sooner or later in his life, one breath 
 of fragrance from the immortal flower one, alone. The 
 legend came to his memory as the sunbeams deepened, 
 slanting spear-like across the azure of the skies, and he 
 dashed down into the shock of the waters to still in him 
 this fierce sweetness of longing for all that would never 
 be his own. 
 
 One woman alone could bring to him that perfume of 
 Paradise ; the rose of Eden could only breathe its divine 
 fragrance on him from her lips. And he would have 
 given all the years of his life to have it come to him one 
 hour. 
 
172 IDALIA. 
 
 When tlie day was at noon he went to her, heeding no 
 more the downpour of the scorching vertical rays than 
 the Ehymer had heeded the leaping tongues of flame 
 while he rode, with the golden tresses sweeping his lips, 
 down to the glories of Poerie. Distinct thought, distinct 
 expectance, he had none ; he had but one instinct, to see 
 her, to be with her, to lay down at her feet the knightliest 
 service that ever man gave to woman. He knew nothing 
 of her, knew not whether she were wedded or unwedded, 
 but he knew that the world had one meaning alone for 
 him now he loved her. That she could ever answer it, 
 he had barely the shadow of a hope. There was much 
 humility in him ; he held himself but at a lowly account ; 
 though a proud man with men, he would have felt, had 
 he ever followed out his thoughts, that he had nothing 
 with which to merit or to win the haughty and brilliant 
 loveliness of Idalia ; he would have felt that he had no 
 title, and no charm, to gain her and gather her into arms 
 that would be strong, indeed, to defend her until the last 
 breath of life, as they had been strong to strangle the 
 bear in the death grasp and to tame the young wild horse 
 on the prairies, but that had no gold to clasp and fling 
 down at her feet, no purples of state and of wealth to 
 fold round her, bringing their equal royalty to hers. 
 That he himself could attract her, he would have had 
 little belief ; he did not see himself as others saw him ; he 
 did not know that his vigorous magnificence of form, his 
 dauntless manhood, his generous unselfishness, his un- 
 trammelled freedom of thought and deed, might charm a 
 woman who had been tired by all, won by none ; he was 
 unconscious of any of these in his own person, and he 
 would have thought that he had nothing on earth which 
 could give him the right ever to hope for her tenderness. But 
 hope is always strong in us till despair is forced on us, 
 however little we may know that hope's existence ; and 
 thought was the last thing that was shaped in him 
 thought never grouped itself before him ; he was still in 
 the opium-dream ; neither future nor past existed for 
 him ; he was drunk with his present ; his love blinded him 
 to any other memory than itself. It was too wholly in its 
 early freshness for it to forecast its fate. 
 
 His eyes eagerly swept over the building as he rode up 
 
" UND ICH ? ICH LIED DICH NOCH > :f 173 
 
 the avenue ; the lattices were all closed ; tin's was usual in 
 the noon, yet it gave him a vague disquietude and dread. 
 The echo of his step resounded on the marble, as it had 
 done when he had forced his entrance into what he had 
 believed the lair of his assassin ; it was the only sound, 
 and the stillness froze his heart like ice : the rolling bay 
 of the hound had never before failed to challenge his 
 arrival. 
 
 The first court was deserted ; in the second he saw the 
 Abyssinian. 
 
 'The Countess Vassalis ? ' he asked rapidly 
 
 ' Is not here/ answered the riegress. 
 
 ' Not here ! 
 
 ' No, most illustrious. Her excellency left Stamboul 
 this morning.' 
 
 He staggered like a man who has received a blow. 
 
 ' Left where P why ? for how long ? ' 
 
 The Abyssinian shook her head with a profound salaam ; 
 she knew nothing, or would say nothing ; her mistress had 
 left Constantinople ; where she intended to travel she could 
 not tell ; her excellency was always travelling, she believed; 
 but a note had been given her to deliver to the English 
 Eifendi, perhaps that might tell more. 
 
 He seized it from her as she drew it from the yellow 
 folds of her sash, and tore it open; a mist was before his 
 sight, and his wrist shook while he held the paper as it had 
 never done lifting the riile to his shoulder, when one error 
 in the bullet's flight would have been instant death to him- 
 self. The letter brought him little solace ; it was but a few 
 words of graceful courtesy, giving him the adieu that a 
 sudden departure rendered necessary, but added nothing of 
 why or whither she was gone, and seeming, in their polished 
 ceremonial, cold as ice to the storm of shattered hope and 
 tempestuous pain that was rife in his own heart. Instinc- 
 tively as his hand closed on it he turned away from the 
 Abyssinian, and went out of the court into the hot blaze of 
 day alone ; he could not bear the eyes of even that African 
 upon him in the desolation that had swept down upon hk 
 life. He went out, where he did not see or know, passing 
 into the scorching air and into the cooler shade of the groves, 
 with a blind dumb suffering on him like the suffering of a 
 dog. For her he had no pride ; against wounds from her 
 
174 IDALIA. 
 
 hand bo had no shield ; and nothing with which she could 
 wring his heart, nothing with which she could try his 
 loyalty, could avail to turn his love away. They had 
 been no idle words with which he had said that his life 
 was hers to do with it what she would ; having made the 
 vow he would keep it, no matter what the test, or what the 
 cost. 
 
 He crushed in his grasp that pitiless letter. Her hand 
 had touched it, her hand had written it ; bitter as it was it 
 was sacred to him. And he stood in the vertical sun, gazing 
 blankly down on the waves below the terraces, tossing up- 
 ward in the light at his feet. The blow had fallen on him 
 with a crushing sickening force. Again he had lost her; 
 again, when to the old baffled weariness with which he had 
 so long vainly sought her was added the certainty that he, 
 who had lavished his heart's best treasure on her, was no 
 more to her than the yellow sands that the seas kissed 
 and left. 
 
 A few hours before and her eyes had smiled on him, her 
 presence had been with him ; she had listened to him, 
 spoken with him, let him linger beside her in all the 
 familiar communion of a welcome friendship. He could not 
 realise that he was forsaken by her without a word, without 
 a regret, without an effort for them ever to meet again. He 
 had no claim on her remembrance, no title to her confidence, 
 it was true ; his acquaintance with her was slight, as the 
 world would have considered ; but he could not realise that 
 the tie between them of a life saved, so powerful on him, so 
 deathless in its memory for him, could be as nothing to her. 
 The wanton cruelty of her desertion seemed to him so 
 merciless that he had no remembrance of how little hold 
 he had, in reason and in fact, upon her tenderness. The 
 knowledge of her loss alone was on him, leaving him 
 110 consciousness save of the burning misery that possessed 
 him. 
 
 As he had never loved, so he had never suffered until 
 now ; his adventurous career in camps and cities and deserts 
 had never been touched by any grief. He had come there 
 in the gladness of the morning, full of faith, of hope, of 
 eager delight, and of unquestioning expectation; and he 
 stood in tho scorch of the noonday heat, stupefied, the 
 glare of sun and sea unfelt in the fiery agony that had 
 seized him. 
 
'UND 1CH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH!' 175 
 
 The little gilded caique was rocking at his feet, where it- 
 was moored to the landing-stairs. Trifles link thought to 
 thought ; and with the memory of that first enchanted hour 
 when he had floated with her down the water he remembered 
 the warning that she had given him the warning ' not to 
 lie under the linden.' 
 
 The warning had been, she had said, for his sake not 
 her own. "Was it for his that she had left him now ? She 
 had implied that some sort of peril, some threatening of 
 danger, must await him with her friendship. Was it to save 
 him from these that she had left him thus ? Then the hu- 
 mility, that was integrally a part of his nature as his lofty 
 pride of race was toward men, subdued the bitter sense of 
 her cruelty. What was he more to her than any other to 
 whom she gave her gracious courtesies, that he should look 
 for recollection from her ? He owed her his life ; but that 
 debt lay on him ; it left no claim to her. What was there 
 in him that he could hope in their brief intercourse to have 
 become any dearer to her than any other chance-met 
 acquaintance of the hour ? He could not upbraid her with 
 having smiled on him one hour to forsake him as a stranger 
 the next, for with the outset she had bade him leave her 
 unknown. 
 
 Hot tears, the first that had ever come there since as a 
 child he had sobbed over his young mother's grave, rushed 
 into his eyes, shutting out the stretch of the sparkling seas 
 and the rich colouring around him, where Cashmere roses 
 and Turkish lilies bloomed in untrained luxuriance. The 
 sea had no freedom, the flowers no fragrance, the green 
 earth in its early summer no beauty for him ; he only felt 
 that, let him spend loyalty, fidelity, life, and peace upon her 
 as he would, he might never be one shadow nearer to her 
 than he was now ; he might never touch her to one breath 
 of tenderness, never move her to one pang of pity. His 
 strength was great: he had wrestled with the gaunt 
 northern bear in the cold of a Scandinavian night ; he had 
 fought with ocean and storm in the madness of a tropical 
 tempest ; he had closed with the African lion in a fierce 
 embrace, and wrenched the huge jaws apart as they closed 
 on their prey. He had prevailed in these things by fearless 
 force, by human might ; but now, in his weakness and his 
 misery, he could have flung himself down on the tawny 
 
176 ID ALIA. 
 
 sands and wept like a woman ior the hopes -that v, r ere scat- 
 terecL for the glory that was dead. 
 
 Another moment, and he had crossed the labyrinth of the 
 garden, thrown himself into saddle, and turned back toward 
 the city. The G-reeks idly lying under the shelter of their 
 fishing or olive feluccas drawn up on the shore, and tha 
 Turks sitting on their cocoa-nut mats under the shadow 
 of fig-tree or vine at the entrance of their huts, stared 
 aghast at the breathless horse, thundering along the sea- 
 road through the noontide heat, his flanks covered with 
 foam, and the white burnous of his Giaour rider floating 
 out upon the wind. Down the steep pathways, over tho 
 jagged rocks, across the flat burning levels of sand, and 
 under the leaning grape-covered walls, Erceldoune rode, 
 reckless of danger, unconscious of the fierce sun-fire 
 pouring on his head. 
 
 He had sworn to follow her, whether her route were 
 seaward to Europe or eastward into the wild heart of Asia. 
 Pride, reason, wounded feeling, wavering faith, none of 
 them availed to turn him from his course. He was true 
 to his oath ; and the madness was upon him that in the 
 golden verse of his namesake the Rhymer makes Syr Tris- 
 tam love better to go back to the risk of death and shame, 
 to the land of his foe, to the old piercing pain and the old 
 delicious sorcery, than to live in peace and honour and 
 royalty without the smile of King Marc's wife, without the 
 light of Ysonde's eyes. Let come what would, he followed 
 Idalia. 
 
 In the feeling he bore her there was a strange mingling 
 of utter humility, of most reverential chivalry, with the 
 wildest passion and in the most reckless daring; in it the 
 two sides of his nature were blent. 
 
 He rode to the Golden Horn, where the flags of every 
 nation were streaming from the crowded masts in the clear 
 hot light. He knew that her departure by any one of the 
 vessels could easily be ascertained. 
 
 To seek the guests whom he had met at her house ; to 
 inquire of her from the numerous acquaintance he had 
 among the various chancelleries in Constantinople, and the 
 military and naval men passing through or staying off 
 there ; to ask who she was, whence she came, how she was 
 held in social estimation; all that might have been the 
 
'UND 1CH? 1CH LIEB DICH NOCH!' 177 
 
 natural course of most was impossible to Erceldoune. He 
 could not have brought himself to speak of her to others ; 
 he felt that if he heard her name lightly uttered he 
 should strike his hand on the mouth that uttered it ; and 
 intense as his longing might be to pierce the mystery that 
 apparently shrouded her, the quixotic code of his love and 
 his honour would have let him ask nothing through strangers 
 that she withheld herself. He prosecuted his search alone ; 
 and the rapidity in such investigations gained by habit soon 
 brought him the knowledge he pursued. 
 
 Before evening he had learned among the sailors in the 
 port that a steam yacht belonging to her, the lo, which had 
 returned twenty -four hours previously from Athens, had 
 taken its departure early in the morning, for Capri, the 
 Greek crew had said, with no one on board but herself, her 
 suite, and the Silesian dog. The yacht was probably by 
 now through the Dardanelles. It was well known in the 
 Golden Horn, the sailors told him, that she usually came 
 from Europe in it ; it could be recognised anywhere on the 
 seas ; for it always carried the green, white, and scarlet of 
 the Italian national colours crossed on the Greek ensign 
 a fancy, it was supposed, of her excellency's. 
 
 Erceldoune's eyes strained across the glittering expanse 
 of water with a wistful longing as he listened every word 
 he gathered plunged like a knife into his heart. No steamer 
 went from the harbour that day to Naples. With twelve or 
 twice twelve hours between them, how could he tell but 
 that again she might be lost to him ? how, or where, or 
 when he might ever recover the clue she had rent asunder ? 
 
 * If that schooner were only mine ! ' he muttered uncon 
 sciously aloud, as his glance fell on a yacht in the harbour, 
 with her gold figure-head and her brass swivel guns glisten- 
 ing in the sun. His want of wealth he had never felt ; his 
 nature was too high-toned, his habits too hardy, his temper 
 too bold ; but now for the first time the pang of his beg- 
 gared fortunes struck heavily on him. Were wealth his 
 own, how soon the seas that severed them might be 
 bridged ! 
 
 A familiar hand was struck on his shoulder as he stood 
 looking across at the gray arc of the Bosphorus, straining 
 his eyes into the offing as though he could pierce the dis- 
 tance and follow her with his gaze. 
 
 N 
 
JtyS IDALtA. 
 
 ' You want a yacht ? Take Etoile. I am going inland 
 ^L a special mission into Arabia ; bring her back in a year's 
 time ; that will be soon enough for me.' 
 
 Erceldoune turned and saw a man he knew well ; a true 
 and tried friend ; one with whom he had gone on many a 
 perilous expedition ; a dauntless traveller, a pure Arabic 
 scholar, and a skilled negotiator with Eastern chiefs and 
 tribes. 
 
 The Etoile was at his service, with her captain and her 
 crew, to take him where he would ; there remained but the 
 duties of the Messenger Service to detain him, and these, 
 fln application let him loose. He had so habitually ab- 
 stained throughout the twenty years of his service from any 
 effort to shirk or shift the most dangerous or most irksome 
 missions, that as nothing specially required him then, and 
 a courier was daily expected from Eussia who could take 
 despatches home in his place, he easily obtained his fur- 
 lough, and by sunset he weighed anchor. 
 
 The yacht steered out of the varied fleet of merchantmen 
 that crowded the Golden Horn, steered out to the open sea, 
 while the scarlet glory of the after-glow lingered in the 
 skies, and dyed the waters blood-red in its light. To what 
 fate did he go ? he asked himself. 
 
 Safer, wiser, better far, he thought, that he should turn 
 back with his familiar comrade, and plunge down into the 
 core of Asia, into the old athletic, bracing, open-air life, 
 into the pleasures that had never palled of forest and rifle, 
 of lake and mountain, of the clear ringing shot and the 
 wild day-dawn gallop, into the pastimes that had no taint 
 in them, the chase that had no pang in it. That old life 
 had been so free, so elastic, so unshadowed, with all the 
 liberty of the desert, with all the zest of hardihood in it, 
 with no thought for the morrow, and no regret for the past, 
 with sleep sound as a mountaineer's, with strength ex- 
 haustless as the sea eagle's. He was leaving it. And for 
 what ? Eor a love that already had cost him a year of 
 pain to a few short hours of hope ; for a woman of whom 
 he knew nothing not even whether she were the wife or 
 the mistress of another ; for the miserable fever of restless 
 passion, for the haunting torment of unattainable joys, for 
 the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for the shadows 
 of surrounding doubt and mvsterv. Better far let the 
 
"UND ICH? ICH LIES DICH NOCHT 179 
 
 strange charm that had enthralled him be cut away at any 
 cost, a$d go back to that old life while there was yet time. 
 The thought crossed him for the moment as he drifted from 
 the quay of the G-olden Horn. The next it passed as 
 swiftly; let him plunge into the recesses of Asia or the 
 green depths of Western wilds, he would carry with him 
 his passion and her memory ; and the vessel swept down 
 beyond the Dardanelles in her pursuit, through the phos- 
 phor crests of starlit waves as the night deepened, and the 
 distance between them grew less and less with every dip 
 the prow made down into the deep-gray glistening water, 
 like a petrel that stoops to bathe in his passage, and 
 shakes the spray from his spread wings to take a freer 
 flight. 
 
 It was evening when she ran into Capri, that Eden hung 
 beneath the sea and sky. All its marvellous maze of colour 
 was in its richest glow ; the sun was sinking behind Solaro ; 
 the towering rocks of the Salto and the Faraglioni burned 
 through their sublimity of gloom ; a lustre of gold and 
 purple streamed over mountainous Ischia down on the brow 
 of Epomeneo, and over the low hills of Procida ; and the 
 blue water lay dazzling in the light, with the white sails of 
 Sorrento skiffs scarce larger on its waves than the white 
 wings of fluttering monachi, while over the sea came the 
 odours of budding orange and citron gardens and a world 
 of violets that filled the woods, sloping upward and upward 
 into the clouds where Anacapri lay. 
 
 Erceldoune saw none of it, yet he felt it vaguely felt, 
 as his vessel steered through that flood of sunlight, coming 
 from the rich mezzo giorno of the Amalfi coast into the 
 golden riot of this lavish loveliness, as though he floated to 
 a paradise. So had they thought before him, who, sailing 
 through those caressing seas toward the same isles where 
 the Sirens sang, had listened to the enchanted song, to find 
 their graves in tumult and in storm. 
 
 The sun sank behind Ischia as he went ashore, and the 
 feudden twilight fell, quenching all the blaze of fire, and 
 bringing in its stead the tender night, with the chime of the 
 Ave Maria ringing out from church bells over the sea. 
 
 He was known in Capri, and the men showed their 
 white teeth with a bright smile, and the girls laughed all 
 over their handsome brown faces, as they welcomed him. 
 
Jty8 IDALIA. 
 
 ' You want a yacht ? Take Etoile. I am going inland 
 ja a special mission into Arabia ; bring her back in a year's 
 time ; that will be soon enough for me.' 
 
 Erceldoune turned and saw a man he knew well ; a true 
 and tried friend ; one with whom he had gone on many a 
 perilous expedition ; a dauntless traveller, a pure Arabic 
 scholar, and a skilled negotiator with Eastern chiefs and 
 tribes. 
 
 The Etoile was at his service, with her captain and her 
 crew, to take him where he would ; there remained but the 
 duties of the Messenger Service to detain him, and these, 
 Dn application let him loose. He had so habitually ab- 
 stained throughout the twenty years of his service from any 
 effort to shirk or shift the most dangerous or most irksome 
 missions, that as nothing specially required him then, and 
 a courier was daily expected from Russia who could take 
 despatches home in his place, he easily obtained his fur- 
 lough, and by sunset he weighed anchor. 
 
 The yacht steered out of the varied fleet of merchantmen 
 that crowded the Golden Horn, steered out to the open sea, 
 while the scarlet glory of the after-glow lingered in the 
 skies, and dyed the waters blood-red in its light. To what 
 fate did he go ? he asked himself. 
 
 Safer, wiser, better far, he thought, that he should turn 
 back with his familiar comrade, and plunge down into the 
 core of Asia, into the old athletic, bracing, open-air life, 
 into the pleasures that had never palled of forest and rifle, 
 of lake and mountain, of the clear ringing shot and the 
 wild day-dawn gallop, into the pastimes that had no taint 
 in them, the chase that had no pang in it. That old life 
 had been so free, so elastic, so unshadowed, with all the 
 liberty of the desert, with all the zest of hardihood in it, 
 with no thought for the morrow, and no regret for the past, 
 with sleep sound as a mountaineer's, with strength ex* 
 haustless as the sea eagle's. He was leaving it. And for 
 what ? Eor a love that already had cost him a year of 
 pain to a few short hours of hope ; for a woman of whom 
 he knew nothing not even whether she were the wife or 
 the mistress of another ; for the miserable fever of restless 
 passion, for the haunting torment of unattainable joys, for 
 the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for the shadows 
 of surrounding doubt and mvstery. Better far let the 
 
"UND ICH? ICH LIES DICH NOCH1' 179 
 
 strange charm that had enthralled him be cut awaj at any 
 cost, and go back to that old life while there was yet time. 
 The thought crossed him for the moment as he drifted from 
 the quay of the G-olden Horn. The next it passed as 
 swiftly; let him plunge into the recesses of Asia or the 
 green depths of Western wilds, he would carry with him 
 his passion and her memory ; and the vessel swept down 
 beyond the Dardanelles in her pursuit, through the phos- 
 phor crests of starlit waves as the night deepened, and the 
 distance between them grew less and less with every dip 
 the prow made down into the deep-gray glistening water, 
 like a petrel that stoops to bathe in his passage, and 
 shakes the spray from his spread wings to take a freer 
 flight. 
 
 It was evening when she ran into Capri, that Eden hung 
 beneath the sea and sky. All its marvellous maze of colour 
 was in its richest glow ; the sun was sinking behind Solaro ; 
 the towering rocks of the Salto and the Faraglioni burned 
 through their sublimity of gloom ; a lustre of gold and 
 purple streamed over mountainous Ischia down on the brow 
 of Epomeneo, and over the low hills of Procida ; and the 
 blue water lay dazzling in the light, with the white sails of 
 Sorrento skiffs scarce larger on its waves than the white 
 wings of fluttering monachi, while over the sea came the 
 odours of budding orange and citron gardens and a world 
 of violets that filled the woods, sloping upward and upward 
 into the clouds where Anacapri lay. 
 
 Erceldoune saw none of it, yet he felt it vaguely felt, 
 as his vessel steered through that flood of sunlight, coming 
 from the rich mezzo giorno of the Amalfi coast into the 
 golden riot of this lavish loveliness, as though he floated to 
 a paradise. So had they thought before him, who, sailing 
 through those caressing seas toward the same isles where 
 the Sirens sang, had listened to the enchanted song, to find 
 their graves in tumult and in storm. 
 
 The sun sank behind Ischia as he went ashore, and the 
 feudden twilight fell, quenching all the blaze of fire, and 
 bringing in its stead the tender night, with the chime of the 
 Ave Maria ringing out from church bells over the sea. 
 
 He was known in Capri, and the men showed their 
 white teeth with a bright smile, and the girls laughed all 
 over their handsome brown faces, as they welcomed him. 
 
*8o ID ALIA. 
 
 He had little aoubt of soon learning what he sought ; a 
 few brief questions brought him loquacious answers. 
 
 4 Niursi, signore ! ' cried a marinaro, in the barbarous 
 Capriote patois. ' L'illustrissima Contessa ! she knows me 
 well. Chiara, my wife, helped the African to carry the 
 luggage up to her villa the day before yesterday ' 
 
 ' She is here still ? ' 
 
 The quick Capriote caught the tremulous excitement 
 that ran through the question, and his heart warmed to the 
 stranger, by whom his brother had once been brought up 
 from the black churning waves under Tiberio in the dead of 
 a tempestuous night. 
 
 ' She is here, signore mio ; she has been often here. She 
 is at the Villa Santilla, in the Piccola Mariana. I will 
 show you the way willingly.' 
 
 ' No : I can find it ; I know every foot of your island. 
 But if you can get me a horse, do.' 
 
 The marinaro put back the gold held out to him with a 
 loving gesture, and a smile that glistened through his 
 brown beard : 
 
 'Not from you, signore. "We have not forgotten, in 
 Capri here, the night after San Costanza's Day.' 
 
 Awhile later, and Erceldoune passed up the terraced 
 heights, through the woods, where he crushed starry cyclo- 
 men and late violets at every step, along hedges of prickly 
 pear enclosing vineyards and fields of flax, and down rocky 
 winding stairs shut in by walls, over which hung the white 
 blossoms of orange boughs. 
 
 Now and then he passed a village priest, or a contadina 
 that was like a study for G-iorgone, or a tourist party 
 whose mules were stumbling down some narrow gorge or 
 dense arbutus thicket ; these were all ; the solitude waa 
 well-nigh unbroken. He knew Capri as well as he knew 
 the old Scottish Border at home ; many a time, waiting 
 week after week at Naples for despatches, he had explored 
 every creek, rock, and islet in that marvellous bay, from sunlit 
 Amalfi to nestling Procida ; and he made his way straight 
 onward to the Piccota Mariana, though slowly from the 
 steepness and the vagaries of the broken Eoman roads, 
 overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, that his horse, a 
 sturdy mountain-trained chestnut from Ischia, climbed 
 cautiously. 
 
'UNO ICH? ICH LIES DICH NOCH ! ' l8l 
 
 A late hour was sounding from some campanile as he 
 rode into that beautiful nook that lies turned toward Sicily, 
 with its line of fisher-boats and white- walled cottages fring- 
 ing the coast, and hidden among olives, cistus groves and 
 orangeries. Here and there where strangers had made 
 their dwelling lights were gleaming, but the Capriotes all 
 iay sleeping under their low rounded roofs ; he almost de- 
 spaired of finding any guide to tell him which villa was hers 
 in that leafy nest among the sea-girt rocks. 
 
 At last he overtook a contadina heavily laden with wood, 
 doing the work of pack-horses, as is the common custom for 
 women in the isles of the Sirens ; she knew the name ; the 
 Contessa had bought some coral of her, for pity's sake, 
 yesterday ; the villa was down there in that little gorge 
 just hanging over the sea, where the gray plumes of olive 
 were thickest. 
 
 If any had asked it, he could not have answered with 
 what definite purpose he went, whether to see her, whether 
 to break on her privacy at such an hour, whether only to 
 look on the place where she dwelt, and watch till the day 
 should dawn ; fixed aim he had none ; he was urged by an 
 impulse as vague as it was unconquerable, unregulated 
 either by reason or by motive. He was in that mood in 
 which chance does its best or its worst for a man ; when he 
 offers no resistance to it, and may even be hurried into guilt 
 vre he knows what he does. 
 
 The lights were shining among the shades of olive and 
 arbutus woods as his horse stumbled down the narrow 
 defile, catching in the trailing vine tendrils at every step. 
 
 The dwelling literally overhung the sea, nestled on a low 
 ridge of rock, curved round so that the whole arc of the 
 bay, sweeping from east to west, was commanded by its 
 windows, that saw the sunrise over the height of St. Angelo, 
 fall in its noonday glory full on Naples, and Vesuvius, and 
 Baiae, where they Be in the depth of that wondrous bow, 
 and pass on to die in purple pomp behind wild Ischia. It 
 was surrounded with all the profuse growth of the island ; 
 thickets of cistus, wilderness of myrtle, budding fig-trees, 
 orangeries with their crowns of bridal blossom and their 
 balls of amber fruit, while vast rocks rose above and shelved 
 oeneath it, with columns that towered to the clouds, and 
 terraced ledges and broken gorges filled up with foliage. 
 
184 ID ALIA. 
 
 man's action, slight though it was, bore to him a terrible 
 singincance. Were her revelries such as those for which 
 the rose was hung above the doors of B/ome ? were they the 
 revelries of a Faustina? The thought passed over him, 
 cold, gliding, poisonous as the coil of a snake ; he flung it 
 from him with fierce loathing, true to the motto of his old 
 race * One loyalty, one faith :' he had given both to her. 
 He heeded neither time nor place ; purpose he had none in 
 staying there ; to watch her life with suspicion or espionage 
 was the last thought in him, the last baseness possible to 
 him ; but he could not tear himself from the place ; he was 
 fascinated to it, even by the very torment of his pain. How 
 utterly she must have forgotten him ! how utterly careless 
 must she be of what suffering she had dealt him ! As he 
 thought of the look that he had seen on her face, as he 
 thought of those men gathered about her while he was 
 absent, he paced the narrow rocky ridge like a man chained 
 to his cell, while his foes riot in all that he has loved and 
 treasured. And the closed casements faced him like an 
 inexorable doom, while a faint glimmer of light that here 
 and there streamed through them seemed to mock him with 
 fugitive tormenting glimpse, only serving to make the 
 darkness darker still. 
 
 At last, when the grayness of dawn was breaking, there 
 was a slight noise that stirred the stillness. The shutter 
 unclosed, the glass- door opened : he saw her alone. There 
 was no one now in the apartment, and she stood in the 
 open window looking out on the sea that stretched far 
 below, round the broken and jutting cliffs. 
 
 He leaned down, scarcely breathing, till he hung half- 
 way over the chasm. Was it possible that in this solitude 
 she thought of him ? Were those men anything to her ? or 
 was he more than they, or nothing not even a regret ? 
 
 The moon at that moment strayed through on to the 
 ledge, and she saw his shadow hanging midway down over 
 the precipice, whose fatal depth slanted straight into the 
 sea, which had worn a narrow way through the fissure five 
 hundred feet below. A cry of horror broke from her that 
 had a greater tenderness in it than lies only in a mere fear 
 for life imperilled. For all answer he swung himself one 
 moment on the ledge, balanced the distance with an unerring 
 eye, and with a mountaineer's leap that the glens and hills 
 
'UND ICH? ICH LIEB DICH NOCH /' 185 
 
 of the Border had taught him long before, cleared the space 
 and alighted at her feet. 
 
 * Does it matter to you whether I live or die ? ' 
 
 The brief prayer bore eloquence deeper than lies in ornate 
 words ; all the man's heart was spent in it. Idalia stood, 
 motionless and silent, her eyes fixed on him where he stood 
 beside her, dropped as from the air upon the wild cliffs in 
 the dead of night, when she believed him far distant on 
 those Eastern shores to which the sea beneath them ebbed 
 away through league on league of starlight. 
 
 ' Does it matter to you whether I live or die ? ' he said 
 afresh, while his voice quivered with a fiery piteous en- 
 treaty. 
 
 * Surely ! It mattered to me when you were but a 
 stranger.' 
 
 A vivid joy thrilled through him ; his eyes in the shadow 
 burned down into hers with passionate appeal, with pas- 
 sionate reproach. 
 
 ' Ay, but it was only a divine pity then ; is it that only 
 now ? And, with but pity in you for me, how could you 
 deal me this last misery ? ' 
 
 "What stirred her heart he could not tell. 
 
 1 1 bade you know no more of me,' she said at last, while 
 her eyes looked away from him down into the still and sil- 
 vered seas. ' I told you nothing but bitterness could come 
 to you from my friendship ; nothing else can. Why would 
 you not believe me while it was time ? ' 
 
 There was an intense and weary mournfulness in the 
 words. They carried a deadly meaning to him; he gave 
 them but one significance. 
 
 ' You mean that even your memory is forbidden me 
 that even my worship of you dishonours you ? ' 
 
 She drew her hands from him. 
 
 ' Your words are as strange as your presence here. This 
 is the time and place for neither.' 
 
 4 My words are strange ! Grod help me ! I hardly know 
 what I say. Answer me, in pity's sake, what are they to 
 you?' 
 
 ' Who ? ' 
 
 And as she spoke, beneath the unbent hauteur of her 
 voice and of her glance there was something as nearly 
 kindred to anxiety and alarm as could approach Idalia's 
 nature. 
 
1 86 ID ALIA. 
 
 ' Those men who were with you.' 
 
 ' Let me pass, sir. These are not questions for which 
 you have right, or to which I give submission.' 
 
 1 1 swear they shall be answered ! "What are they to 
 you ?' 
 
 She glanced at him in haughty amaze, tinged with some 
 other feeling that he could not translate. 
 
 * You dare address me thus ! Are you mad ? ' 
 1 think so/ 
 
 ' I think so also,' she said coldly. ' And now, sir, there 
 is an end of these unwarranted questions, which you have 
 as little title to ask as I have inclination to answer. Leave 
 me, or let me pass.' 
 
 He stood in her path, half mad as he said : 
 ' I will know one thing. Are you any man's wife ? ' 
 Utter surprise passed over her face, and something of 
 contemptuous annoyance. 
 
 ' I reply to nothing asked in such a manner,' she said 
 briefly. ' Let me pass, sir.' 
 
 * No ! Tell me this one thicg for the love of pity ! ' 
 The anguish in his voice touched her. She paused a 
 
 moment. 
 
 ' It can concern you in no way,' she answered him dis- 
 tantly. ' But since you ask it, know that I cherish freedom 
 too well to be wedded.' 
 
 ' I thank Grod ! I may love you without sin.' 
 
 His voice was very low, and his words had a greater in- 
 tensity because their passion was restrained in obedience 
 to her ; there was grandeur in their very simplicity. She 
 raised her head with her old stag-like gesture, looking to 
 the sea, and not to him. 
 
 4 Sir, you have no title to speak such words. You cannot 
 say that I have ever given you the faintest ' 
 
 ' Have I ever said it ? No ; you have given me no title, 
 but I claim one.' I 
 
 < Claim ! * 
 
 ' I claim one. The title that every man has to love, 
 though he go unloved to love better than life, and only 
 less than honour.' 
 
 He spoke steadily, undauntedly, as became his own self- 
 respect and dignity ; but his voice had an accent which told 
 her that world-wide as the love had been that she had 
 
1 UND ICH ? ICH LIEB DICH NOCHT 187 
 
 roused, none ever had loved her as this man did. For a 
 moment she turned and looked at him a look fleeting, and 
 veiled from him by the flickering shadows. The look was 
 soon banished, and her eyes strayed backward to the sea, 
 Her face was very pale, but she moved away with her proud 
 and languid grace. 
 
 * These words are painful to us both : no more of them, 
 sir. Farewell.' 
 
 The word struck him as a shot strikes one of his Border 
 deer. In the impulse of his agony he caught her trailing 
 dress, and held it as a sentenced captive might hold the 
 purple hem of his sovereign's robes. 
 
 ' Stay ! A moment ago you said you cared whether I 
 lived or died. As I live now, I will die to-night, in 
 that sea at your feet, if you tell me to leave you for 
 ever.' 
 
 A shudder ran through her. Looking down on him she 
 saw that fatigue, long fasting, the misery of the past hours, 
 and the force of the feeling he bore her, had unloosed his 
 passions and unstrung his nerves till his brain was giddy ; 
 and, his calm failing him, she saw that in every likelihood, 
 as surely as the stars shone above them, he would keep his 
 word and fling away his whole existence for her. 
 
 Commonly she was too careless of men's lives as of their 
 peace ; but here she could not be so. She had saved him ; 
 she could not so soon again destroy him. 
 
 1 Hush ! ' she said more softly ; ' the noblest woman 
 would never be worth that. It would be better that we 
 should part. When I tell you that it can bring you no 
 happiness ' 
 
 ' Whatever it bring, I said before, I accept it. My life 
 is yours to save or throw awav, as you will. Answer me, 
 which shall it be ? ' 
 
 There was a suppressed violence, a terrible suffering in 
 his voice, that moved her almost with such shuddering pain 
 as though she witnessed his death before her sight. In the 
 light falling from the opened windows she could see the 
 burning gleam in his eyes, and the red flush that darkened 
 the bronze of his face. 
 
 * Live ! ' she answered him, while her own voice lost its 
 dullness. ' You do not know now what you say ; with, 
 calmer hours you will see how little worth it I or any 
 
1 88 ID ALIA. 
 
 woman could be. You may meet me again ; but you must 
 speak no more of such words as you have spoken to-night. 
 I have your promise ? ' 
 
 6 Till my strength shall fail me to keep it.' 
 
 6 When it does we shall meet no more.' 
 
 Then she left him, and passed through the chamber that 
 was opened to the night, till, in the distance, the clustered 
 flowers and statues veiled her among them, and the 
 closing of a door echoed with a dull sound through the 
 stillness. 
 
 He stood alone on the terrace, the noise of the sea 
 surging in his ear, his pulse beating, his brain reeling ; 
 he could not tell what to believe, what to trust, what to 
 think. 
 
 The frank, loyal, single-hearted nature of the man had 
 too honest a mould, too masculine a cast, to follow or to 
 divine the complex intricacies of a woman's life, of a 
 woman's impulses and motives. He felt blinded, power- 
 less, heart-sick, dizzy ; now crushed with reckless despair 
 at the chill memory of her words, now touched with sweet 
 wild hope, because he thought her free to be won if daring, 
 fidelity, and devotion could avail to win her. 
 
 To doubt her never even now, even with all that he 
 had seen and heard occurred to him. He believed that 
 she might only pity him with proud cold pity ; he believed 
 that it was faintly, remotely possible that by force of his 
 own mighty love some tenderness might be at last wakened 
 for him in her heart. But between these he saw no path. 
 He never thought that she might be but fooling and de- 
 stroying him. 
 
 He had comparatively seen little of women ; nothing of 
 such a woman as Idalia. His bold and sanguine nature 
 quickly grasped at hope ; even in all the humility of his 
 love it was not in him to surrender. 
 
 Till morning broke beyond the giant mass of St. Angelo 
 he paced up and down the cliffs, with the waves beating 
 music at his feet. Then he flung himself down on the 
 moss that covered a ledge of the rock, with his saddle 
 beneath his head, as he had lain many a night under 
 Asiatic stars, and on Andes slopes, and on yellow Libyan 
 sand. Physical fatigue brought sleep, and sleep was 
 gentler to him than his waking life ; it gave him dreams, 
 and with his dreams Idalia. 
 
SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. 189 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 'SHE SMILES THEM DOWN IMPERIALLY, AS VENUS DIB 
 THE WAVES.' 
 
 As she passed from him through the embrasure of the 
 myrtle-shrouded window, and crossing her reception-room 
 entered an inner chamber, at the farther end stood Victor 
 Vane too far to have heard what had been spoken, yet 
 near enough through the suite of apartments to have seen 
 out on the terrace above the sea. A few minutes before he 
 had left the villa with her other guests, whose boats were 
 taking them across to Naples ; now he had returned and 
 awaited her, half with the familiarity of a man who shared 
 her confidence, half with the hesitation of one who fears 
 he may give offence. 
 
 * You are here still ! and so late ! I suppose you bring 
 news of importance you could not give before them?' she 
 said, with a shade of annoyance in the languor of her 
 voice. 
 
 He had approached with a quick step, an eager warmth 
 upon his face. He was checked and chilled vaguely yet 
 irresistibly as he met her glance. He was rarely to be 
 daunted, still less rarely to be shamed; yet he was both 
 now. He paused involuntarily ; his eyes fell, and words 
 died on his lips as he bowed before her. 
 
 ' And your intelligence ? ' she asked. 
 
 * Intelligence ? CafFradali has deserted us.' 
 Id alia lifted her eyebrows. 
 
 ' He is as well lost as retained. "What else ?' 
 
 ' You know that the Ducroscs will send twenty thousand 
 rifles into Poland, and that Falkenstiern goes to take com- 
 mand of the Towariez ?' 
 
 She gave a gesture of impatience. 
 
 1 He will " command " them when they are organised 
 when ! It was I who sent him. This can scarcely be your 
 intelligence your intelligence that will not wait till to- 
 morrow ? ' 
 
 He hesitated, with a strangely novel embarrassment upon 
 him. 
 
i go ID ALIA. 
 
 'I waited to congratulate you on your conquest of the 
 Prince to the cause.' 
 
 A light of triumph gave its pride to her eyes, and its 
 warmth to her brow ; she smiled, as with the memory of 
 victory. 
 
 'Viana! Yes; it is something to have secured him, 
 semi-Bourbon that he is ! But I still remain at a loss to 
 imagine why you reappear at this time of the night.' 
 
 A flush of anger heated the delicate coldness of her lis- 
 tener's face, his silken and gentle courtesies were forgotten 
 for the moment. 
 
 ' Such an hour, ruadame ! It is not too late for that wild 
 wanderer yonder to be favoured with an interview.' 
 
 The moment the words escaped him he repented them ; 
 he knew how rash they were with the nature and disdainful 
 dignity of the woman to whom he spoke. Id alia cast one 
 glance on him of superb indifference ; but she gave no be- 
 trayal of surprise, not even of disquiet, far less of em- 
 barrassment. 
 
 6 If you only came to arraign my actions, I will be obliged 
 to you to retire.' 
 
 ' Wait ! Hear me first ! I can act indifference no longer. 
 I came back to-night for one thing only to tell you what 
 you know, as well as you know that the stars shine yonder 
 that I love you ! ' 
 
 She heard him with that same royal indifference, and 
 ironic amusement. 
 
 ' I think we are too well acquainted with each other for 
 this. I gave you more credit than to suppose you would talk 
 in this fashion.' 
 
 He looked up at her with a passionate pain ; he had been 
 j heartless, and been proud of his heartlessness ; he had 
 mocked all his life through at what other men felt and 
 suffered, and passion or tenderness had been alike the 
 subject of his most cutting sneer ; but for the moment, at 
 least his creed had deserted him, his wisdom and his sar- 
 casm had failed him ; for the moment he loved, as utterly as 
 ever a lover did, and he felt powerless to make her credit it, 
 But eloquence was always at his bidding, and eloquence 
 came now; every honeyed flattery, every imploring eager- 
 ness, every impassioned pleading, that could warm or shake 
 the heart of the woman who heard him, poured from his 
 
SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. 191 
 
 KpB. Persuasive always, he was a thousandfold more so 
 now that for the first time in his existence genuine passion 
 had broken up his callousness, and a sense of hopelessness 
 shivered his self-reliunce. He loved her, if it were but a 
 mingling of desire, of ambition, of senses intoxicated by her 
 beauty, of pride piqued by her disdain ; and he felt impotent 
 to make her even believe this far more impotent to make 
 her accept it. 
 
 She heard him without interruption, smiling a little as 
 she heard ; she was half wearied, half amused, as at a 
 comedy known and stale from custom, yet amusing because 
 frell acted. 
 
 * Monsieur, I gave you credit for better taste,' she said 
 quietly, as he paused. ' I have had so much of this so often ; 
 granted you are unusually eloquent, unusually graceful, but 
 even with those accessories the tale is very tiresome ; and it 
 has one great drawback, you see we neither of us believe 
 it!' 
 
 ' Believe ! how can I make you believe ? I tell you that 
 ever since I saw you first 1 have been so changed that 1 
 have wondered if I lived or dreamed ; I have felt all that once 
 I disdained as only fit for boys and fools ! What more can 
 I tell you? you must knoiv that I speak truth.' 
 
 * What a recantation ! 1 am not a fitting hearer for it at 
 all, nor likely to appreciate it. 1 will thank you far more to 
 amuse me with your bon-mots, which are really good, than 
 to entertain me with your efforts in Eomeo's strain, which, 
 though very pretty, are very stale.' 
 
 ' Wait for pity's sake ! Doubt what you will, mock at 
 what you will, but believe at least that I love you !' 
 
 She laughed softly. 
 < * We do not believe in love nous autresT 
 
 ' And yet men have gone to their death only for love of 
 you ! ' 
 
 6 No proof of wisdom if they did ! ' 
 
 A little while before he had thought as she thought ; a 
 few months earlier and his incredulity of every such madness 
 &nd emotion was not more scornful than her own ; now, in- 
 toxicated with the disdainful beauty of the only woman who 
 taad ever cost him a moment's pang, he believed in all the 
 wildest follies of romance, and would have staked everything 
 'he o wired on Dearth, or wf!j?orpd on the future, to 171 ove h^r 
 
192 IDALIA. 
 
 and to win her. For the only time in his life he was baffled, 
 for the only time powerless. His hands clenched where he 
 stood before her. 
 
 * Hear me at the least before you banish me. Listen ! 
 what is there we might not compass together ? You adore 
 sovereignty, it should go hard if I did not give it you. You 
 are ambitious, your ambition cannot overleap mine. We are 
 both against the world, together we should subdue it. Empty 
 thrones have fallen to hands bold enough to grasp them as 
 they reel through revolutions; you and I might wear a crown 
 if our aims and power were one. Love me, and there is no 
 height I will not raise you to, no ordeal I will not pass 
 through for you, no living man who shall baffle or outrun 
 me. I have the genius that rules worlds ; I would lay one 
 at your feet.' 
 
 Every word that he uttered he meant ; in the excitation 
 of the instant, sweeping down all the suave and hardened 
 coldness of his temperament, he felt the power in him to do 
 and to dare greatly ; he felt that for her, through her, with 
 her, there should be no limit to the ambition and the triumph 
 of his life ; he spoke wildly, blindly, exaggeratedly, but he 
 spoke with an exaltation that for the second made him a 
 nobler and truer man than he had been in all the cool scorn 
 of his wisdom and his mockery. Yet he did not move her, 
 much less did he win her. 
 
 She looked at him with a smile in her eyes, and a haughty 
 languor in her attitude. She merciless from knowing the 
 world too well, and gifted with a penetration far beyond the 
 common range of women saw that the gold offered her was 
 adulterated ; that the springs of his speech were as much 
 self-love as love. 
 
 'I understand you,' she said as he paused. 'I could 
 advance your ambitions well, and you would be glad that 1 
 should do so ; your vanity, your policy, your schemes, and 
 perhaps a little, too your admiration, are all excited and 
 chime in with another one; and that compound you call 
 love. "Well, it is as good a name for it as anything else. 
 But as for thrones ! I thought we called ourselves Liberalists 
 and Eedressers ? Crowns scarcely hang in the air like roses, 
 as you seem to think, for any passer-by to gather them ; but 
 if they do, how do you reconcile the desire for one with all 
 your professions of political faith ? I suppose then, like 
 
SHE SMILES THEM DOWN. IQ3 
 
 most democrats, you only struggle against tyranny that you 
 may have the right in turn to create yourself Tyrannis ? ' 
 
 His hands closed on a cluster of rhododendrons in the 
 window, and tore them down with an unconscious gesture. 
 In a measure he was wronged ; he loved her enough in that 
 moment to have renounced every ambition and every social 
 success for her, and he could not make her even believe that 
 any feeling was in him. In a measure, too, her satire was 
 right, and pierced him the more bitterly because it laid bare 
 so mercilessly all that was confused and unacknowledged to 
 himself. In his pain in her contempt, he hated her almost 
 as much as he loved her, and the old barbaric leaven of 
 jealousy, that he had used to ridicule as the last insanity of 
 fools, broke out despite all self-respect that would have 
 crushed it into silence. 
 
 'You are very pitiless, madame/ he said in his teeth. 
 ' Do you deal as mockingly with that beggared courier whom 
 you favour with interviews at an hour you think untimely 
 for lovers less distinguished?' 
 
 Her glance swept over him with the grand amazement of 
 one whom no living man ever arraigned. He could not tell 
 whether his insult moved her one whit for sake of the man 
 whom his jealousy seized as his rival ; but he saw that it had 
 for ever ruined all hope for himself. She looked at him 
 calmly, with a contempt that cut him like a knife. 
 
 ' I did not know that my wines were so strong or your 
 head so weak. If you trangress the limits of courtesy, I 
 must trangress those of hospitality, and dismiss you.' 
 
 He knew that it was as vain to seek to move or sway her 
 from that serene indifference, as to dash himself against the 
 Capri rocks in striving to uproot them ; yet in his despera- 
 tion he lost all the keen and subtle tact, the fine inscrutable 
 ability, that had never failed him save with her. He laid 
 his hands on the sweeping folds of her dress, with the same 
 gesture of entreaty that Erceldoune had used in the uncon- 
 scious vehemence of his prayer. 
 
 * Idalia stay ! Take heed before you refuse my love, 
 for love it is, God help me ! ' 
 
 She drew the laces from him, and moved away. 
 
 ' You have as much belief in the name you invoke, mon- 
 sieur, as I have in the love for which you invoke it ! Come ! 
 we alike know the world too well for this comedietta not to 
 weary both. You must end it, or I.' o 
 
194 IDALIA. 
 
 6 No, hear me out ! ' he said fiercely, almost savagely, fof 
 one whose impassive gentleness had commonly been his 
 choicest mask and weapon. 'Think twice before you 
 refuse any toleration to my love. Take that, and you shall 
 make me your slave ; refuse it, and you will never have had 
 a foe such as you shall find in me. Remember, you 
 cannot brave me lightly, you cannot undo the links that 
 connect us, you cannot wash out my knowledge of ail that 
 you have held most secret. Eemember whose thoughts 
 and acts and intrigues I have in my keeping. I know 
 what you would give all your loveliness in tribute to me to 
 bribe me from uttering to the world ' 
 
 * You try intimidation ? I accredited you with better 
 breeding and less melodrama/ said Idalia, her careless 
 negligence unruffled, as with a bow like that with which 
 queens dismiss their courts, she passed from the chamber 
 ere he could follow or arrest her ; it would have been a 
 man bolder and more blinded still than he was who should 
 have dared to do either. 
 
 He was left there alone, in the midst of the white warm 
 light and of the burnished leaves swaying against the marblo 
 columns ; to his lips oaths never came, he was too finely 
 polished, but an imprecation was hurled back upon his 
 heart that cursed her \vith a terrible bitterness, and a 
 hatred great as was his baffled passion. He hated her for 
 his own folly in bending to the common weakness of men ; 
 he hated her for the disdainful truth with which she had 
 penetrated the mixed motives in his heart ; he hated her 
 for the shame she had put upon him of offering her a re- 
 jected and despised passion ; he hated her for all the 
 numberless sorceries of her fascination, of her brilliance, of 
 her pride, which had made him weak as water before their 
 spell. To win her there was nothing he would have checked 
 at ; she had become the incarnation of his ambitions, as she 
 might have been the means of their fruition ; all that gave 
 her danger to other men but gave her added intoxication 
 for him ; she would have been to him, had she but loved 
 him, what the genius and the beauty of she whom they 
 called Hellas E/ediviva were to Tallien. And more bitter 
 than pride stung, or vanity pierced, or ambition shattered, 
 was the sense that love her as he had, love her as he would, 
 consume his very heart for her sake as he might, he would 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 195 
 
 never plead, beseech, swear, or prove ifc as he should 
 make her believe that one pulse of love beat in -him. 
 
 And all tlie by-gone ironies and contemptuous scoffs 
 which he had used to cast on those who suffered for the 
 lost smile of a woman's eyes came back upon him now, 
 laughing in his ear and gibing at his weakness like fantastic 
 devils mocking at his fall. A woman had enthralled him, 
 and his philosophies were dead corpses that lay cold and 
 powerless before him, incapable of rallying to his rescue, 
 things of clay without a shadow's value. 
 
 CHAPTEE XV. 
 
 THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 
 
 THE early morning broke on Capri ; with the rising of 
 the sun the little fleet of boats all down the shore 
 began to flutter into motion as the birds fluttered into 
 song, the Angelus rang, the full daylight glittered over the 
 white line of towns and villages that nestled far and wide 
 in the bow of the bay, in the transparent air a delicate 
 feathery column of gray smoke curled up from the cone of 
 Vesuvius ; the cliffs rose up in the sunlight, vine-covered, 
 and standing like pillars out in the midst of the sea, while 
 the mists were still hanging over that deep blue western 
 depth, stretching out and on to the Mediterranean, farther 
 and farther toward the columns of Hercules and the gates 
 of the African and Asian worlds. 
 
 In her own chamber, a morning-room whose windows, 
 clustered round with trained myrtle and clematis, looked 
 out down the shelving cliff on to the sea, Idalia stood ; her 
 head was bent, her eyes were grave and filled with thought, 
 and her lips had as much of disdain as of melancholy ; she 
 looked a woman to dare much, to reign widely, to submit 
 rarely, to fear never. Yet she was in bondage now. 
 
 At a breakfast table, a little distance from her, sat 
 Conrad, Count Phaulcon. He was smoking, having finished 
 with the coffee and claret, fruit and fish beside him, and 
 was looking at her under his lashes, a look half wary, half 
 admiring, half angered, half exultant, the look of a man 
 
 o 2 
 
196 ID ALIA. 
 
 foiled in holding her by intimidation, but successful in 
 holding her by power, yet not wholly at his ease with her, 
 nor wholly so with himself. 
 
 1 If you would only hear reason,' he said impatiently : he 
 had vanquished her in one sense, but in another she was 
 still his victor, and he was restless under it. 
 
 ' I am happy to hear reason,' she answered coldly ; * but 
 of dishonour 1 am a little tired ! ' 
 
 There was a certain listless satiric bitterness in the last 
 w r ords. 
 
 ' Dishonour ! ' echoed Phaulcon, while the blood flushed 
 over his forehead, and he moved irritably. ' How strangely 
 you phrase things ! What has changed you so ? For a 
 woman of the world, a woman of your acumen, of your ex- 
 perience, of your brilliancy, to pause and draw bnck for 
 such puerile after-thoughts I cannot in the least com- 
 prehend it. What a sceptre you hold ! Bah ! stronger than 
 any queen's. Queens are mere fantoccini marionettes 
 crowned for a puppet-show, and hung on wires that each 
 minister pulls after his own fancy ; but you have a kingdom 
 that is never limited, except at your own choice ; an empire 
 that is exhaustless, for when you shall have lost your beauty, 
 you will still keep your power. Ton smile, and the poli- 
 tician tells you his secret ; you woo him, and the velvet 
 churchman unlocks his intrigues; you use your silver 
 eloquence, and you save a cause or free a country. It is 
 supreme power, the power of a woman's loveliness, used, as 
 you use it, with a statesman's skill/ 
 
 She smiled slightly, but the haughty carelessness and 
 resistance of her attitude did not change. Those persuasive, 
 vivacious, hyperbolic words, she remembered how fatal a 
 magic, how alluring a glamour such as they once had for 
 her ; they had no charm now, they had long ceased to have 
 any. 
 
 ' A supreme power ! ' pursued Phaulcon. ' In the rose- 
 water of your hookahs you steep their minds in what colour 
 you will. With the glance of your eyes you unnerve their 
 wills, and turn them which way you choose. In an opera 
 supper you enchant their allegiance to what roads you 
 like; in the twilight of a boudoir you wind the delicate 
 threads that agitate nations. You a^e in the heart of con- 
 spiracies, in the secrets of cabinets, in the destinies of 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. igj 
 
 coalitions, and with fascination conquer where reason would 
 fail. It is the widest power in the world ; it is that ot 
 Antonina, of Marcia, of Olynipia, of Pompadour ! What 
 can be lacking in such a life ? ' 
 
 ' Only what was wanting in theirs honour ! * 
 
 The words were spoken very calmly, but there was not 
 the less meaning in them. 
 
 6 Honour ! What makes you all in a moment so in love 
 with that word ? There was a time when you saw nothiug 
 but what was triumph in your career.' 
 
 ' It is not for you to reproach me with that.' 
 
 Over his changing, handsome, eloquent features a certain 
 flush and shadow came. 
 
 * Reproach ! I would rather reproach you with the 
 change. And why should there be this continued estrange- 
 ment between us, Idalia ? You loved me once/ 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on his musingly, very mournfully, with 
 that lustre of disdain that was in them, mingled with a mo- 
 mentary Avistfulness of recollection. 
 
 ' Yes, I loved you once,' she answered, and her voice had 
 an excessive gentleness in it ; but he knew her meaning too 
 well to ask why it was that this was now solely and irrevo- 
 cably of the past. 
 
 He was silent some moments ; the dashing and reckless 
 Eree Lance felt an embarrassment and a sense of mortifi- 
 cation in her presence. He could hold this haughty and ex- 
 quisite woman in a grip of steel, and feel a savage victory in 
 forcing the proud neck that would not bend to lie beneath 
 his heel ; he could take a refined exultation of cruelty in 
 seeing her pride rebel, her instincts recoil, her dignity suffer 
 mutely ; he could amuse himself with all this with a rich 
 pleasure in it. Nevertheless, he owed her many and heavy 
 debts ; he gave her an admiration that was tinged still with 
 ft strange tyrannous wayward sort of love ; he held her in 
 an unwilling homage that made him. half afraid of her, 
 and he shrank under the sense of her censure and of her 
 rebuke. 
 
 In one sense he was her master, but in another she was 
 far above him, in another she was his ruler, and escaped hia 
 power. 
 
 He rose restlessly ; the glance he gave her was doubtful 
 and embarrassed, and his tone was half appealing, half im- 
 perious. 
 
198 ID ALIA. 
 
 ' "Well, there is one thing, I want more money.' 
 
 ' You always want money ! ' 
 
 There was a weary scorn in her words, the scorn of a 
 proud woman forced into companionship with what has 
 sunk too utterly in her eyes for any other feeling save that 
 only of an almost compassionate contempt. 
 
 Phaulcon laughed ; riot because he was impervious to the 
 contempt, but because the temper of the man was really 
 lightly and idly insouciant, careless as any butterfly, except 
 in hate. 
 
 1 Of course ! who doesn't ? Is there anything money 
 won't buy, from a woman's love to a priest's absolution? 
 Tell me that ! A man without money is like a man born 
 into the world without his eyes or his legs ; he exists, he 
 doesn't live ; he hibernates miserably, he never knows what 
 it is to enjoy! Who are the kings of the earth? The 
 Hopes, the Pereires, the Kothschilds, the Barings. War 
 could not be begun, imperial crowns would never come out 
 of pawn, nations would collapse in bankruptcies, thrones 
 would crash down to the dust, and nobles turn crossing- 
 sweepers, without them. "Who rule Europe ? kings, min- 
 isters, cabinets, troops ? Eaugh ! not one whit of it the 
 CAPITALISTS ! Which was the potentate, the great Em- 
 peror who owed the bond, or the great Eugger who could 
 afford to put it in the fire ? Tes, I do want money. Can 
 you let me have any ? ' 
 
 Her lips moved slightly, she restrained whatever words 
 might rise to them, but she did not repress the disgust that 
 was spoken silently on them. 
 
 1 You wish to ruin my fortune now ? ' 
 
 1 Ear from it,' laughed Phaulcon. ' I am not like the boy 
 who killed his goose of the golden eggs. I would not ruin 
 you on any account ; but even if. I did, you know very well 
 that any one of your friends would willingly make up any 
 breaches I caused in your wealth. 3 
 
 Where she stood, with one hand leaning idly on the 
 carved ivory of a chess-king, she turned with a sudden 
 gesture. He had broken down her haughty silence, her 
 studied contemptuous tranquillity at last. A flush rose over 
 her brow, her lips quivered, not with fear but with loathing ; 
 her eyes flashed fire. All the gentleness that in her mo- 
 ments of abandonment characterised her, and all the 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 199 
 
 languor that at other hours made her so indolently and 
 ironically indifferent, changed into a fearless defiance, the 
 more intense from its force of contrast with the restrained 
 serenity of her past self-control. 
 
 ' One other word like that and you never enter my pre- 
 sence again, if to be free from you I close the gates of a 
 convent on my own life. "What ! are you so vile as that ? 
 Is all shame lost in you ? ' 
 
 If it were not, there were moments when he was as bad 
 a man as the world held, when the devil in him was 
 alone victorious, and all conscience that had ever lingered 
 was crushed out and forgotten. Her words, and yet far 
 more her look, lashed all that was evil in his nature to its 
 height. 
 
 He laughed aloud. 
 
 1 " A world of scorn looks beautiful " in you, that I 
 grant, Ulccellenza. At the same time, your title to it is not 
 quite clear. It is for the women who go to courts to smile 
 with that superb disdain, to answer with that proud defiance, 
 not for the Countess Vassalis.' 
 
 There was not much in the words themselves, but in 
 their tones there was an intolerable insolence, an intolerable 
 insult. The fire in her eyes burned deeper still, her breath 
 came rapidly, her whole form was instinct with a passion 
 held in rein, rather for sake of her own dignity than for anv 
 more timorous thing. Standing in that haughty wrath, 
 that self-enforced restraint, she looked like some superb 
 stag, some delicate antelope at bay, and panting to spring 
 on its foes. 
 
 * Do you think such taunts as that your taunts have 
 power to wound me for one instant? Where is your 
 boasted wisdom ? It has forsaken you strangely, as strangely 
 as your memory I Whatever I have lost, the loss is due to 
 you ; whatever I have erred in, the error lies with you ; 
 whatever wreck my life has made, is wrecked through you ; 
 whatever taint is on my name was brought there first by 
 jou. You have tried my patience long and often ; you 
 lave tried it cnce too much. You have trusted to the tie 
 tiat is between us ; it is broken for ever as if it had not 
 been. Insult through you I have continually borne. What 
 the world has said has been as nothing to me ; my life is 
 net ruled by it, my honour is not touched by it. But insult 
 
20O ID ALIA. 
 
 from you I will never bear. Be my destroyer as you 
 choose ; but your accomplice again you shall never make 
 me, nor your dupe. Stand aside, sir ; I will hear no more 
 words.' 
 
 He had laid his hand upon her arm ; she shook him off 
 with an action as intense in its gesture of contempt as hei* 
 words had been intense in their concentrated passion, and 
 swept beyond him towards the doorway of her chamber. 
 
 Phaulcon sprang before her, and stood between her and 
 the closed doors ; there was a taint of cowardice in his na- 
 ture, and he had forgotten all policy when he had let malice 
 and vengeance hurry him into an open rupture with one 
 who was beyond all others needful to him, and who, what- 
 ever her foes, whatever her faults, still never feared 
 
 Idalia, wait ! ' 
 
 * Let me pass, sir.' 
 
 ' No, by Heaven, not in such a mood ! ' 
 
 * You wish to compel me to summon my household ? ' 
 ' I wish to induce you to hear reason.' 
 
 ' Tour euphuistic synonym for some new villany ? I have 
 answered you already.' 
 
 * Softly, softly. It will not do for us to quarrel. You 
 know the terms on which alone you can make such an 
 answer final.' 
 
 * Your persecution ? I am indifferent to it. Allow me 
 to pass.' 
 
 ' Pardon me, no. The terms I meant were the breaking 
 of your oath.' 
 
 He spoke very gently, yet at the words she turned pale 
 for the first time in their interview, as though he had 
 pierced her where she was without shield ; she did not reply, 
 and he pursued his advantage. 
 
 ' Tell me, will your new and eccentric fancy for " honour " 
 be greatly gratified by the deliberate rupture of your sworn 
 word ? When men and women talk niuch of their honour, 
 to be sure they are always conscious of having lost it, or 
 being just about to lose it with a more flagrant bankruptcy 
 than common ; but still, your newly-adopted principle witl 
 be ill commenced by the repudiation of your pledged oati, 
 of your bound engagement/ 
 
 Still she said nothing, only in her eyes suppressed pas- 
 sion gleamed, and her hand clenched as though, but for Ler 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 2OI 
 
 dignity's sake, it would have found force to strike him 
 where he stood. 
 
 Conrad Phaulcon smiled. 
 
 c I am no tyrant, no harsh task-master, my most beautiful 
 Countess ; and I frankly admit that I admire you more in 
 your haughty rebellion than I do in the softest smile with 
 which you enchant all our good friends. I exact nothing. 
 I command nothing. I merely remind you you cannot 
 break from me without also breaking your promise, and 
 more than your promise your oath. However, a woman's 
 word, I suppose even when it is sworn, even when it is 
 the word of such a woman as yourself, who have none of 
 your sex's weaknesses is only given to be broken. Is ifc 
 so?' 
 
 She answered nothing still ; a slight quick shudder of 
 hatred or of contempt passed over her one moment ; she 
 was torn inwardly with such a conflict as the prisoner on 
 parole feels when he might break his fetters away, and 
 strive, at least, for the sweet chance of liberty, were he not 
 held back by one torturing memory his word. 
 
 Suddenly she turned and bent rapidly towards him, her 
 eyes looking into his with so full and brilliant a lustre of 
 unuttered scorn, that he started and drew back. 
 
 ' You sell everything your body and your soul. What 
 bribe would you take to give me my release ? ' 
 
 1 "What bribe ? None. You are much more to me, my 
 exquisite Idalia, than any gold, well as I love the little god 
 " Bribe ! " What an ugly word ! Bribes are like medicines 
 every one takes them, but no one talks about them. 
 Your " release," too, when you live as free as air ! J 
 
 She said no more, but stood aloof from him again in 
 haughty and enforced composure. 
 
 Leave my presence, or let me pass out,' she said briefly. 
 * One or the other.' 
 
 6 Either, with pleasure, if you will give me two answers. 
 First, will you break your oath ? ' 
 
 The look that gave so much of heroism and of grandeur 
 to her beauty passed across it ; to stoop to supplication 
 to him would have been as utterly impossible to her as to 
 have put down her neck beneath his heel ; and though she 
 could not break his bonds, she was not vanquished by him. 
 She answered with a calm endurance that obeyed not him, 
 but the law of her own nature ; 
 
202 IDALIA. 
 
 'No. 
 
 ' Ah, that is well and wise, ma belle. ]S r ow for the other 
 question. You will give me the money ? ' 
 
 6 No.' 
 
 The reply was precisely the same as it had been before : 
 the triumph in his eyes fell. 
 
 ' And why not ? ' 
 
 i Because every sum I gave you now would seem given 
 because I feared you. Fall as low as that, you know well 
 enough that I shall never do. As far as you hold me 
 by my oath, so far I will hold myself bound, no farther ; 
 for the rest I have said all is cancelled henceforward be- 
 tween us.' 
 
 4 "What ! do you mean that you deny my title to my 
 power on you ? Do you mean that it can ever be possible 
 for your mere will to cancel such a tie as there is between 
 us ? Do you mean that, if you pretend to forget the past, 
 and all my claims on you, I shall ever allow them to be 
 forgotten ? ' 
 
 ' Forgotten! No; it is not so easy to forget. But 
 trade on them longer, I have said, you shall never do. I 
 have endured your exactions too many years already.' 
 
 ' But, by Heaven, then I insist 
 
 4 You cannot insist. If you need money, you know the 
 price of it : my release from you, as far as you have the 
 power to bestow it. On other terms, you will never again 
 live on my gold. The choice will be for you.' 
 
 * But I demand ' 
 
 6 You can demand nothing, sir.' 
 
 And with a movement that even now did not stoop to 
 be hurried, or lose in any sort its dignity, she swept by him 
 before he could arrest her, passed through the door, arid 
 closed it. 
 
 He knew Idalia well enough to know that to force him- 
 self on her, or seek to intimidate her into compliance with 
 his will, would be as utterly vain as to seek to quarry with 
 a razor the great black heights of Tiberio towering yonder 
 in the light. Half the victory was in his hands, half in 
 hers. To gain the rest, he knew that he must wait. 
 
 He left her, and went out across the gardens, and down 
 the winding way that led along the rocks to the shore. He 
 wa not wholly satisfied with his morning' i work j he felfc 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 203 
 
 the mute resistance of a proud nature against a power of 
 which he was tyrannously and inexorably jealous, and he 
 knew that this power did not extend over her money, of 
 which he had often received much, of which he was al- 
 ways wanting to receive more. Besides, with all his evil 
 triumph in galling and goading her to his uttermost in- 
 genuity, a certain shame was always on him before Idalia, 
 and a certain love for her always survived in his heart 
 love that was always strangely blent with something of 
 unwilling homage, of reluctant awe, and now and then of 
 absolute repentance. 
 
 He would not have undone one of the links of the fetters 
 he had made her wear under the purple-hemmed and gold- 
 broidered robes of her beauty, freedom, and supremacy ; 
 but at the same time, in her presence or freshly from it, he 
 felt ashamed of having forged them. Long habit had 
 killed almost everything in him that had once been a little 
 better ; but Conrad Phaulcon had still here and there cer- 
 tain flashes of conscience left. 
 
 As he went towards the beach, round a sharp point of 
 rock abruptly jutting out with its hanging screen of ivy and 
 myrtle, ere he looked where he went, his foot was almost 
 against the arm of a man lying there, in the shadow 
 asleep. 
 
 Erceldoune lay on the grass, the horse standing motion- 
 less beside him ; his limbs were stretched out in all their 
 careless magnificence of strength, his head had fallen slightly 
 back, his chest rose and fell with the calm breathings of a 
 deep repose, and as the morning light slanted through a 
 fissure of the cliffs, it was full upon his face, from, which 
 in repose the dauntless light, the eagle fire, had gone, and 
 only had left now a profound and serene melancholy. 
 
 It was yet early ; sleep had only come to him as the sun 
 had risen, after hours of intense excitement, and a night of 
 extreme bodily fatigue. There was nothing to awaken him 
 here, and lulled by the pleasant murmur of the seas and 
 the warmth of the young day, he dreamt on still. The 
 Grreek started violently, and a fierce panther-like longing 
 was the first thing that seized him, mingled with supreme 
 amazement ; a ferocious vindictiveness darkened and flushed 
 the glory of his face ; he paused, his lips a little parted, 
 his teeth ground, his whole form quivering with Hys longing 
 
2O4 ID ALIA. 
 
 to spring ; his temperament was intensely vivacious, and 
 years had done nothing to chill, if they had done much to 
 harden him, and little by little he had so gathered up 
 his hatred towards the man he had injured, that it was as 
 great as though that injury had been received, instead of 
 given by him* 
 
 He stooped over the sleeper, noting the unarmed power- 
 lessness of that slumber, while his teetli clenched, his 
 glance wandered by sheer instinct towards a loose, weighty, 
 mallet-like mass of granite lying near him. One blow from 
 it in a sure hand, and the life would be still before it could 
 waken for a struggle, a shout, a sigh. 
 
 ' I might crush out his brains as easily as a fly, and, by 
 God, 1 could do it too ! ' he thought in a fierce blindness of 
 hatred that remembered only that night-ride through the 
 pomegranates, and forgot all the vileness of his own bru- 
 tality towards this man who lay sleeping at his feet. 
 
 Without waking, Erceldoune stirred slightly, his right 
 hand that lay open clenched ; he turned with a restless sigh 
 he was dreaming of Idalia still. At the movement his 
 foe cowered, and drew back involuntarily ; pusillanimity 
 ran in his blood, and he had a keen dread of this c Border 
 Eagle/ who had been invulnerable under so many shots, 
 and had had a resurrection almost from the grave a dread 
 nearly as strong as his hate for him. Moreover, with 
 that action he remembered many things, policy before all, 
 which forbade him to attempt ary risk of reckoning with 
 the man he had left for dead in the Carpathians. He took 
 one long glance at him the glance of hatred is as linger- 
 ing as that of love, and of still surer recollection then 
 hastily and noiselessly turned aside over the thick grasses, 
 and went his way down to the beach. 
 
 It was not through any sense of shame or of humanity 
 that he left the sleeping man unharmed ; it was not even 
 that he would have shrunk from crushing the life out of 
 him as mercilessly as out of a cicada ; it was only that he 
 remembered the danger and unwisdom of such self-indul- 
 gence ; and also, in some faint emotion, he felt a sense that 
 Idalia was near them both too near for him to sink into 
 such a crime as this. In his own way lie loved her, in his 
 own way revered her, though he cared nothing how he tor- 
 tured, almost as little how he ruined her. While under 
 her influence he could not be his worst. 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 205 
 
 An hour later he had crossed the bay, and approached a 
 palazetto smothered in orange-trees, whose terraces over- 
 hung the sea, odorous, and shaded deep with myrtle. He 
 made his way unannounced, and passing through several 
 chambers entered one in which he found the temporary 
 owner of the house, who looked up wearily and listlessly 
 the owner was Victor Vane. 
 
 * Well ? ' he asked, as the door closed. 
 
 'That Scot ! That courier ! ' panted Phaulcon, ' he is in 
 Capri. I passed him lying asleep on the grass; I could 
 have killed him like a dog. Does he know Idalia? Is it 
 possible he can have learnt that it was she who saved 
 him ? ' 
 
 ' Know Idalia? Yes, beyond doubt, he knows her.' 
 
 * He does ? She never named him to me ! ' 
 
 * Very possibly ; but you remember how she saved him, 
 and miladi has her caprices ! she had him with her day 
 after day in the East.' 
 
 The words were languid still ; there was no irritation 
 expressed in them, but there was a significance for which, 
 had Erceldoune been there, the speaker would have been 
 hurled out on to his terrace with as little ceremony as 
 though he had been dead Border grouse. 
 
 Even his comrade and sworn ally darted a look on him 
 savage, passionate, but withal that letter than any look he 
 had given, for a hot and frank wrath was in it, with some- 
 thing of generous challenge. 
 
 I What do you mean by that ? ' 
 
 I 1 mean what I say no more. This gentleman your 
 Carpathian friend found her out while he was chasing 
 what he very absurdly calls his " assassin " down the Bos- 
 phorus shore ; he dined with her when we were there, and 
 the Countess appeared to take a very flattering interest in 
 the landless laird. He is a handsome giant, you know, and 
 I have often noticed that your women of intellect have a 
 wonderful eye for physical perfections ! ' 
 
 With every quiet word he plunged a stab of steel into 
 his listener's heart, with every one he veiled more closely 
 the passions that were moving in his own. The colour 
 changed in Phaulcon's face, he writhed under every syl- 
 lable, but he could resist none ; the same merciless tyranny 
 as he had exercised over Idalia was used over him now, and 
 
206 IDAL1A. 
 
 he had not the fearless and haughty strength which was in 
 hers that could have enabled him to defy or to disdain it. 
 
 6 In the East in the East ? ' he muttered. ' AVith her ? 
 and she never told me ! ' 
 
 ' Caro ! Did you imagine you had your fair Countess's 
 confidence? I can assure you you are excessively mis- 
 taken.' 
 
 Phaulcon shook in all his limbs with restrained passion. 
 "Well as he knew the art of word-torturing, he was scarce 
 so perfect an adept in it as his friend. 
 
 * Do you mean ' he began impetuously, and paused. 
 Yane laughed, rose, and sauntered a little way from the 
 table. 
 
 ' Have you breakfasted ? Do I mean what ? Just taste 
 one of these citrons ; they are the first ripe this season. 
 Do I mean that your friend, the Border Chief, has lost his 
 head after the Countess Yassalis ? Tes, I do mean it. 
 He is wildly in love with her, and he has eyes that say so re- 
 markably well, considering that he had loved nothing but 
 tiger- shooting and hard riding till that charming piece of 
 romance in the Carpathians.' 
 
 The words were easy, indifferent, a little flippant and 
 contemptuous ; they stung the Greek like so many scor- 
 pions. He flung himself out of his seat, and paced to and 
 fro the apartment with fierce breathless oaths ground out 
 on his lips. Yane looked at him with an admirable affecta- 
 tion of amused astonishment. 
 
 'Pace, pace, caroT he said softly. '"Why will you always 
 be so impetuous ? Vesuvius yonder, who looks rather 
 dangerous to-day by the bye, was never more impulsive ! 
 What annoys you so much in this colossal courier being in 
 . love with Miladi Idalia ? He is not the first by many a 
 score ! ' 
 
 Conrad Phaulcon swung round and strode up to his 
 tormentor. 
 
 4 By Heaven, if you taunt me, or scoff at her with that ' 
 ' Gently, gently, tres cker ! We do not quarrel. Be- 
 sides, there is really no object in assuming all that with me. 
 Just recollect how long I have known you and how well!' 
 Phaulcon was silenced, and lashed into obedience : his 
 nead dropped ; he turned again, and paced the chamber 
 with fast uneven steps. 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 207 
 
 ' This idea annoys you,' pursued his counsellor leisurely. 
 'I grant his presence is troublesome, awkward indeed for 
 you; and Scotch patience with Spanish fire is a disagreeable 
 combination. Besides your own excessive impetuosity made 
 that little affair very notorious ; if he were to recognize 
 you, I fear, do what you would, something extremely un- 
 pleasant would result. Still, with due caution this might 
 not happen, and no danger need occur from it if Idalia do 
 not betray you, and that she probably will not do, unless 
 unless ' Victor paused a moment, and let hisj eyes drop 
 on his companion. ' He is a magnificent man to look at, 
 and adores her in all good faith, which might have the 
 charm of novelty/ he added in a musing whisper. 
 
 4 Damnation ! I would lay her dead at my feet if I 
 thought ' 
 
 Vane raised his hand in deprecation. 
 
 ' Pray do not be so very excessive ! That language was 
 all very well in the middle ages ; both you and Sir Eulke 
 Erceldoune have dropped in on us by mistake, out of the 
 Crusades. But your brilliant Idalia is not a woman to be 
 murdered. In the first place, she is too beautiful ; in the 
 second, she is too notorious ; in the third, a glance of her 
 eyes would send any assassin back again unnerved and un- 
 strung. No ; you must neither kill him, nor kill her. The 
 idea ! What barbarism, and what blundering ! It is only 
 excuse me^ madmen who use force ; is it not their own 
 necks that pay the penalty ? ' 
 
 ' But do you mean that she has any sort of feeling for 
 this accursed Scot ? ' 
 
 The other smiled. 
 
 ' Dear friend, is it for me to say what new caprice your 
 fair Countess's will may indulge in? Certainly, if one 
 might attribute such a provinciality to the most accom- 
 plished woman of her time, I should have said, by the little 
 I saw in Constantinople, that she did feel some sort of 
 tenderness to your Titan of an enemy. A t least, she made 
 him win at baccarat, bade me harm him " at my peril," and 
 spent the hours alone with him in a very poetic manner. 
 Though really I cannot imagine why she should smile on a 
 penniless Queen's messenger, except by the feminine rule 
 $f contradiction ! ' 
 
 Cashing him, like the separate cords of a scourge, each 
 
208 ID ALIA. 
 
 word fell on his listener's ears. Vane watched his fury 
 with gratified amusement ; this thing had been bitter be- 
 yond all conception to him, lightly and idly as he purposely 
 spoke of it, and it rejoiced him with a compensating satis- 
 faction to turn its bitterness elsewhere. Eurious oaths in 
 half the tongues of Europe chased themselves one after 
 another off the Greek's lips. Vane let this galled and 
 futile passion spend itself in its vain wrath some moments, 
 then he spoke again .- 
 
 * The idea annoys you ? Well, certainly he is an incon- 
 venient person to be on the list of her lovers. But what 
 can you do ? As for shooting him, or doing anything of 
 the kind, that would create a fracas, it is not to be thought 
 of. If you let him see you, all he will do will be to knock 
 you down, and give you into arrest. Besides this, Idalia is 
 in a great measure independent of you ; over her wealth 
 you have no legal control, and all moral claim to coerce her 
 you have yourself forfeited. True, you have a hold on her 
 by many things ; but that hold could not prevent this leau 
 seigneur of the barren moors from being her lover, if she 
 choose to break her vows for him, especially if she be quite 
 frank with him and let him know all. Really, on my ho- 
 nour, placed as you are through that terrible impulsiveness 
 which you never will abandon, I do not see how you are to 
 step between Madame de Vassalis and this modern Both- 
 well, if they choose to play at Love for a little while with 
 each other.' 
 
 And Vane softly finished his citron, having spoken the 
 most stinging words he could have strung together with the 
 gentle persuasive accent of a woman coaxing her best 
 friend. Phaulcon swung round and strode up to him. as he 
 had done before, his eyes glittering with fire, his face 
 darkly flushed. 
 
 1 Perdition seize you ! if you dare to make a jest of T 
 
 * Chut ! ' said Vane, with the suavest hush that ever fell 
 from any lips. ' Caro mio, if I speak a little lightly of your 
 lovely Idalia, whose fault is it ? " is it not thine, my 
 friend ? " Altro ! keep that style for men who have not 
 worn the badge of silver ivy with you at an opera ball. As 
 regards this affair he is certainly in love with her ; she 
 possibly encourages it. Unlikely, I know, but still I re- 
 peat possible. He is an excessively fine man! Therefore, 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 209 
 
 since you cannot appear in the matter, owing to various 
 little intricacies, what steps will you take? It is a delicate 
 question, cher Conrad ; the Countess Idalia is not a woman 
 to brook open interference: even with your title to give 
 it. She is very proud ! I am wholly with you, and I am 
 not inclined to be very simpatico to that Arab-looking 
 courier; but you must really be cautious how you touch 
 him ; that matter would look very ugly if it turned up 
 against you. The idea of firing at him at all ! and then of 
 not hitting him when you did fire ! Will you not believe 
 me how very mistaken all impulsiveness is ? ' 
 
 Phaulcon writhed under the negligent, gently-uttered 
 phrases ; all the pent passion in him was tenfold hotter and 
 darker, because it was in so great a measure powerless ; 
 but he was blinded to all that Victor chose him to be blind 
 to namely, his own love for her of whom they spoke and 
 he dreamed of nothing in his words beyond their mutual 
 antagonism for the man they had mutually injured. An 
 hour went by before they parted ; left alone, the master of 
 the dainty palazetto overhanging the Neapolitan waves 
 neither peeled a citron, nor toyed lightly with this thought 
 of Erceldoune's presence in Capri. On the contrary, admi- 
 rably though he had veiled them, passions fiercer than the 
 Greek's had lightened in him with the intelligence : the 
 delicate colourlessness of his face flushed with a faint hot 
 hue, his blue smiling eyes gleamed like steel, he set his 
 teeth with a snarl like a greyhound's. 
 
 * She loves him, or she will love him; how soft her eyes 
 grew for him in the East! There is no assassinating him 
 only fools kill. There is no challenging him that is long 
 out of date, and besides he is as good a shot as any of us, or 
 better. There is no ruining him his fortunes are ruined 
 already, and he is too world-wise to attempt any lies to her 
 with a chance of success. If she choose to allow his love, 
 who can prevent that? Conrad cannot exert his title while 
 the Moldavian affair hangs over his head. There is only 
 one chance ; if he be such a fool as to take his passion se- 
 riously, if he be ignorant of her history, and give her head- 
 long faith. But that is such a hazard ! he is in love with 
 her beauty, what \sould he care though one proved 'to him 
 that she were vile as Messalina ? Ah, Idalia ! lellissima 
 Idalia ! you are haughty as a queen, and beautiful as a god- 
 
 p 
 
210 ID ALIA. 
 
 de&s, and dangerous as a velvet- voiced cardinal, and brightly 
 keen as the wisest statesman, but ' 
 
 And while these thoughts strayed through his mind, he 
 thrust the knife he held up to its haft in a pome- 
 granate among the citrons ; and while the red juice welled 
 out, and the purple pulp seemed to shrink as though 
 J wounded, he plunged the blade, down and down, again and 
 again, into the heart of the fruit, as though the action 
 were a relief to him, as though the stab to the pome- 
 granate were an allegory. 
 
 Yet with it a nobler feeling, a melancholy that was for 
 the moment too deep to be able to replace regret by re- 
 taliation, came on him. 
 
 ' She could have made me what she would !' he thought. 
 ' I could have won a throne for her. Greece swings in the 
 air for any bold hand to seize ; a turn of the wheel, and 
 Hungary may be thrown in the lottery ; free Yenetia, and 
 she would give the sceptre to her deliverer. Such things 
 have been ; they will be again. Valerian was a common 
 soldier, Themistocles was a bastard, Bonaparte an artillery 
 officer what has been may be again. They were once far 
 farther off power than I. For myself, I could do all that 
 is possible with her, I would do the impossible !' 
 
 A smile crossed his face at the dreaming wildness of his 
 own thoughts ; his profound acumen could never so wholly 
 desert him that he could be the prey to any emotion with- 
 out some sense of ridicule and disdain even for himself ; 
 but there was no more of pain at his heart than of self- 
 contempt ; he felt, even amid the jealous bitterness that was 
 turning his love into hatred, that he should have become 
 a better and a truer man had Idalia returned his passion. 
 
 ' I dream like a boy, or a madman !' he thought, while 
 his hand crushed with a fierce gesture an odorous crown 
 of orange-flowers, and flung the bruised petals out to the 
 sea. ' And yet with her I could have had force in me 
 to make even such dreams real. If she had loved me, I 
 would have slaved for her, dared for her, conquered for her. 
 If she had loved me, there is nothing I would not have 
 compassed.' 
 
 Even where he stood in solitude, his lips quivered and 
 liis forehead contracted, as under some unbearable phy- 
 sical pain. Hardly thirty years were over his head, all the 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 21 1 
 
 maturity of life lay before liiin ; lie felt that he had the 
 genius in him to rule men and to carve himself a memory 
 in history ; he had the ability that would have made him 
 a supreme and triumphant statesman ; he would have been 
 this, he would not have failed to be it ; had opportunity 
 been his. As it was he saw the portals of fame closed to 
 him through the disadvantages of position, and the exer- 
 cise of power denied to him because he had not the primary 
 power of money. Impatient and bitter at his exile from 
 legitimate fields, he had thrown himself into bastard poli- 
 tics, and adventured his fate with the secret and uncertain 
 gambling of intrigue and conspiracy. 
 
 He hated Austria, and would have schemed night and day 
 to humble her ; beyond this feeling he had as little unison 
 as might be with his associates ; for the grandeur of theoretic 
 republicanism, for the regeneration of Italy, for the free- 
 dom of Hungary or Poland, for the advance of the high- 
 flown quixotism of Graribaldians, or for such poetic par- 
 tisanship as breathed in 'Casa G-uidi Windows,' he had never 
 a single throb of sympathy. But he loved the power that 
 it seemed to him he might obtain through them ; he loved 
 the machinations that in their work he wove so wisely and 
 so well ; he foresaw what had not then come, the certain 
 downfall of the Neapolitan Bourbons ; he had the spirit 
 of the gamester, and was happiest in the recklessness 
 of chance ; he had the ambition of a statesman, and he 
 aspired, in the revival of nationalities and in the turmoil of 
 new liberties, to seize the moment to advance himself to 
 the prominence and the predominance which he coveted. 
 Therefore he had embraced a party with which his temper 
 had little akin, whose views his own mind disdained as 
 chimerical, and whose cause only his thwarted ambitions 
 induced him to embrace. As yet. though he held a great 
 power in his hands over the lives of men whose projects 
 and whose aspirations were all confided to his mercy, no 
 substantial power had accrued to him ; he had reaped but 
 little, he had risked much, and his accumulated debts were 
 very heavy. As he saw himself now although in general, 
 when in the full excitement of his life, the full complexity 
 of his intrigues, he thought otherwise he saw the truth: 
 that in the fiower of his manhood he was without a 
 career, without a future ; that with all his talents, graces^ 
 
212 ID ALIA. 
 
 and fashion, he was no more than an adventurer ; that 
 bankruptcy, pecuniary and social, might any hour fall on 
 "kirn ; that stripped of the brilliance of his elegant world, 
 And of the euphuisms of a political profession he was 
 neither more nor less in literal fact than a gamester, a 
 spy, and a beggared speculator in the great hazards of 
 European destinies. In such a mood he hated himself, he 
 hated all he was allied with, he hated the world that he had 
 the genius and the tact to rule, yet in which he absolutely 
 OAvned not even a sum enough to save him from hopeless 
 ruin whenever the fate that hung over him should fall. 
 And a greater bitterness than even this came on him : for 
 once he loved ; for once he felt that greater, better, truer 
 things might have been possible for him ; for once a pang, 
 almost as sharp as agony, seized him in dreaming of what 
 he might have been. 
 
 For once he suffered. 
 
 Every disdainful word, every contemptuous glance, 
 every cold rebuke, of the woman he coveted with the 
 passion of ambition, as well as with the passion of 
 love, seemed burned into his memory and perpetually 
 before him. He could not even make her believe that 
 he loved her ! that was the deadliest pang of all. 
 Hate, cruel, fierce, remorseless, the most insatiate hate of 
 all, the hate which springs from baffled love, wound its 
 way into his thoughts again. Before now he had been a 
 cold tactician, an unscrupulous intriguer, a man who cared 
 nothing at what cost his ends were gained, but still one 
 who, from innate gentleness of temper and instinctive re- 
 finement of nature, had felt no sort of temptation toward 
 grosser and darker evil.; had, indeed, ridiculed it as the 
 clumsy weapon of the ignorant nnd the fool ; now r he was 
 in that mood when the heart of the man possessed by i* 
 cries thirstily, ' Evil, be thou my good.' 
 
 ' I have all their cards in my hands,' he thought, wherti 
 he leaned, musingly Hinging the buds of the gum-cistu 
 into the water below. ' A word from me and her haughty 
 head would lie on the stone floor of a dungeon.' 
 
 The thought grew on him, strangely changing the cha- 
 racter of his features as it worked out its serpent's undu- 
 lations through his mind. His clear and sunny eyes grew 
 cruel ; his delicate lips hardened into a straight acrid line; 
 1^'c- c.^rnfh "hrmv dnrkonod nnd contracted; this man. who 
 
THE ALLEGORY OF THE POMEGRANATE. 213 
 
 liad had before but the subtle, graceful swoop, the bright 
 unerring keenness of the falcon, now stooped lower, and 
 had the merciless craft, the lust to devour and to destroy, 
 of the fox. 
 
 He drew out of his pocket a letter in a miniature Italian 
 hand ; such a hand as a Machiavelli, a John de' Medici, or 
 an Acquaviva, might have written. He read it slowly, 
 weighing every line, then put it back into its resting-place, 
 with a certain disdain and sneer upon his face : there 
 was not the brain in Europe, he thought, that could out- 
 wit hi>. 
 
 1 Austria will bid higher than that,' he mused. ' and the 
 young wretch here will fall as Bourbons always fell. Six 
 months and he will be driven out of Naples it would be 
 much to be his " Count d'Avalto" and his " Lord Chamber- 
 lain" then ! Pools ! do they think such a bribe as that 
 would take ? If / make terms, it shall be with tiie Haps- 
 burgh ; they shall pay me in proportion to my hate. They 
 know what my enmity has meant !' 
 
 He leaned musingly over the marble parapet of his ter- 
 race, the lines of cruelty and of craft sinking deeper into 
 his i'air, unworn face ; even to him, free from all such 
 weaknesses as an unprofitable honour, and not unwilling to 
 sell his hate, as he would have sold his intellect for power, 
 even to him there was something bitter and shameful in 
 the thought of treason something that made him recoil 
 from the desertion of those who had been allied to him 
 so long, and acceptance of those who had so long had his 
 deepest hatred ; something that made the very silence of 
 the Italian noon, the very melody of the Italian seas, the 
 very cadence of a boat-song, that echoed dreamily over 
 the waves from a distance, that only let its closing cadence, 
 ' Liberta ! O Liberta !' come upon his ear, seem like a re 
 proach to him by whom she this Italy in chains, tin" 
 Italy ruined through her own fatal dower of a too greats 
 beauty was about to be betrayed. 
 
 There never yet was the man so hardened that he could 
 play the part and take the wage of an Iscariot without 
 this pang. 
 
 ' She does it,' he said in his teeth, with a sophism that 
 ere now he would have disdained. ' She might have made 
 ine what she would ; she chooses to make rae ' 
 
214 ID ALIA. 
 
 1 A traitor ' was not uttered even clearly in his thoughts ; 
 who thinks out clearly such thoughts as these to the last 
 iota of their own damnable meaning? A shiver, too, ran 
 through him as he recalled a risk that even his fertile state- 
 craft could not avail to ward off from him, the step he 
 meditated once being taken the risk of the stab-thrust in 
 the back from the poigiiard of the ' Brotherhood,' which 
 even in this day, even in the streets of polished European 
 capitals, strikes soon or late, howsoever high they stand in 
 a traitor's guilty purples, those who have broken the oath 
 of those secret bonds. 
 
 Then he laughed a smile in which the last instinct of 
 his better nature died. 
 
 1 Faugh ! my good Italians shall believe that I join the 
 "White Goats to serve Yenetia ; my blind Viennese shall 
 think I wear a fair face to Italy to entrap her confidence 
 for them, It is so easy to dupe both. And she Naples 
 will suffice for that. A whisper of mine to Monsignore 
 Griulio, and scorn, and wit, and statemanship, and wealth, 
 and all the cozenries of her loveliness, all the resources of 
 her art, will avail her nothing. There in the Vicaria, what 
 will she do with her beauty, and her kingdom, and her 
 lovers and the insolence of her pride, then ? Better have 
 shared a crown with me.' 
 
 As his thoughts shaped themselves into ruthless shape 
 that dulled remorse, and stole swiftly and surely on the 
 evil path which tempted him, the whole man in him 
 changed ; the gentleness of his nature grew into fierce 
 lust, the unscrupulous subtlety of his intellect was merged 
 into a deadly thirst for retaliation. On the woman who 
 had scornfully repelled him he could have dealt a hundred 
 deaths. 
 
 Yet for one moment more the love he had borne her van- 
 quished him again, and he remembered nothing but its pain, 
 its wrong, and its rejection ; for one moment more he gave 
 himself up to the misery, the weakness, the shame, as he 
 held it, of this fool's idolatry. It was the one thing alone, 
 loathingly as he contemned it, that could have made him a 
 better and a truer man. 
 
 His head dropped till it sank down on to his arms, that 
 were folded on the marble ledge, and a sharp quiver like a 
 woman's weeping shook him from head to foot, 
 
'MONSIGNORE: 215 
 
 'I would have forgiven her all even her scorn, ho 
 thought, ' if only she would have believed that I loved 
 her!' 
 
 CHAPTEE XVI 
 
 MONSIGKSTORE.' 
 
 Ls~ ono of the fairest nooks of the Bny of Naples stood 
 a palace in the perfection of taste, from the frescoes on its 
 walls within to the delicate harebell-like campanile, that 
 threw its slim shaft aloft, looking towards Amalfi. Front- 
 ing the sea a small oval-shaped pier ran out into the water, 
 with a broad flight of steps terminating it ; above this, the 
 natural growth of the country had hung a self- woven 
 screen of orange and myrtle boughs ; a place of embarka- 
 tion, or disembarkation, lonely, secure, and unlooked-on by 
 anything save by lofty Anacarpi far above, hanging like an 
 eagle's nest among the clouds. In the shadow of the even- 
 ing a boat stopped there, a man alighted, dismissed the 
 rowers, and went on along the length of the little quay to 
 an arched door of curious cinque-cento work ; it was the 
 private entrance of the palazetto, which despite the humi- 
 lity of the diminutive it was given, stretched up and around 
 in wing on wing in stately architecture, and numbered 
 ninety chambers. 
 
 He was admitted, and entered the house, lighted with a 
 flood of light, crowded with a glittering suite of attend- 
 ants of all grades, and seemingly endless in its vastness 
 with chamber and corridor, opening out one on another in 
 wearying succession of splendour, relieved from monotony, 
 however, by the exquisite pieces of sculpture and of paint- 
 ing that studded the whole like a second Pitti. Some 
 thirty of these corridors and reception-rooms ended in a 
 little chamber, small at least by comparison, hung with 
 purple velvet, its furniture of silver and of ebony, its only 
 painting a superb Ecce Homo of Leonardo's, its windows 
 narrow and lancet-shaped ; the whole now illumined with a 
 soft amber light. This was the sanctuary of Monsigr.ore 
 Villaflor. 
 
 Monsiguore rose with affability he was ever affable 
 
2)6 ID ALIA. 
 
 and advanced with courtly grace. Monsignore was a hand- 
 some and portly man, with the beautiful Neapolitan eyes 
 and the beautiful Neapolitan face ; a little losing the sym- 
 metry of his figure now, and over his fiftieth year, but a 
 very noble person still. He wore the violet robes of a 
 bishop, and on his hand sparkled the bishop's amethyst 
 ring. Looking at him, it was hard to believe that the race 
 of ] rince-bishops had died out, for he was a very princely 
 person. He was not like St. Philip Neri, he was not like 
 B/eginild de la Pole, he was not like Acacius, or Francois 
 Xavier, or the great martyred man who looked across to 
 England with those sublime words : ' Terrain Anglicae video, 
 et favente Domino terram intrabo, sciens tamen certissime 
 quod mihi immineat passio ; ' and kept his oath and went. 
 Monsignore was not like any of these ; but he was exces- 
 sively like Cardinal Bembo, he was excessively like Cardinal 
 Mazarin. 
 
 Victor Vane bowed before him with the grace of a cour- 
 tier and the reverence of a son of the Church ; with the 
 Paris litterati he was a Cartesian, with the G-ermans a 
 Spinozian, with the English men of science a Rationalist, a 
 Pantheist, a Monotheist, or a Darwinian ; with the Moun- 
 tain an Atheist, as best suited ; but with the Monsignori he 
 was always deferential to the Faith. They met as those 
 who have often met for the advancement of mutual aims ; 
 but they met also as those who have to play a delicate 
 game with each other, in which the cards must be studi- 
 ously concealed. Both were perfect diplomatists. The 
 game opened gracefully, courteously, cautiously, with a 
 little trifling on either side ; but they approached their 
 respective points in it more quickly, less warily than usual; 
 for he who before had but played into the hands of Mon- 
 signore to betray him, now came to play into his hands 
 with sincerity. 
 
 This was not the first by many audiences the brilliant 
 Bishop, the favourite of the Vatican, had given to one who 
 had been until the night before this the deadliest foe of 
 his Church, of his king, of his projects, of his policies ; for 
 Griulio Villaflor had been duped despite all his finesses, and 
 had believed the gentle and adroit Englishman his tool, 
 while he was, in truth, the tool himself. Mousignore had 
 his silken webs over Italy, and Prance, and Austria, and 
 
- MONSIGNORE.' 217 
 
 Spain ; Monsignore had his secret slim of the ablest ; 
 Monsignore kre.v everything ; was the lover of great ladies 
 who played the spy in palaces, never gave a Benedicito 
 without 'some diplomatic touch, never administered the 
 Viaticum but what the Church was the richer for a legacy, 
 never yet was compromised by a lie, yet never yet was 
 driven to the vulgarity of the truth ; but even ^Monsig- 
 nore had been trepanned by Victor Vane. The secret of 
 the defeat was this : Griulio Villaflor loved power well, but 
 he loved other things as well ; the pleasures of the table, 
 the scent of pure wines, and the gleam of almond eyes and 
 snowy bosoms. His opponent had loved nothing but 
 power ; until now, for the first time, he loved a woman and 
 Joved a revenge. Hence, now for the first time, also, he 
 played into Villaflor's hands. 
 
 A dusky red tinged the pale clear brown cheek of the 
 Bishop, and in his eyes was the gleam that those who knew 
 him had learned to tremble sorely at when too few were 
 found for the dungeons of the Vicaria, or out of the crowds 
 of Easter-day one face dared look a frank defiance at him 
 while the silver trumpets sounded. 
 
 ' All the revolutionists have not menaced us and braved 
 us as this one woman has done,' he muttered. ' All the 
 rebels of Sardinia and Sicily have not the danger in them 
 that Idalia has. The man is bad enough, but she ' 
 
 ' Conrad can be bought,' put in Vane gently ; there was, 
 indeed, an overstrained quietude in his face and in his tone. 
 * Name the price your Grrace will give ; I will purchase him 
 for you to-morrow. J 
 
 Monsignore bent his head with a slight smile. 
 'Promise what you will, I can confide perfectly in your 
 discretion/ he said, with his suave dignity of grace ; he re- 
 served to himself the right to refuse ratification of the pro- 
 mises when the fish should be fairly baited and hooked. 
 ' He is but a secondary matter. Can she be bought ? ' 
 
 ' No ! J Into the calm immutability of her betrayer's 
 voice there glided a half sullen, half bitter, yet withal ad- 
 miring savageness ; he was recalling to memory the imperial 
 disdain with which she had swept from him the night be- 
 fore, the indifference with which she had disregarded alike 
 his entreaties and his threats. ' What could be offered her 
 that could eclipse what she has P She has wealth, she has 
 dominion, she has a power wider than yours ! ' 
 
2i8 ID ALIA. 
 
 The last words were almost bluntly uttered ; for (lie mo- 
 ment he felt a thrill of triumph in flinging the splendour 
 and the influence of the woman by whom he had been re- 
 jected in the teeth of even the purples and the pomps of 
 Eternal Home. 
 
 The dusky red glowed slightly brighter in Monsignore's 
 cheek, a flush of anger ; he waved his delicate white hnnd 
 with an expressive action. 
 
 * "While they last ! But if she had choice between retain- 
 ing these under our pleasure and losing them say in the 
 casemates of the Capuauo yonder ; what then, my son ? She 
 would yield ?' 
 
 ( She would never yield.' 
 
 He answered calmly, still with that restrained and im- 
 passive serenity on him ; by the tone he said, as though he 
 had spoken it, that no menace, no pang, no death, would make 
 Idalia what he was now a renegade. 
 
 1 Altro ! she is a woman ?' said Monsignore, with the 
 mockery of the Neapolitan laugh in the protrusion of his 
 handsome under lip. 
 
 ' We waste words, Monsignore,' said Victor Vane abruptly. 
 ' She is not like other women.' 
 
 1 Contumacious ! Then she must feel the arm of the 
 Church.' The words were spoken without any ruffle of that 
 silken and unctuous tone in which Griulio Villaflor whispered 
 softest trifles in the ear of Austrian and Parisian beauty, but 
 in the lustrous eyes gleamed a glance cold as ice, fierce as 
 lust, dangerous as steel. ' My son, tell us all that you know 
 once more.' 
 
 ' All that I know !' There was a smile that flickered 
 across his features one moment, though it passed too instanta- 
 neously for it to be even caught by Villaflor. ' That would 
 take hours. I can give you heads, and bring you proofs as 
 you require them. I know that she arranged the escape of 
 the two Ronaldeschi from the galleys; I know that she has 
 effected the flight of Carradino from his prison ; I know that 
 through her twenty thousand muskets will find their way to 
 Poland, and the same into Tuscany, by routes that all your 
 sbirri will never discover ; I know that it was at her salons 
 in Paris that the war of Sicily was first organised ; I know 
 that she is the life, the soul, the core, the prophetess ot 
 every national movement. I know that she holds the threads 
 
* MONSIGNORE.' 2ig 
 
 of eirery insurectionary movement from the Apennines to the 
 Caucasus.' 
 
 Monsignore made a slight gesture of impatience ; while 
 shading his eyes with the hand on which the episcopal ame- 
 thyst glittered, he narrowly watched the immutable counte- 
 nance of his companion. 
 
 * We know all these, and much more,' he said, with an 
 accent of disappointed irritation. ' If we can once secure 
 her person, we have witness enough against her to consign 
 her twenty times over to the peine forte et dure, to the prison 
 or the convent cell for her lifetime. Id alia she is Satanas ! 
 you have more to tell than these stories, figlio mio / 
 
 ' Or I would not have wearied your Grace to-night,' as- 
 Bented Vane, still with that calm and undeviating air as of 
 one who, having learnt a recitation by heart, mechanically, 
 yet unwaveringly, repeats it out. ' Yes, I know more ; I 
 know that she is here.' 
 
 'Here? 
 
 Despite the perfect self-command and the trained immov- 
 ability of the courtly Churchman, surprise and exultation for 
 once escaped him, uncontrolled and unconcealed ; his eyes 
 lightened, his hand grasped the ivory and ebon elbow of his 
 state chair, his lips moved rapidly. 
 
 ' Here ! She has the daring of a Caesar !' 
 
 And there was in the words an accent of compelled ad- 
 miration that was, perhaps, from such a foe as this great 
 priest of Borne, the highest homage that Idalia had ever yet 
 extorted ; for it was homage wrung out in unwilling venera- 
 tion from the hatred and the cunning of an implacable an- 
 tagonist. 
 
 Vane started as though stung, and turned his face toward 
 the grand dark canvas of the Ecce Homo, away from the fall 
 of the light. "When the astute Churchman, who had been 
 his own hated enemy and duped tool so long, and whom he 
 now used as the weapon of his vengeance when the haughty 
 Catholic, who pursued her with the rancour of his creed, and 
 with the unpardoning bitterness of a mighty and unscrupu- 
 lous priesthood against those who dare to defy and to disdain 
 it when, from the unwilling admiration of Giulio Yillaflor, 
 this tribute was wrung to the lofty and unconquerable 
 courage of the woman whom he had come hither to betray 
 into the unsparing hands of her foes, he the traitor feU 
 
220 1DALIA* 
 
 for one moment sunk into depths of shame, felt for one 
 moment the full depravity and vileness of that abyss into 
 which thwarted ambition and covetous revenge had drawn 
 him. 
 
 Yet if he would have repented and retracted, he could 
 not ; and would not have done so if he could. The word 
 was spoken ; he had delivered her over into the power of 
 her adversaries, had delivered over her beautiful neck to the 
 brand, her proud head to the cord, her wealth to the coffers 
 of the Bourbon, her loveliness to the mercy of Home, her 
 life to the hell of the dungeon. It was done ; and still aa 
 he turned to the dark shadow of the Leonardo with that 
 loathing of the light which murderers feel when every ray 
 that touches them, seems to them as though seeking out 
 their crime, he would not have undone it if he could. Eor 
 he had loved her, and now hated her with a great insatiate 
 hate ; so near these passions lie together. 
 
 4 Here ! ' echoed Yillaflor once more, while his large eyes 
 lighted with the fire of the tiger, though that fire was sub- 
 dued under the droop of his velvet lashes. ' In Naples ! 
 and I not to know it ! * 
 
 In that single sentence was told a terrible reckoning that 
 waited for those of his people of his spies who had been 
 thus treacherous, or for the carelessness which had withheld 
 from him the near presence of the woman whom he had 
 watched, waited, plotted, bribed, schemed to entrap with all 
 the intricacies and resources of his astute intellect and far- 
 spread meshes, for so long. 
 
 1 In Capri and without disguise,' answered Vane, turn- 
 ing his head from a seemingly negligent glance at the Leo- 
 nardo ; his eyes were quite clear, his countenance quite 
 frank, his smile gentle and delicately satirical as usual. 
 He was now attuned to his part again, and the evil in him 
 gaining the sole mastery upon him, made him take a Bor- 
 gian pleasure in thus preparing drop on drop, with the pre- 
 cision and the genius of science, the poison that was to con- 
 sume and wither the brilliant life of the woman he had 
 vainly loved. ' Remember ! first, she is unaware that you 
 know all your Grace could alone have known through ine 
 she is unaware that there are any proofs against her in 
 the possession of the Neapolitan court ; secondly, she is 
 one to whom the meaning of fear and submission is un- 
 
' MONSIGNORE.' 221 
 
 known ; she claims the Greek blood of Arteinesia she 1ms 
 Arteinesian daring ; thirdly, she has so attached the mari- 
 nari to her that, good subjects and brainless beasts though 
 these Capriotes be, she could scarce be touched on their 
 shore with impunity ; fourthly and chiefly, so many swords 
 would leap out of their scabbards for Idalia, despite the 
 many dead men who have, dying, cursed her, so world-wide 
 and so well known is the dominion of her beauty, that I 
 believe she thinks that none of the governments dare tmirh 
 her. She relies on this : that Sicily is in revolt, Naples in 
 ferment ; one public act, such as these poor, blind, con- 
 tumacious mules call tyranny, done to a woman whose love- 
 liness could excite the populace, and whose genius could 
 command it like Idalia's, and the crisis which is, as even you 
 confess, often so near, might come, despite you and the 
 Palace, with a thunder you could not still by the thunder 
 of the Vatican, holy father.' 
 
 There was a bitter irony hidden under the gentle court- 
 liness of the words, and of the apologetic softness of the 
 smile with which they were uttered, lie had been a foe 
 and a traitor to G-iulio Yillaflor so long, that he could not 
 at once abandon the refined pleasure of thrusting silken 
 taunts against that silken Churchman. The words lashed 
 the passions of the Neapolitan as was purposed ; that dusky 
 scarlet glow came again into his cheek, his nostrils dilated, 
 his fine lips quivered haughtily ; for the instant he lost the 
 unctuousness of the Palace priest, and had the grand arro- 
 gance of a Wolsey, a Kichelieu, or a Granvella. 
 
 He moved as though to rise from, his ivory chair aa 
 though to go into the van of combat for the Church and for 
 the Nobles, like the warrior bishops of the past. 
 
 ' Do you think I fear the people ? a beast that crouches 
 to the whip, and kicks the fallen , that cringes when its 
 paunch is empty, and bullies when it is bold with a full 
 feed ! / fear the people ! By the Mother of God, I would 
 teach them such obedience that they should never breathe, 
 but by my will ! ' 
 
 For the moment there flashed out the old spirit of the 
 Colonna and the Este in the unusual outbreak of proud 
 passion ; arrogant, cruel, and iron though the words were, 
 Giulio Villaflor, as he spoke them, was a grander and a 
 better man, because a truer and a bolder, than in the vel- 
 
222 ID ALIA. 
 
 ^vet sweetness, the courtly maskings of his palatial sanctities, 
 
 j of his episcopal voluptuousness, of his blending of courtier, 
 
 (Statesman, saint, and roue. He who heard smiled that 
 
 i delicate smile that meant a malice and an irony so infinite, 
 
 yet never betrayed this unless it were desired to "be betrayed. 
 
 ' Then/ he asked softly, ' you would dare arrest her in. 
 
 Capri ? ' 
 
 The eyes of Monsignore flashed upon him. 
 c Dare is not a word to use to Home ! ' 
 It was the haughty defiance and self-deification of the 
 Pontifical Power roused, as it had roused of old against 
 Emperors and Kings, rebels in the Cloisters and rebels in 
 the Courts, against the sceptre of Barbarossa as against the 
 science of Abelard of the Power which refuses to see that 
 this day is not as that, which denies that the dawn has 
 shone because its fiat has gone forth for darkness to 
 endure. 
 
 c Tour Grace cannot think that I used the word save as 
 suggestive of what is expedient. Your object is to make 
 the Countess Yassalis a political prisoner. Is it advisable 
 to allow her the halo of political martyrdom ? Do you wish 
 to give the enemies of the Church and King the power to 
 compare you to a second Cyril, and her to a second Hy- 
 pathia ? ' 
 
 Giulio Villaflor smiled a very expressive, a very devilish 
 smile, mellow though it was. 
 
 ' No. I have no desire to deify another Greek courtesan.' 
 "Was the word as foul slander to the living Athenian as 
 it- was to the dead Alexandrian ? 
 
 His smile was answered in his listener's eyes; in that in- 
 stant Victor almost forgave him the animosities of lengthened 
 years, in that instant almost loved him and admired him ; 
 their natures were so kindred, they could stab so well with 
 the same weapon. 
 
 ' Precisely ! ' he said, with that persuasive tact which, 
 save once, under the contempt of Idalia, had never deserted 
 him. l Then pardon me, Monsignore ; but will it not be 
 well to conduct this matter with as little publicity as may 
 be? Where there is danger for her, there will she remain; 
 I know what she is. She has all the finesse of a Greek, but 
 she has none of a Greek's cowardice. Moreover it is to 
 secure Yiana that she is here (we will come to his affair 
 
' MONSIGNORES 223 
 
 afterwards) ; lie is all but gained to her, and he is rash and 
 ^eckless to foolhardiness. At his villa of Antina in the in- 
 terior, there is, the day after to-morrow, a reunion of the 
 " Alpe al Mar " confederates, and, under cover of a masque- 
 rade, its political purpose has been kept strictly secret, 
 Kad even you not known of it through me, you would never 
 have heard of it in any other light than as one of Carlo's 
 splendid eccentricities and extravagant entertainments. 
 There is a password which, also, but through me, your 
 Grace's choicest experts would not have been able to sur- 
 prise. Ah, Monsignore, there is mine under mine ; govern- 
 ment spies are too often content to believe that when they 
 have explored the topmost one they know all ! There, at 
 Antina, will be the Countess Vassalis, and not she alone ; 
 Caftradali, Aldino, Villari, Laldeschi, all the Neapolitans 
 who are written in your Livre R-ouge will meet. You 
 may strike a great stroke at one blow ; by day-dawn Viana 
 and his glittering maskers may fill the Castel Capuano, if 
 you will. Ask for what proofs against them you choose, 
 you can have sufficient to justify the galleys for life against 
 one and all of them ; out of their own words shall you con- 
 vict them ; and, once yours, how shall this lawless empress, 
 this queenly Democrat, this patrician with the " Marseil- 
 laise " on her lips, this liberator with the pride of all the 
 empires in her heart, ever escape again to mine your thrones 
 with her arts, to sap your creeds with her ironies, to arm 
 your enemies with her riches, to overthrow your policies 
 with her genius, to dare, to mock, to scheme, to revolution- 
 ize, to rule to be, in one word, Idalia? Where will her 
 power be when the same fetters as Poerio's hang on her 
 wrists ? where her loveliness when day and night the skies 
 alone look on it from a chink in a dungeon wall ? where 
 her triumphs and her victories when the felon's branding- 
 iron eats its hot road into her breast? She will be dead 
 as dead as in her grave/ 
 
 The persuasive eloquence with which nature had endowed 
 him left his tongue with a silken stealing sound, like the 
 gliding movement of some serpentine thing, made more or- 
 nate in its eloquence by the richness of the Italian words 
 he used. But there was beneath it the hiss of hatred, the 
 ravenous thirst of desired vengeance, the lust that painted 
 to itself her doom, and gloated on its own pictures with a 
 hellish pleasure. 
 
224 ID ALT A. 
 
 Giulio Villaflor caught that accent, and thought, with hia 
 acute trained wisdom : 
 
 fc He has loved her he will be true to us, then. There 
 is no hate so sure-footed and so relentless as tliat hate.' 
 
 ' Fiylio urio, 9 he said, with his mellowest smile, resting his 
 glance so cruel yet so caressing on the man who hence- 
 forward would be no longer his master, but his instrument, 
 once having let him glean his secret, c you should have been 
 in our Church ; you have an orator's powers. How many 
 Bouls you would have won ! ' 
 
 ' Pardon me, your Eminence ! it is more amusing work, 
 more to my taste at least to lose them.' 
 
 Monsignore smiled a gentle reproof. 
 
 4 " Tour Eminence ! " Tou give me too high a title, my 
 son.' 
 
 * Forgive me a mistake the world will soon ratify ! I only 
 anticipate the future by a month or two.' 
 
 Griulio Villaflor was flattered ; courted though he was, he 
 was not above the bait to his vanity and his ambition. The 
 Cardinal's hat was the goal of his daring yet wary desires, 
 and in his own mind he foresaw himself soon or late a second 
 Leo X. ; Pontifex Maximus in all the ancient power of the 
 Papal tiara. 
 
 He let his eyes rest for a long moment on those of hia 
 companion; they were the deep, soft, full Italian eyes, like 
 the brown, gentle luminous eyes of the oxen of the Apen- 
 nines ; they could be tender in love as those of Venus Pan- 
 demos, they could be spiritual in religion as those of Leo- 
 nardo's John, but also they could be impenetrable as those of 
 Talleyrand, they could be piercing in meaning and in dis- 
 covery as those of Aquaviva, when, instead of the smile of 
 the lover or the benignity of a priest, he wore the mask of 
 the diplomatist and the politician. 
 
 * We understand each other, figlio mio ?' he said gently, 
 while the violet gem of the episcopal ring glittered like the 
 glance of a basilisk. 
 
 4 We do/ 
 
 They understood each other : and thus silently, while the 
 aromatic light shone on the Vinci Passion, and without the 
 melody of the waters beat sweet measure against the swaying 
 orange-boughs, the seal was set to the unholy barter that 
 betrayed a woman, and played the Iscariot to "Liberty. 
 
'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.' 225 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 *A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HAEDS.' 
 
 THE day on which Conrad Phaulcon left her was just in 
 the mellow heat of noon, yet not oppressive where the great 
 overhanging rocks with drooping masses of entwined 
 foliage shut out the sun ; and where in the privacy of her 
 villa-gardens Idalia came, leaving her persecutor to his half- 
 triumphant and half mortified solitude. 
 
 Alone, she sank down on the stone bench that overlooked 
 the sea, while the hound Sulla was crouched at her feet ; 
 alone, a profound weariness and dejection broke down the 
 pride which had never drooped before her foe, while a pas- 
 sionate hatred quivered over the fairness of her face. 
 
 ' O G-od!' she said half aloud in the unconscious utterance 
 of her thoughts, ' and I once believed in that man as simple 
 women believe in their religion ! Pool fool fool ! And 
 yet I was so young then ; how could I know what I worked 
 for myself? how could I know what depths of vileness 
 were in him ? ' 
 
 The dog before her, lying like a lion at rest, with his 
 muzzle down, lifted his head with a loud bay of wrath, and 
 a snarling growl of menace and defiance : he heard the foot- 
 steps of Count Conrad passing downward on the other side 
 of the villa toward the beach, and he hated him with all a 
 hound's unforgiving intensity ; once, months before, Phaul- 
 con had been so incautious in a fit of passion, as to strike 
 the stately Servian monarch, and, but for Idalia, would have 
 been torn in pieces for the indignity. Sulla had never 
 pardoned it. 
 
 His mistress laid her hand upon his neck, and her teeth 
 set slightly, while her splendid head was lifted with a 
 haughty action that followed the colour of her thoughts. 
 
 f Let him be, Sulla. The man who is false is beneath 
 rebuke or revenge ! ' 
 
 And to those who should have known her rightly that 
 proud contempt would have been more than any vengeance 
 she could have given. She sat there many moments mo- 
 ments that rolled on till they grew more than hours ; her 
 eyes watching the boats that passed and repassed below in 
 the Capriote waters, her thoughts far from the scene around 
 
226 ID ALIA. 
 
 her. Her life had been changeful, varied, spent in many 
 countries, and conversant with many things ; its memories 
 were as numerous as the sands, but what was written on 
 them was not to be effaced as it could be effaced on the 
 shore. The reverse of Eugenie de G-uerin, who was ' always 
 hoping to live, and never lived,' she had lived only too much, 
 only too vividly. She had had pleasure in it, power in it, 
 triumph in it ; but now the perfume and the effervescence 
 of the wine were much evaporated, and there was bitterness 
 in the cup, and a canker in the roses that had crowned its 
 brim. Eor she was not free. 
 
 Like the Palmyran queen she felt the fetters underneath 
 the purples, and the jewelled links of gold she wore were 
 symbols of captivity ; moreover, conscience had wakened 
 in her, and would not sleep. 
 
 She rose at last ; she knew many would visit her during 
 the day, and she was, besides, no lover of idle dreams or 
 futile regrets ; brilliant as Aspasia, and classically cultured 
 as Heloise, she was not a woman to let her hours drift on 
 in inaction or in fruitless reverie ; no days were long for 
 her even now that she rebelled against the tenor and the 
 purpose of her life. 
 
 With the hound beside her she left the cliff, and moved 
 slowly, for the heat was at its height, backward toward her 
 house ; a step rapidly crushed the cyclamen, the leaves were 
 swept quickly aside, and in her path stood Erceldoune. 
 The meeting was sudden to both. It was impossible that 
 either could for the moment have any memory save that of 
 the words with which they had so lately parted ; over the 
 bronze of his face the blood Hushed hotly, from the fair- 
 ness of hers it faded ; she paused, and for the moment her 
 worldly grace forsook her, she stood silent while he bowed 
 before her. 
 
 c Madame, I had your promise that you would receive 
 me ; not, I hope, in vain ? ' 
 
 The words were slight, were ceremonious, she had for- 
 bidden him all others ; but in his voice were the feverish 
 entreaty, the idolatrous slavery to her, which, repressed in 
 speech, were so intense in his own heart. 
 
 ' 1 do not break my promises/ she said gently, ' and 
 and you will not do so either. Are you staying in Capri, 
 that JQM are here so early ? ' 
 
'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS. 1 227 
 
 His eyes looked into hers with a mute imploring suffer- 
 ing, that touched her more deeply than any words could 
 have done. 
 
 4 While I have strength to keep my word, I will ; I can- 
 not say my strength will endure long you put it to a hard 
 test. How hard, God only knows ! ' 
 
 She stood silent a moment ; then she moved on with a 
 negligent dignity. 
 
 1 Pardon me I put it to no test. I but told you the 
 terms on which our friendship can continue. I told 
 you, too, that it were better ended at once; I say so 
 now.' 
 
 There was far more of melancholy than of coldness in 
 the answer, chill though it might be; one long step brought 
 him to her side as she passed onward, and his voice was 
 low in her ear. 
 
 ' We said enough of that last night ! I will keep my 
 word while I may ; till I break it, I claim yours. Make 
 my misery if you must, but let me cheat myself out of it 
 one little hour more.' 
 
 She turned her head slightly ; and he saw that, unpity- 
 ing though her words were, her eyes were humid. 
 
 * If I could spare you any pain, I would ! believe me, 
 believe that at least,' she said, with an intonation that was 
 almost passionate, almost appealing ; she could not have 
 this man, whose life she had rescued from the grave, and 
 over whose agony she had watched in the Carpathian soli- 
 tudes, think that she could wanton with his wretchedness, 
 or be careless of his sorrow. 
 
 ' Then do what else you will with my life, but do not 
 bid me leave you.' 
 
 She was silent, and she shook her head with a gesture of 
 dissent ;"she knew that he prepared himself but added pain, 
 but more enduring suffering, the longer he deceived him- 
 self with the thought or the simulation of happiness. Tet, 
 she asked herself bitterly, why was she bound to send him 
 from her as though she were plague-stricken ? why, since 
 it was his will to linger in her presence, she should be 
 compelled to drive him out of it ? 
 
 Her honour, her pity, her conscience, her reason said, 
 Why delude him with a passing and treacherous hour of 
 hope? Her heart pleaded for him, perhaps pleaded for 
 
228 ID ALIA 
 
 herself. Her mood changed swiftly, though her character 
 never ; a natural nonchalance was combined in her with the 
 dignity and depth of her nature. She was at all times too 
 epicurean not to let life take its course, and heed bv.t little 
 of the morrow. 
 
 She gave a half impatient, half weary sigh, 
 
 'Well, be it so, if you will; for to-day, a the least,' she 
 said with the accent of one who thro^-q thought away, and 
 resigns the reins to chance, ' You stay in Capri. Have 
 you breakfasted ? ' 
 
 <I thank you, yes; in a fishing-hut on the beach 
 yonder.' 
 
 That must have been but a poor meal. I know what 
 Capriote fare is; some smoked tunny and some dried 
 onions. Come within/ 
 
 He obeyed her, and forgot all else in the charm of that 
 sweet present hour. 
 
 She had repulsed his love ; she would have done so again 
 had it been uttered. She had told herself that this man's 
 gallant life must not be cheated into union with hers, this 
 fearless heart must not be broken beneath her foot; though 
 she should have spared no other, she vowed to spare him 
 over whose perils she had watched while her hand held the 
 living water to his dying lips. In what she now did, there- 
 fore, she erred greatly ; but it was very hard for her not to 
 err. She was used to reign, and was accustomed to follow 
 her own pleasure, answering to none ; she had known the 
 world till she was satiated with it ; she was in this moment 
 utterly weary of her associates, weary almost of herself. 
 There was a certain repose, a certain lulling peace, in the 
 chivalrous and ennobling adoration she received from 
 Erceldoune. She kuew him to be a high-spirited gentle- 
 man, frank to a fault, loyal to rashness ; with brave lion'3 
 blood in his veins, and a noble knightly faith in his love ; 
 beyond all cowardice of suspicion, and true unto death to 
 his word. It was as strange to her as it was sweet to find 
 such a nature as this ; stranger and sweeter than any can 
 know who have not also known life as she knew it. It 
 was like a sweep of free, fresh, sea-scented Appennine air, 
 stirreb by the bold west wind, after the heat, the press, the 
 don-mots, the equivoques, and the gas glitter of a Floren- 
 tine Veglione. 
 
'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS: 229 
 
 It is difficult for any who survey mankind deeply and 
 widely to retain their belief in the existence of au honest 
 man ; but if they meet one, they value him far more than 
 they who affect to imagine honesty as natural among men 
 as beards. 
 
 The hock, the chocolate, the fish, the fruit, were scarce 
 tasted as he took them that morning; he knew nothing but 
 the shaded repose of the quiet chamber, the dream-like 
 enchantment of the hour, the form before him, where 
 through the green tracery of the climbing vine, the golden 
 sun fell across her brow and at her feet. He was almost 
 silent ; his love had a great humility, and made it seem to 
 him hopeless that his hand could ever have title even to 
 wander among the richness of her hair. 
 
 To have right to win her lips to close on his, it seemed 
 to him that a man should have done such great and glorious 
 things as should have made his life 
 
 * A tale of high and passionate thoughts 
 To their own music chanted.' 
 
 The full heat of the noon was just passed, the bells of 
 afternoon vespers were sounding from a little campanile 
 that rose above a jumbled mass of rock and foliage, gray 
 jutting wall, and pale-green olive woods ; through a break 
 in the foliage the precipitous road was just seen, and a 
 group of weather- browned peasant women with the silver 
 spadella in their hair, going upward to the chapel of S. 
 Maria del Mare. Idalia rose, and followed them with her 
 eyes. In an unformed wish, born of weary impatience, 
 she almost envied them their mule-like round of life, their 
 simple, dogged, childish faith, their/ nurtured indifference 
 alike to pleasure and to pain. 
 
 'That animal life is to be envied, perhaps/ she said, 
 rather to herself than to him. ' Their pride is centred in 
 a silver hair-pin ; their conscience is committed to a priest ; 
 their credulity is contented with tradition ; their days are 
 all the same, from the rising of one sun to another; they 
 do not love, they do not hate ; they are like the ass that 
 they drive, follow one patient routine, and only take care 
 for 'their food. Perhaps they are to be envied/ 
 
 He rose also, and came beside her. 
 
 * Do not belie yourself. You would be the last to say so. 
 
230 IDALIA. 
 
 You would not lose tl those thoughts that wander through 
 eternity," to gain in exchange the peace from ignorance 
 of the peasant or the dullard.' 
 
 She turned her face to him, with its most beautiful smile 
 on her lips and in her eyes. 
 
 ' No, I would not : you are right. Better to know the 
 secrets of the gods, even though with pain, than to lead 
 the dull, brute life, though painless. It is only in our 
 dark hours that we would sell our souls for a dreamless 
 ease.' 
 
 * Dark hours ! You should not know them. Ah, if you 
 would but trust me with some confidence ! if there were 
 but some way in which I could serve you ! ' 
 
 Her eyes met his with gratitude, even while she gave 
 him a gesture of silence. She thought how little could 
 the bold, straight stroke of this man's frank chivalry cut 
 through the innumerable and intricate chains that en- 
 tangled her own life. The knightly Excalibur could do 
 nothing to sever the filmy but insoluble meshes of secret 
 intrigues. 
 
 ' It is a saint's day : I had forgotten it,' she said to 
 turn his words from herself, while the bell of the cam- 
 panile still swung through the air. ' I am a pagan, you 
 see ; I do not fancy that you care much for creeds your- 
 self/ 
 
 ' Creeds ? I wish there were no such word. It has only 
 been a rallying-cry for war, an excuse for the bigot to burn 
 his neighbour.' 
 
 ' No. Long ago, under the Andes, Nezahualcoytl held 
 the same faith that Socrates had vainly taught in the 
 Agora ; and Zengis Khan knew the truth of theism like 
 Plato ; yet the world has never generally learnt it. It 
 is the religion of nature of reason. But the faith is too 
 simple and too sublime for the multitude. The mass of 
 minds needs a religion of mythics, legend, symbolism, and 
 fear. What is impalpable escapes it ; and it must give 
 an outward and visible shape to its belief, as it gives in 
 its art a human form to its deity. Come, since we agree 
 in our creed, I will take you to my temple a temple 
 not made by hands.' 
 
 She smiled on him as she spoke, and a dizzy sweetness 
 filled his life. He did not ask if she had forgotten her 
 
'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.* 231 
 
 words of the past night; he did not ask whether in this 
 lull of dreamy joy and passionate hope there might be 
 but a keener deadliness of disappointment. He was with 
 her; that sufficed. She went with him out into the 
 brightness of the day, down the rocky paths, under shining 
 walls of glossy ilex-leaves and drooping orange clusters 
 of scented blossom. In the fair wild beauty of Capri, 
 the tranquillity unbroken except by the lapping of the 
 waves far down below and the distant echo of some sea- 
 song, the sunlight that flooded land and water, the shadows 
 sleeping lazily here and there where the lemon and citron- 
 boughs were netted into closest luxuriance, the world 
 seemed formed for love alone. 
 
 Since she had bidden his passion die in silence, why did 
 she let him linger here ? 
 
 He did not ask ; he only gave himself to the magic of 
 the present hour, to the sound of her voice as it thrilled 
 in his ear, to the touch of her hair as he lifted from it 
 some low hanging orange branch, to the sorcery of her 
 presence. 
 
 The cool sea lay, a serene world of waters, scarcely 
 ruffled by a breeze, and glancing with all the marvellous 
 brilliance of colouring that northern air never can know. 
 The boat waited in a creek, floating there under so dark a 
 shadow from the drooping boughs of lemon and acacia that 
 it was almost in twilight. A few strokes of the oars, 
 and it swept out of the brown ripples flinging up their 
 surf against the rocks into the deep blue of the sunlit 
 bay; below, above, around on every side, colour in all 
 its glory, all its variety, all its harmony and contrast, 
 melting into one paradise in the warmth of the summer 
 day. 
 
 1 1 love the sea more dearly than any land. It is incar- 
 nate freedom,' she said, rather to herself than him, as she 
 leant slightly over the boat, filling her hand with the water 
 till its drops sparkled like the sapphires in her rings. 
 There was a certain aching tone in her words that sent a 
 pang to his heart : it was the envy of freedom. Was she 
 not, then, free ? ' 
 
 c That is the charm my own moors have the mere sense 
 of liberty they give. Barren though they be, if you were 
 to see them ' 
 
232 IDALIA. 
 
 His voice was unsteady over the last sentence, He 
 thought of the dead glories of his race, of the squandered 
 wealth and the fallen power that once would have been his 
 by right ; his to lay at her feet, his to make his fortunes 
 equal with his name. 
 
 1 You love liberty ? ' she said suddenly, almost abruptly, 
 save that all in her was too exquisitely harmonised, too full 
 of languor and repose, ever to become abrupt. ' Tell me, 
 would you not think any sin justified to obtain it ? ' 
 
 ' Justified ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, justified,' she said impatiently, while her eyes 
 flashed on him under their drooped lids. ' "What ! do you 
 know the world so well, and yet do not know that there 
 have been crimes before now glorious as the morning, 
 and virtues base as the selfish chillness that they sprang 
 from ? What was Corday's crime ? what was Eobes- 
 pierre's virtue ? Answer me. Would you think it justified 
 or not?' 
 
 A flush rose over his face quickly ; he thought, he felt, 
 that it was of her own liberty she spoke. 
 
 * Do not ask me,' he said hurriedly, passionately. ' You 
 would make me a sophist in your cause. Evil is never justi- 
 fied, though done that good may come ; but to serve you, to 
 succour you, I fear that I should scorn no sin, nor turn from 
 any.' 
 
 The words were almost wild, but they were terribly true. 
 Though perhaps the less likely thus to fall because he knew 
 his own weakness, he felt that the inflexible justice, the 
 honesty of purpose, the unerring loyalty to knightly creeds, 
 which were so ingrained in him that they were scarce so 
 much principle as instinct, might reel and break and be for- 
 gotten if once this woman whispered : 
 
 ' Sin ; and sin for me.' 
 
 He thought he could deny her nothing not even his sole 
 heritage of honour if she could bend to woo it from him. 
 A look of pain passed for one moment over her face. She 
 thought of him as he had lain in his extremity, while her 
 hand had swept back the dark luxuriance of his hair, and his 
 eyes had looked upward into hers without sense or sight. 
 Was it possible that she had saved him then only to deal 
 him worse hereafter ? She shook the sea-drops from her 
 hand with a certain imperious, impatient movement, and 
 
'A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS.' 233 
 
 replied to him with the haughty negligence of her occasional 
 manner. 
 
 ' 1 asked you an impersonal question no more ; and if 
 you cannot frame a sophism contentedly, you are terribly be- 
 hind your age. We have rhetoric that proves fratricide only 
 a droit d'amesse, and logic that demonstrates a lie the natural 
 right of man.' 
 
 He answered her nothing. She saw a look come on his 
 face, mortified, wounded, incredulous. There was something 
 in her words, and in the accent of their utterance, that 
 seemed to chill him to the bone, and freeze his very heart. 
 The stately simplicity of his own character could not follow 
 the manifold phases of hers. Moreover, he had spoken in 
 the fervour of passion ! she had answered him with what, if 
 it were not half scorn, half cruelty, trenched close on both. 
 
 A certain pitying light glowed in her eyes as they read 
 this ; the languid and ironic, smile passed from her lips ; she 
 sighed slightly, though it was half with a laugh that she 
 spoke. 
 
 ' " Caro es, non angelus." 
 
 Do you not remember the line in the Imitations ? Be sure 
 that you may say it to any human life you meet ; above all, 
 to a woman's. There is no angel among us ; some faint rays 
 of purer light here and there that is the uttermost, and 
 that so often darkened ! I will give you the surest guard 
 against the calamity of disappointment. Learn to say and 
 realise, of all you fancy fairest or noblest, this only " Caro 
 es."> 
 
 He looked at her wistfully still ; the temper of the man 
 had too much directness, too much singleness, to be able to 
 divine the veiled meanings of her varying words, the seduc- 
 tive changes of her altered tones ; he only knew that he felt 
 for her as he had felt for no other woman. 
 
 1 Caro es ?' he repeated. ' Well, might I not also be an- 
 swered with its companion line, " Homo es, non es Deus" ? 
 I ani no sophist ; you have reproached me with it. Sophism 
 is to me the shameful refuge of cowards who dare not own 
 themselves criminals ; but but even while I condemned 
 what I loved, my love would not change ; though she erred, 
 I would not forsake her. " Caro es" ? What knell to love 
 is there there ? It is but to admit a common bond of weak- 
 ness and mortality.' 
 
234 1DALIA. 
 
 His voice was low and unsteady as he spoke, but it had 
 a great sweetness in it; the love he was forbidden to declare 
 for her he uttered to her in them. 
 
 She stooped and leant her hand over the side again, toy- 
 ing with the coolness of the water. His words had touched 
 her keenly, and their loyalty sank deep into her heart. She 
 shook her head with a slight smile a smile of great sadness, 
 of great compassion. 
 
 ' You will be still in error. While you say the " Caro 
 es," in your meaning, you will still expect more divinity than 
 you will ever find on earth. It is not that we are not angels 
 that only idiots dream it is that we are ' 
 
 'What?' 
 
 ' Worse than the worst of men too often. Hush ! we will 
 talk no more. We shall soon be near my cathedral.' 
 
 She leant back in silence, while the vessel swept with a 
 free bird-like motion through the water, the boat-song of the 
 Capriote rowers rising and falling with the even beat of 
 their sculls, while behind them they left the rock of Capri, 
 orange-crowned in the sunlight, with the soft gray hue of the 
 olives melting down into the many coloured sea. 
 
 A low arid darkling arch fronted them the porch of the 
 temple where the broad bay lay coolest and darkest, and 
 the waters deepened into deeper blue. They bowed their 
 heads ; the boat shot down into the gloom, passing under 
 the narrow passage-way, close and contracted as a cell ; 
 then out of its darkness the skiff glided, without sound, 
 into the silent and azure vault of the cathedral to which she 
 brought him. 
 
 It was the Grotto Azzuro. 
 
 The sea lay calm as a lake beneath, the blue and misty 
 light poured through the silence, the Gothic aisles of rock 
 rose arch upon arch in awful beauty ; there was no echo 
 but of the melody of the waves chanting ever their own 
 eternal hymn in a temple not built of men. It was beautful, 
 terrible, divine in its majesty, awful in its serenity, appalling 
 yet godlike in its calm ; while through the stillness swept 
 the ebb and flow of the sea, and all the sunless shadow was 
 steeped in that deep, ethereal, unearthlike, azure mist 
 which has no likeness in all the wide width of the world. 
 The boat rested there alone ; and high above the arched 
 rocks, rose, closing in on every side, like the roof of a twi- 
 
* A TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS: 235 
 
 light chancel, lost in vague and limitless immensity ; while 
 through the calm there echoed only one grand and mournful 
 Kyrie Eleison, chanted by the choir of waves. Perfect 
 stillness, perfect peace, filled only with that low and mur- 
 muring voice of many waters ; a beauty not of land, not of 
 sea, sublime and spiritual as that marvellous and azure 
 light that seemed to still and change all hue, all pulse of 
 lite itself; a sepulchre, and yet a paradise, where the world 
 was dead, but the spirit of God moved on the waters. 
 
 Passion was stilled here ; love was silenced ; the cbast- , 
 ened solemnity, the purity of its mysterious divinity, had 
 no affinity with the fevered dreams and sensuous sweetness 
 of mortal desires. The warm poetic voluptuous light and 
 colour of the land that they had left were the associatt-s of 
 passion ; here it was hushed, and cast back in mute and 
 nameless pain on its own knowledge of its own mortality ; 
 here there were rather felt ' the pain of finite hearts that 
 yearn' for things dreamt of and never foi\nd, the vagueness 
 of far-reaching futile Promethean thirst, the impulse and 
 the despair of immortality. 
 
 The boat paused in the midst of the still violet lake-like 
 water. Where he lay at her feet he looked upwards to her 
 through the ethereal light that floated round them, and 
 seemed to sever them from earth. 
 
 ' Would to Grod I could die now ! ' 
 
 The words broke unconsciously from him rather in the 
 instinct of the moment than in conscious utterance. Her 
 eyes met his, in them that dreamy and beautiful light that 
 seemed to float in unshed tears. She laid her hand one 
 moment on his forehead with a touch so soft that it was a 
 caress. 
 
 'Hush! for what is worth life in us there will be no 
 death ! ' 
 
 And the boat swept slowly and noiselessly through the 
 crystal clearness of the waters, through the cold and solemn 
 loveliness, through the twilight of the blue sea-mists, down 
 into the narrow darkened archway of the farther distance, 
 and out once more into the golden splendour of the living 
 day even as a human life, if men's dreams be true, may 
 pass through the twilight shadows of earth down into the 
 darkness of the valley of death, thence only to soar onward 
 into the glory of other worlds, the radiance of other days. 
 
236 IDALIA. 
 
 She stooped to him slightly as the vessel swept away 
 into the breadth and brightness of the bay. 
 
 1 Is not my temple nobler than those that are built by 
 men?' 
 
 He looked upwards at her with a look in his eyes that 
 had never been there before. 
 
 4 You have taught me to-day what I never learned in all 
 the years of my life ? ' 
 
 And the boat passed softly, silently out of the sea-built 
 temples that the waves had worn, out of the stillness and 
 solemnity of that aerial light, onward through the heavy 
 perfumes wafted from the shore, onward to where the Siren 
 Isles laughed in their smiling loveliness upon the waters, 
 half of earth and half of heaven. 
 
 CHAPTEE XVIII. 
 
 6 CRAYEST THOU ARCADY ? BOLD IS THY CRATING. I SHALL 
 NOT CONTENT IT.' 
 
 THE day had sunk away into evening before the boat re- 
 turned ; the splendour of the Capri moonlight was on sea 
 and land, on the gray terraces of olives, with their silvery 
 plumes of foliage, and on the green vines, clustering in the 
 early summer over the steep stairs of rock and the stones 
 of high monastic walls. 
 
 As they passed up the winding ascent, an old peasant 
 sitting watching for the boat under the orange-boughs, a 
 nut-brown, withered Capriote woman, of full seventy year^ 
 started from the shadow in Idalia's path, and fell on |hei? 
 knees before her, pouring out on her gratitude and bene- 
 dictions. Idalia stooped and raised her. 
 
 'Do not kneel to me, old friend; you owe me nothing.' 
 
 ' I owe you my children's life, my children's souls ! ' cried 
 the Italian in the patois of the bay, lifting her brown stern 
 face, all bathed in tears. 'To whom should I kneel, if not 
 to you ? Day and night I prayed to S. Theresa to save 
 them, and she never heard my words ; you heard them. 
 The saints in glory never had more fairness than your face, 
 
1 GRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 237 
 
 illustrissima; they never had the pity of your heart, the 
 charity of your hand. They let us pray on, pray on, and 
 never speak ; you heard and saved us.' 
 
 The one she blessed raised her once more with a gentle 
 veneration for age in the action. 
 
 'You have thanked me too much, madre mia ; far too 
 much. The little any one of us can do to relieve sorrow 
 is but such slight payment of so great a human debt. 
 "When Fanciulla is old enough to marry, tell her I will give 
 her her silver wreath and her dower. No, no more thanks 
 you shame me ! You, who have led so long a life of 
 goodness, to bless me ! ' 
 
 She stooped lower still towards the old peasant, to drop 
 some gold into her kerchief unperceived, and passed on, 
 while the praises and prayers of the Capriote were poured 
 out, with tears staining weather-beaten, age-worn cheeks, 
 that in youth had never known so sweet a rain of joy and 
 peace. 
 
 'Ah!' murmured Erceldoune to her, 'you cannot ask 
 me now to believe you, when you say, " ISTon angelus ! "' 
 
 She turned her eyes on him with a sudden weary wistful- 
 ness, a sudden ironic scorn, intricately commingled. 
 
 ' I do say it. Repeat it till you believe it ; it is a terrible 
 truth. Here and there we do a little good save, as I 
 saved to that poor Capriote, the life of starving infants, a 
 legacy that her dead son left to drag her into the grave ; 
 children as bright as the morning dying for want of the 
 bread we throw away as we eat guinea peaches and two- 
 thousand-franc pine-apples. "What is the worth of it ? It 
 is a grain against a mountain of evil ! ' 
 
 He looked at her with appealing pain ; he felt vaguely 
 that she, who to him was stainless as the morning, had the 
 darkness of some remorse upon her, and yet he could 
 neither follow the veiled intricacies of her nature, nor 
 divest her of that divinity with which, to-day yet more than 
 ever, he had clothed her. She glanced up at him and 
 laughed. 
 
 * Do not look so grave ; I never murdered any one in poi- 
 soned wines or medicated roses ; it is a good deal to say in 
 these days of artistic slaughter! Believe me a woman. 
 If you rightly understand all those words say, you will 
 never attribute me too much divinity, or ask me to oblige 
 
238 IDALIA. 
 
 you with consistency. Mephistopheles always takes a 
 woman's guise now; he has found he can change his masks 
 so much more quickly. "Will you dine with me ? Dress ? 
 O, I will pardon your costume it is velvet, picturesque, 
 rather Spanish.' 
 
 She motioned him to take his way into the deserted li- 
 brary, and went from him down the corridors of the Villa 
 Santilla, that they had reached while she spoke. 
 
 Had she any love for him ? He had no belief that she 
 could have. And yet, if there were none in her heart, was 
 it not rankest cruelty to toy with him thus ? ]S"o, he could 
 not reproach her that it was ; she had bidden him over and 
 over again leave her ; she had refused to hear words of 
 love from him ; she had only acceded to his remaining near 
 her at his own persisting prayer ; there was no blame here. 
 He had no thought that she could care in any way for his 
 fate ; the caprice of her manner, the mockery of her satire, 
 the profound pathos that had tinged her words, the strenuous 
 force with which she had bidden him think evil of her : 
 these were not the ways of women to one they loved ; they 
 were the inconstancies of a heart ill at ease, of a spirit with- 
 out rest and not without regret ; but they were not the 
 ways of a woman who loved. And yet an agony of passion 
 was on him ; he only felt, lived, thought, breathed for her ; 
 and the purity of the sea-temple in which he had looked 
 upon her face in the past day shed on her its own sanctity, 
 its own exaltation. Nothing loftier, purer, more superb 
 ever rose in a poet's vision of idealised love than he had 
 incarnated in his worship of her worship whose grandest 
 element was faith, sublime in its very blindness. 
 
 At her villa that night there were a score of guests ; all 
 men, and all unknown to him ; among them the Italian, Carlo 
 of Viana, whose subjugation to her sway had been so proud 
 a triumph. Men of the world though they might be, there 
 was not one of them, not even the brave, bright, cordial 
 southern prince, who could wholly conceal the surprise and 
 the dislike, almost the offence with which they saw a stranger; 
 their glances ranged over him curiously in a jealous challenge, 
 and he felt as little amity to them. 
 
 ' Count Phaulcon is not here?' asked the Prince of Viana 
 of her. 
 
 ']N"o. I regret to have to make his apologies; he is un- 
 
'CRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 239 
 
 happily prevented the honour of meeting your Highness, 
 she answered him, as they passed into the dining- chamber. 
 
 'And this foreigner, has he your pass, niadame?' asked 
 Viana, softly bending his head. 
 
 * He is not one of us, but he is rny friend.' 
 
 ' Tour friend, madanie ! ' said Viana, with a certain smile 
 that Erceldoune caught, and for which, though he could hear 
 no words accompanying it, he could have tossed the Tuscan 
 prince into the sea sounding below the cliffs. * A fair title, 
 truly : but one with which none, I think, ever rest content.' 
 
 Yiana said no more on the subject ; but Erceldoune saw 
 that, as in Turkey, so also in this larger gathering, his pre- 
 sence was unwelcome, and imposed a restraint on her guests, 
 though not apparently on her. He was a curb put on them ; 
 and they bore it with chafing impatience, deepened in many 
 of them by a jealous surprised intolerance of this foreigner 
 with whom their hostess had entered the salons. 
 
 He himself sat in almost unbroken silence, eating little, 
 drinking unconsciously much more than his wont. His 
 thoughts whirled; he felt a fierce reasonless hatred for all 
 the men by whom he was surrounded. He saw her through 
 the haze of light and perfume and wine-odours and incense ; 
 he felt giddy, maddened, reckless ; the fiercest jealousy was 
 at riot in him, and the spiritual beauty of the earlier day 
 was gone for the while from him, as it was gone from her. 
 
 He saw her now as she was in all the varied scenes of her 
 dazzling and careless career. She took little heed of him, 
 rarely addressed him, rarely looked at him. Her silver wit, 
 barbed and ironic, scathed all it touched ; her delicate 
 laughter rang its mocking chime at things human and 
 divine ; the diamonds on the rose hues and black laces of 
 her costly dress glittered like the dews on a pomegranate ; 
 her resistless coquetries enslaved whomever she would, and 
 cast their golden net now on one and now on another, the 
 heartlessness of a heartless code, the caprices of a world- 
 wise imperious woman, used to be adored, and to tread the 
 adoration at fancy beneath her foot, the recklessness of one 
 accustomed to defy the world, and to stake great stakes on 
 fortune, ruling her as utterly as a few hours before in the 
 G-rotto Azzuro high thoughts and noble regrets had reigned 
 in her. 
 
 Which was truly herself of those characters so dissimilar? 
 
240 ID ALIA. 
 
 It would have been hard to tell. He would best have com- 
 prehended her who had judged both. But to the man who 
 loved her, let her be what she should, let her treat him as she 
 would, the Protean changes in her tortured him as with so 
 many masks that shrouded her beauty from him ; the frank 
 singleness of his nature was without key to the intricate com- 
 plexity of hers. Had he seen her first and solely as she was 
 to-night lying back in her chair, toying with her exotics 
 glowing with rose and purple, touching the golden Lebanon 
 wine or the luscious Lachryma, letting her eyes dwell with 
 their lustrous languor now on one, now on another, and 
 holding all those about her with a silver chain, surer than 
 steel in its hold on them, ductile to her hand as silk he 
 would have dreaded her power, he would have doubted her 
 mercy, he would perhaps never have loved her. 
 
 Erceldonne listened to the words around him, but insen- 
 sibly and uncertainly ; his thoughts were on her alone ; but 
 when they reached his senses he heard the most advanced 
 opinions of Europe, with the politics of the extreme Left, 
 form the staple of all deeper discussion, and the basis of a 
 thousand intricate intrigues and abortive projects that were 
 circulated, often to be passed current with the seal of Idalia's 
 approbation, much more often to be broken in two by some 
 hint of later intelligence than theirs, or some satirically sug- 
 gested comment languidly let fall by her on their excited 
 warmth like the fall of an icy spray. And yet there were 
 moments when she was not thus, when she was more 
 seductive in her eloquent expositions, her sudden and then 
 impassioned earnestness, than in her nonchalance ; moments 
 when she spoke low, swiftly, brilliantly, with a picturesque 
 oratory, persuasive, vivid, irresistible, till her guests' bold 
 eyes glowed with admiration as they listened, and they were 
 ready to lend themselves to her hands, to be moulded like 
 wax at her will, without a will of their own. Then, as often, 
 when she had roused them or wooed them to the height of 
 the enthusiasm, the rashness, or the sacrifice she had sought 
 to win from them, she dropped the topic as suddenly, with 
 a languid indifference or a sarcastic jest, sinking back among 
 her cushions, playing half wearily with the scarlet blossoms 
 of her bouquet or the velvet ears of the hound, with hardly 
 a sign that she remembered the presence of her numerous 
 eomrades. 
 
'GRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 241 
 
 Varied and glittering though the conversation that went 
 on round him was, infectious and free as its gaiety of tone 
 was also, marked as might seem her confidence in him to in- 
 troduce him there, and intoxicating to every sense as the 
 entertainment to which she had brought him might be, Ercel- 
 doune was wretched in it ; he could comprehend nothing ; 
 he was jealous of every man at her table ; everything he 
 heard related to a party, but to which he referred, however 
 indefinitely, his seizure in Moldavia. She scarcely looked 
 at, rarely addressed, him. In nothing, save her personal 
 loveliness, could he recognise the woman with whom he 
 had floated through the azure air of her sea-temple before 
 the sun had set. 
 
 It was late when they rose from the table. Cards were 
 begun, while the windows stood open to the midnight, where 
 the southern moon flooded the Mediterranean. Idalia threw 
 herself into the hazard with the eagerness of a gamester ; she 
 played with the utmost recklessness, a hectic excitement 
 shone in her eyes, the insouciant defiance of her wit rose 
 with the risks of chance ; she staked heavy sums, lost them, 
 and only played the more eagerly still. Impair her charm 
 even this insatiate passion could not do, distasteful though 
 it be in women, and even abhorrent in women who are in 
 their youth, as seductive as she was ; but there were danger, . 
 levity, heartlessness in the charm. She was now at her ^pr-sj: 
 
 Once she glanced at the solitary form of Jfcceldoun.e. 
 standing put against the flood of moonlight; his face was 
 pale, and very grave, \Vhile his eyes had a pathetic wonder, 
 rebuke, and pain in them. She never looked at him again. 
 The hours went on, and the play with them, only broken by 
 intervals when hookahs and cool drinks were brought round, 
 and the homage offered to hazard was offered to its beautiful 
 empress. She lost very considerably for a while; but the 
 more she lost the more extravagantly she staked upon the 
 cards ; and fortune changed, pouring in on her its successes 
 at length as lavishly as it had previously squandered her gold. 
 So the short sweet night passed away, over the scattered 
 hamlets that crowned the piles of rocks or nestled in sea- 
 gray olive-woods ; passed away in the whirl of gambling and 
 the bitterness of jealous heart-burning and the stir of restless 
 passions. Without, where the waters lapped the shore so 
 softly, and the islands hung in the starlit air like sea-birds' 
 
242 ID ALT A. 
 
 nests brooding above the waves, the aged, dying peacefully, 
 dreamt of immortality, and children slept with smiles upon 
 their lips under the low brown eaves of cabin roofs, and the 
 eyes of poets, wakeful and laden with voluptuous thoughts, 
 dwelt, never weary, on the silent sailing clouds, warm with 
 the flush of earliest dawn ; but here, within, there was but 
 the fever of unworthy things. 
 
 Erceldoune, where he stood apart, glanced once or twice 
 at that fair tranquil neglected night with an impatient sigh, 
 as though to take relief from its balmy freshness and cool 
 serenity amid the glittering martyrdom of the scene before 
 him and the tumult of passion at work in him. 
 
 In the intensity of his pain he could have believed him- 
 self like the men in the old legends whom a sorceress be- 
 witched; it was anguish alike to stay or to go; every moment 
 he spent there was suffering as intense as when he had lain 
 prostrate with the vultures wheeling above his eyes in the 
 sickly light of the sun ; yet he could not tear himself from 
 its terrible fascination any more than he could then have torn 
 himself from the power of the carrion birds. He believed in 
 her; yes, not less utterly than when a few hours before he 
 had heard her lofty and spiritualised thoughts unfold all 
 diviner things, and lead him through the dim and glorious 
 mysteries of a poet's speculations of eternal worlds. But he 
 felt like a man in delirium tremens, who struggles with a 
 thousand hideous and revolting shapes, that rise again as fast 
 as he overthrows them. The atmosphere about her, the 
 glances that dwelt on her, the profane mocking wit that 
 woke her laughter, the eyes that met her own in such bold 
 language, the gaming passion that, while it possessed at 
 least, enslaved her all these were so much desecration and 
 profanation to his idol, so much blasphemy against the 
 woman who had been with him in the pure stillness of 
 the Grotto Azzuro. The sun above the eastward circle 
 of bay rose, breaking over the sea, while the stars were 
 still seen through its golden haze, in which they would 
 with another moment die. Idalia looked at the sun, then 
 left the gaming-table. 
 
 ' There is the day rebuking us. Grood-night !' 
 
 As she spoke she paused one moment, the full fresh light 
 of the broken morning falling upon her, while around was 
 still the wax-glare of the chandeliers , the pure light lay 
 before her, the impure glitter was behind. 
 
'GRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 24^ 
 
 She paused one moment, looking seaward, then turned 
 negligently to her guests, and dismissed them with much 
 carelessness, little ceremonial. 
 
 Viana pursued her with eager whispered words ; she put 
 him aside with a coquette's amusement and a graceful ges- 
 ture of denial and passed out, while the Nubian appeared 
 and followed her. 
 
 The prince, with stormy petulant anger on his face, left 
 the room with his equerry. The others went out one by 
 one. 
 
 Erceldoune remained silent and motionless ; he neither 
 saw nor heard what passed before him ; he had bowed his 
 farewell instinctively ; but all that he knew were the smiles 
 he had seen cast on others, and the bold look with which 
 Viana had followed her, and for which he could have struck 
 him down as men of his race struck their foes when a back- 
 handed sweep of a heavy iron gauntlet dashed down all 
 rivalry and washed out all insult. Each of her guests, as 
 they passed out, cast a look of suppressed and envious 
 dislike at him where he stood, as though he had a right to 
 remain thus behind them. He noticed nothing, was con- 
 scious of nothing ; an intolerable agony, a burning bound- 
 less jealousy, alone were on him. He stood there like a 
 man stunned, looking blankly out at the sunlit sweep of 
 waters. Evil passions were not natural to him ; but the 
 life he had led had left the free untamable strength of the 
 old Border chiefs unaltered in him. 
 
 He stood there with no remembrance of how little right 
 he had to remain, scarcely any remembrance even of where 
 he was. All at once he started and turned. As a dog 
 feels, long before human eyes can see or human ears can 
 hear it, the approaching presence that he loves, so he felt 
 hers before she was near him. Through the inner chambers, 
 dark in twilight, where the lights were extinguished and the 
 dawn could ill penetrate, Idalia returned. Her step was 
 weary, and her face, as the illumination from the chandelier 
 still burning in the window where he stood fell on it, was 
 pale, even to the lips, on which, as some poet has it, ' a 
 sigh seemed set ' unuttered. 
 
 ' You have remained after the rest ! How is that ? 
 It is as well, though, as it is. I wish to speak to you 
 alone.' 
 
244 ID ALIA. 
 
 The words themselves might have fed many a wild hope 
 many a vain thought, in any man less single-hearted and 
 less incapable of misconstruing her meaning than he was. 
 "With him all the light died out from his face as he heard. 
 He knew that if she would have listened to his passion she 
 would not have returned to him now 5 she would not have 
 addressed him thus. 
 
 He bowed gravely, and stood waiting for her pleasure. 
 The forbearance was not lost on her. Idalia, more than any 
 other woman, could appreciate this deference which gave 
 her untainted comprehension, this delicacy which took no 
 advantage of her return to him in solitude. She moved on 
 toward one of the windows, and stood there, between the 
 gray light of the rising day and the radiance of her own 
 card-room. 
 
 c You have offered me many pledges of your service,' she 
 said gravely ; ' nor do I doubt their sincerity. I am now 
 about to test ifc ; not on any ground that, as you think, my 
 past slight aid to you gives me any claim upon your life 
 I have none whatever but rather simply because I trust 
 you as a gallant gentleman, as a chivalrous nature, as a 
 true-hearted friend.' 
 
 He bent his head in silence ; he offered her no protesta- 
 tion of his faith ; he knew that none was needed. 
 
 ' I am about to ask you much,' she resumed ; ' to ask you 
 to undertake a service of some danger, of immediate action, 
 and of imperative secrecy ; it may involve you in some peril, 
 and it can bring you no reward. Knowing this, are you 
 prepared to listen to it ?' 
 
 His face grew a shade paler beneath its warm sea-bronze ; 
 he divined well what her meaning was in those few words, 
 * it can bring you no reward.' But he answered without a 
 second's hesitation. 
 
 * Do with me what you will,' he said simply ; ' I am 
 ready.' 
 
 There were no asseverations, no eager vows, no ornate 
 eloquence ; but she knew better than they could tell her 
 that he was hers, to send out to life or to death at her 
 choice. 
 
 She put out her hand to him with royal grace to thank 
 him as sovereigns thank their subjects. She let his lips 
 linger on it mutely, then, with no more emotion than queens 
 
'CRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 245 
 
 show at that act of homage, sho sank into a couch and bent 
 slightly forward. 
 
 ' Listen ! I want no political controversy, but it seems 
 to me unutterably strange that you, with your bold high 
 spirit, your passion for liberty, your grand contempt for 
 conventionalities and station, should have no sympathy with 
 a party whose cause is essentially that of freedom.' 
 
 He looked at her wearily. What were creeds and causes 
 to him now ? 
 
 ' I am no politician,' he said briefly. ' I have never 
 mingled in those matters. I am neither a student nor a 
 statesman. I hate tyranny. I would stamp it out wherever 
 I saw it ; but the codes of my race were always Conser- 
 vative. I may unconsciously have imbibed them.' 
 
 She smiled with ironic disdain. He had touched the 
 qualities in her with which she could rule men like children, 
 and could have swayed a kingdom with the sceptre of 
 Eussian Catherine or of Maria Theresa. 
 
 4 " Conservative ! " To reverence the divinity of rust 
 and of corruption to rivet afresh the chains of tradition 
 and of superstition to bind the free limbs of living men in 
 the fetters of the past to turn blind eyes from the light, 
 and deny to thirsty lips the waters of truth to say to the 
 crowned fool, " You are God's elect," and to the poor 
 " Tou are beasts of burden, only not, like other beasts, 
 worthy shelter or fodder" to cling to falsehood, and to 
 loathe reason ; this is what it is to be " Conservative !" 
 Do you, who love freedom like any son of the desert, sub- 
 scribe to such a creed as that ? ' 
 
 Now he saw her as those saw her who were subdued to 
 her will, till no sense was left them save to think as she 
 thought, and to do as she bade. The magic of the voice, 
 the charm of the eloquence, the spell of the fearless truths, 
 uttered with an imperial command, wrought on him as they 
 had always done on others as they could not fail to do on 
 any man with a heart to thrill and a soul to be moved. 
 
 'I will believe what you believe!' he cried passionately. 
 ' You are my creed ; I have forgotten all others.' 
 
 The brilliant fire which had been upon her face as she 
 spoke faded. 
 
 'Too many have made me their creed; do you take 
 some surer light to guide you. I do not seek a convert iu 
 
246 IDALIA. 
 
 you. You are happier, perhaps, if you can live thinking of 
 none of these thing's. What I seek of you now is your 
 service, not your adhesion. I want little else except your 
 high courage, and I know that will never fail either you or 
 others.' 
 
 < Try it as you will.' 
 
 There was a curious conflict of feelings in him as he heard 
 her. He was moved to strong pleasure by the mere thought 
 that she placed confidence, of whatever sort, in him, and he 
 knew by her words that she held his honour, his faith, and 
 his courage in full esteem ; yet as strong a pain smote him 
 heavily. He felt that these great purposes of her life, 
 vaguely as he could imagine them, were dearer to Idalia 
 than anv individual love could become, and he felt also that 
 in her manner to him which seemed to place him farther 
 off from her than he had ever been. 
 
 She bowed her head in thanks to him. 
 
 4 What I need is told in few phrases,' she resumed. 
 ' The Conservative faction, that you favour, is in the full 
 exercise of its iniquity in JSTaples for a little while longer; 
 a very little. There are to-night in my house concealed 
 here, I do not shirk the word two of its greatest victims, 
 an old man and a young, father and son. The elder is as 
 noble a patriot and scholar as Boethius, with no other crime 
 than this he wishes the freedom of his Italy. King 
 [Francis plays the part of Theodoric. Once arrested, the 
 fate of Boethius will be his. Less severity, perhaps, but 
 the galleys, at best, await his only son, fresh from the cam- 
 paigns of Sicily. By intelligence I have of the government's 
 intentions, I know they will not be safe here three hours 
 longer. I left my own yacht at Trieste ; besides, it could 
 not approach Naples without being searched, or probably 
 brought to by a broadside. Yours is here ; will you save 
 these men, take them secretly on board, and land them on 
 the coast of Southern France ? I give you my word that 
 they have no other sin than one that is the darkest, perhaps, 
 in the world's sight to love truth and liberty too danger- 
 ously well ; how much they have suffered for these you 
 will know when I tell you that they are Pilippo and 
 Cesario FiesohV 
 
 An eager light flashed into his eyes, a noble indignation 
 flushed his face ; he knew the names well the names o\ 
 
'GRAVEST THOU ARCADY P 247 
 
 men who, for the choicest virtues of the patriot's and 
 thinker's and soldier's characters, had endured the worst 
 persecutions of the Neapolitan Bourbons. "Whatever he 
 thought of creeds and causes, he loathed tyranny and 
 oppression with all his heart and soul. 
 
 ' Save them ? Yes, if I lose iny own life to do it.' 
 
 She looked at him with a smile ; how often she had seen 
 that lion spirit, that eagle daring, lighten in temperaments 
 the most diverse at her bidding ! 
 
 e Ah ! I thought your sympathies must always rise with 
 liberty, and your hatred with oppression, or you would 
 have belied your whole nature. I would make you " with 
 us" in an hour's reasoning.' 
 
 Plis eyes met hers with something pathetic in their 
 wistful gaze, as though they besought her not to trifle with 
 him. 
 
 ' You never need to reason with me. You have only to 
 say, " I will it." ' 
 
 An absolute obedience this, an utter unquestioning sub- 
 mission, prostrate as any that ever laid Marc Antony at 
 Cleopatra's mercy, or Heloise at Abelard's ; yet he did not 
 lose his dignity in it ; it was lofty even while it was subject. 
 It touched her, yet it pained her ; it brought home to her 
 the intensity and truth of this man's devotion ; she would 
 not, or could not, return it or repay it ; she had no right, 
 she bethought her, with a pang, to use it as she had used it 
 with so many, to the furtherance of her own aims, however 
 generous or just those aims might in this instance be. 
 Moreover, she had come to say other and more bitter things 
 to him than this. 
 
 She was silent a moment, looking at him where his 
 gallant height rose against the clear subdued light of the 
 breaking day ; her future task was more painful than she, 
 consummate mistress of every toil and art, and used to 
 control every mood and ^very passion of men, had ever 
 known one yet to be. 
 
 1 Weigh the peril well,' she said after a pause, with some- 
 thing of restraint upon her. ' It must be great I mean, 
 if you are discovered. Discovery may be guarded against, 
 but it cannot be positively averted at all channels. If you 
 will risk the danger of detection, your yacht can weigh 
 anchor at once. She is, of course, in readiness? 
 
248 IDALIA. 
 
 Piesoli, father and son, disguised as Capriote fishermen, can 
 row you to the vessel among others. They are ready to 
 take the alarm at any instant, and sleep dressed in their 
 disguises. They will probably pass in safety ; the marinari 
 here are dull and unsuspicious, nor would they harm what 
 1 shelter for a thousand ducats each. But should detec- 
 tion occur, remember, the Bourbon government will not 
 spare you even for your country's sake. You will have 
 rendered yourself liable to the law for assisting the 
 escape of condemned " conspirators " and " insurgents," 
 as the Court terms them, and you will share the fate the} 
 Butter.' 
 
 The words were almost cold, but uttered with a visible 
 effort ; in the instant, even though the urgency of peril for 
 those she sought to save, and the motive for which she bade 
 him expose himself to this risk at her command, excused it 
 to her, she loathed herself for sending him out to chance 
 the slightest danger in fealty to a love that would never 
 bring him anything except its pain. Indeed, his life was 
 dearer to her than she, disdainful of all such weakness, yet 
 would know. 
 
 He raised himself erect. 
 
 6 1 have given you my word ; I am not used to weigh the 
 hazards of any dangers that may accrue to me through 
 keeping it.' 
 
 She answered him nothing ; the implicit obedieroe this? 
 man was ready to render her, even to the rendering up of 
 his life or liberty at her word, moved her the more deeply 
 beside the bold honour and the fearless independence of his 
 carriage toward men, such as now flashed out even to her 
 in his reply. Once again, unseen by him as she leaned her 
 brow upon her hand, there came upon her face the warmth, 
 and in her eyes the look, with which she had gazed upon 
 him in the previous night. It passed; she rose and *tcod 
 again in the shadow of the myrtle-covered casement, look- 
 ing from him out toward the sea. 
 
 1 When will you be ready, then ? ' 
 
 * I am so now. Tour friends can row me on board when 
 you will, and the yacht can weigh anchor with them at 
 once.' 
 
 6 And you take no more thought than that of periling 
 your life for strangers ? ' 
 
'GRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 249 
 
 ' I have never taken much thought for my life that I can 
 recollect. Besides, what need is there of thought ? You 
 wish it.' 
 
 He spoke only in the singleness of his fidelity, in the 
 earnestness of his devotion to her; but the most refined 
 suhtlety of art and purpose could not have taught him a 
 better means to win his way toward the tenderness of 
 Idalia's nature, and an infinite tenderness there was, let her 
 lovers and her foes say what they would. 
 
 Her cheek lost the warmth it had regained, her face had 
 the same sadness on it which it had worn as she had entered 
 the chamber, the intense melancholy which now and then 
 fell on her at rare intervals gathered in her eyes. She 
 pitied him, she honoured him ; she would willingly, at all 
 cost to herself, have effaced every thought which bound him 
 to her, and saved him from every pang that came to him 
 through her ; but she was too proud and too world-worn to 
 recognise that there might be a feeling even beyond this in 
 her heart for him. Even had she recognised it, it would 
 not have changed her purpose the purpose which had made 
 her let him see her as he had done through the past evening 
 the purpose to toy with him no more, but to put from him 
 now and for ever, the vainness of hopes which could but 
 fatally beguile, only to as fatally betray him. 
 
 She could do this as no other woman could have done ; 
 she had dealt with men in all the force of their enmities, all 
 the height of their follies, in their most dangerous hours as 
 in their most various moods ; through paths no other of her 
 sex could have approached Idalia passed unhesitating and 
 with impunity, and one of the secrets of her great power 
 lay in her perfect and unerring knowledge of human nature. 
 "With the first hour in which she had seen the man who 
 now stood with her she had known his character as pro- 
 foundly as she knew it now. She turned to him and spcia 
 softly yet with a certain grave and haughty grace. 
 
 ' I do not pretend to misunderstand you ; to do so would 
 be but to imitate the mock humility of foolish women. 
 You would do this thing for my sake ; if done at all, it must 
 be done for the pure sake of justice and compassion, not 
 for mine. You gave me your promise that no other words 
 like these should pass between us, and I told you if it were 
 broken we could meet no longer/ 
 
250 ID ALIA . 
 
 He looked at her bewildered ; she seemed to him to toy 
 with him most recklessly ; it was a deadly trial to his faith 
 not to believe most mercilessly also. 
 
 ' That promise I must break, then. It is the only ono 
 broken in my life. My G-od ! why do you play with me 
 so ? You know what my love is ! ' 
 
 His voice sank to a breathless fervour ; he stooped for- 
 ward, his lips trembling, his eyes seeking hers with an an- 
 guish of entreaty. That look almost broke down her re- 
 solve ; it was so easy to soothe this man's loyal heart with 
 a smile, with a glance ; it was so hard to put an end for 
 ever to that imploring prayer. Hard to her at least now, 
 when for the first time some portion of the heavy blow she 
 had so often dealt fell on her, some scorch of the fiery pain 
 she had so often caused touched herself, if it were but by 
 sympathy and pity. Tet she was unmoved from her resolve ; 
 she was unflinching in a course once chosen, and she was 
 resolute to fool him on no more with empty hope, to let 
 him blind himself no longer. She wished to save him, so far 
 as she could still effect this, from herself, and to do so she 
 sacrificed his faith in her with a ruthless and unsparing 
 hand. 
 
 1 1 do know it,' she answered him ; and her voice had no 
 tremor in it, her face no warmth, her eyes dwelt on him 
 with a melancholy in which no softer or weaker conscious- 
 mingled. c And because I know it, and know its strength 
 and its nobility, I will not dupe it or dupe you. What 
 avail to lead you on after a mirage, to let you cheat your- 
 self with fond delusions ? Better you should know the 
 truth at once that what you feel for me can only bring 
 you pain ; strive against it for your manhood's sake/ 
 
 He staggered slightly, and bent his head like a man who 
 receives a sudden sickening blow ; despite the revulsion of 
 the last few hours, it fell on him with the greater shock 
 after the peace and beauty of the day they had passed to- 
 gether on the sea. 
 
 She looked at him, and a shadow of his own suffering feii 
 on her ; she could not strike him thus without herself be- 
 ing wounded without a pang in her own heart. Tet what 
 she had determined to do as she saw him standing aloof 
 that night with the rack of wondering grief, of incredulous 
 reproach upon his face, she carried out now, cost her in its 
 loss even to her fair fame whatever it should. 
 
1 GRAVEST THOU ARCADY ?' 251 
 
 She turned to him with a sudden impulsiveness most rare 
 with her, and in her eyes something of the defiance with 
 which she had fronted Conrad Phaulcon mingled with an 
 infinitely softer and more mournful thing. 
 
 ' Listen ! As you have seen me to-night, I am. That 
 higher, holier light you view me through is in your own 
 eyes, not in me. Ask those whom you saw with me ; they 
 will tell you I am without mercy- believe them ; they will 
 tell you I have ruined many lives, blessed none believe 
 them ; they will tell you you had better have died in the 
 Carpathian woods than have fallen beneath my influence 
 believe them. Take the worse that you can learn, and 
 credit it to its uttermost. Tell yourself till you score its 
 truth into your heart, that I have never been, that I shall 
 never be, such as you imagine me. Tour love can be no- 
 thing to me ; but I would save it from its worst bitteroess by 
 changing it into hate. I would not even forbid you to 
 change into it scorn.' 
 
 Her eyes were prouder than they had ever been as she 
 thus bade the man, who had centred in her his purest and 
 most exalted faith, give to her the shame of his disdain. 
 As she spoke, with her resistless beauty touched to a yet 
 nobler dignity as she uttered this attainder against her own 
 life, he must have loved her less, or have believed evil 
 swifter than the one who heard her now, who could have 
 followed out her bidding, and stamped the warning down 
 into his soul, till all love of her was dead. 
 
 He looked at her in silence, and in the heart- stricken 
 pathos of that look she saw how utterly she laid life desolate 
 for him ; she felt the recoil of the living death she dealt, as 
 now and then the hunter feels it when he meets the upward 
 dying gaze of the stag his shot has pierced. 
 
 In that instant, while his faith was beaten down for the 
 first moment under the scourges of her words, and the 
 chivalrous idolatry he bore her was bent and blinded under 
 the dead weight of her own self-accusation, the baser alloy 
 of passion alone was on him he was only conscious of that 
 madness in which men are ready as to yield themselves to 
 an eternity of shame and torture, 
 
 * So that this woman may be mine ! ' 
 She saw that in him ; she knew its force, its meaning j 
 
25* IDALIA. 
 
 she knew that in this instant of bis anguish her loveliness 
 was all he felt or sought. 
 
 ' No matter what you are/ he muttered breathlessly ; ' no 
 matter what you bring me I love you, O Grod ! as no man 
 ever, I think, loved before. Have you no pity on that ? 
 Be what you will, if if ' 
 
 His voice sank, leaving the words unfinished; he felt 
 powerless to plead with her ; he felt hopeless to touch, or 
 sway, or implore her ; and also, beyond all, he could not 
 even, on the acceptance of her own testimony, dethrone her 
 from his stainless faith, any more than a man can at a word 
 tear out from him as worthless a religion that he has che- 
 rished as divine through a long lifetime. 
 
 The darkest passions had no terror for her ; she had 
 known them over and over again at their worst, and had 
 ruled them and ruled by them. But deepest pity was in 
 her heart for him ; she sought to save him, even at all sa- 
 crifice to herself, and she saw that it was too late ; she knew, 
 as his eyes burned down into hers, that, though they bhould 
 part now and for ever, this longing she had wakened would 
 consume him to his grave. 
 
 A woman weaker and more pliant would have yielded to 
 that impulse, and have given him tenderness ; to the pride 
 and to the truth of Idalia's nature to have stooped so far 
 had not been possible. 
 
 1 Love is no word for me,' she said with calmness, under- 
 neath which a vibration of deeper feeling ran. c I am 
 weary of it ; and I have none to give. I have played with 
 it, bribed with it, ruled by it, bought by it, worked on it, 
 and worked through it evilly. I cannot do that with you ; 
 I must give you suffering ; I will not also give you danger. 
 Take your promise back ; I absolve you from it.' 
 
 Her eyes were turned toward the sea, and not to him, as 
 she spoke ; she could not watch the misery she dealt. She 
 knew as though she saw it the look that came upon his face 
 darker and deadlier than the physical anguish that had 
 been upon it when she had found him dying in the Carpa- 
 thian pass. She had stricken him strengthless ; she had re- 
 fused his love ; she had refused even his belief in her, even 
 his homage to her ; she had condemned herself for the evil 
 that she wrought, and she stood aloof from him, imperial, 
 world-weary, rich in the world's wealth, without a rival i 
 
'GRAVEST THOU ARCADY?' 253 
 
 the sovereignty of her beauty and her will. Hich himself in 
 those accidents of power and possession which she owned, he 
 might have pleaded still, on the ground of his wretchedness, 
 against her fiat ; but in the pride of his beggared fortunes 
 his lips were sealed to silence ; he could not force his love 
 having no treasure upon earth save that to give, upon the 
 empress of those brilliant revels on which the dawn had 
 lately broken, upon the mistress of those high ambitions 
 which seemed alone to reach her heart ; upon a woman so 
 proud, so peerless, so throned in every luxury and every 
 splendour as this woman was. She was not haughtier in her 
 magnificent command than he in his ruined poverty ; and in 
 that moment he had not force, nor memory, nor conscious- 
 ness left to him. He only suffered dumbly and blindly, like 
 a dog struck cruelly by the hand he loves, the hand he would 
 have died in striving to obey. 
 
 She looked at him once only once and a quick sigh 
 ran through her. Had she saved him from the fangs of the 
 carrion beasts and the talons of the mountain birds merely 
 to deal him this ? Better, she thought, have left him to his 
 fate, to perish in a nameless ^rave, under the eternal shelter 
 of the watching pines. Yet she did not yield. Without a 
 glance or a sign she moved slowly away across the chamber ; 
 their interview was over, its work was done. 
 
 His step arrested her. He moved forward with a faint 
 slow effort, like one who staggers from the weakness of long 
 illness. 
 
 * Send those you spoke of to me ; I do not take my pro- 
 mise back.' 
 
 She turned her eyes full on him with a sudden light of 
 wonder, of admiration, of amaze. 
 
 ' You would do that now ?' i 
 
 6 1 have said I will.' 
 
 She looked at him one lingering moment longer ; all that 
 was great, and high, and fearless in her nature answering tho 
 royalty in his ; then she bent her head silently. 
 
 ' 1 thank you ; be it so.' 
 
 And with those words only, she left him. 
 
254 IDALIA, 
 
 CHAPTEE XIX. 
 
 ' THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD.* 
 
 IN a distant apartment of the villa a youth lay sleeping, 
 his richly-tinted face with the black cnrls falling back from 
 the bold brow, like one of the beautiful boys who loved, and 
 laughed, and danced, and sung in one long carnival, from 
 sunset to sunrise, in the glad Yenice of G-oldoni. He slept 
 soundly, as only youth sleeps, dressed in a Capriote fishing 
 suit ; and on his chest, as the striped shirt fell back from it, 
 there were the scars of deep wounds just healed no more 
 over the strong fearless beatings of his young heart. A little 
 distance from him sat his father, an old man, with the grand 
 head of a noble of Tintoretto's or Bassano's canvas the head 
 of the great mediaeval signori who filled the porphyry pa- 
 laces, and swept through the Piazza San Marco, in the red 
 gold of glowing summer evenings, when the year of revel was 
 held in Venice for the Eoscari's accession, and the City of 
 the "Waters was in her glorious reign. The elder' man was 
 not sleeping ; his eyes were on his son. He had lost three 
 such as that sleeping boy for Italy three trampled down 
 under the tread of Austrian armies or of Pontifical 
 mercenaries; the one left was the last of his name. But 
 he would have sent out a hundred more, had he had them, 
 to bring back the dead grandeur to Borne, to see the ancient 
 liberties revive, and the banner of the free republic float in 
 spring-tide air above the fresh lagoons and over the green- 
 wreathed arches of his beloved Yenezia. 
 
 They had suffered much, both of them, for liberty ; but 
 they were both willing to suffer more the boy in the dawn 
 of hia manhood, and the elder in the weariness of his age. 
 There was no sound in the chamber ; food and wine stood 
 near ; the shutters were closed ; through a small oval aper- 
 ture the glowing sun in the hour of its sunrise alone pene- 
 trated, flooding the floor with seven-coloured light. From 
 the dawn without there came a faint delicious odour of carna- 
 tions, of late violets, of innumerable leaves. The door opened 
 noiselessly ; through it came Idalia. The old man started 
 and rose, took her hand and pressed it to his lips, then stood 
 
* THE LIGHT IN THE DUS- LIES DEAD: 255 
 
 in silence. She glanced at the sleeping youth, lying there in 
 so profound a rest with a smile on his arched full lips. 
 
 { Poor boy ! ' she said softly ; c it is a cruelty to waken 
 him. Dreams are the mercies of life. Yet there is no time 
 to be lost. You may be saved still. 5 
 
 6 What ! your friend will serve us so well as that ?' asked 
 the Italian wonderingly. * But it is not strange ; the 
 English are a bold people : they never refuse to resist 
 oppression.' 
 
 Over Idalia's face swept an unspoken contempt. 
 
 1 The individual English, no ! But the nation would let 
 any freedom be strangled like a hanged dog, rather than risk 
 its trade or lose a farthing.' 
 
 e But it is a great risk for him. We have no right to 
 expose him to it.' 
 
 * No ; we have no right/ she answered almost bitterly. 
 * Not a shadow of right ! still he accepts it : he does not 
 heed peril. What brave man does?' 
 
 Tor you.' 
 
 The words were softly added; the old Venetian looked 
 at her with a mournful fixity, an unuttered interrogation* 
 She turned slightly from his gaze ; she knew what was in 
 his thoughts ; she knew that he reminded her of the many 
 who had gone out to peril, and fallen beneath it, for her 
 
 'We can waste no time, caro amico? she said rapidly, 
 in his own liquid, caressing Venetian tongue. ' The earlier 
 you leave, the less likelihood of detection. He will wait for 
 you on the shore; you will row him to his vessel among 
 others; nothing can be simpler. You will be safe with 
 him.' 
 
 Something that was almost the weakness of tears rose in 
 her eyes as she spoke ; she thought how entirely her trust 
 would be preserved ; how surely, at risk of very life, he 
 whom she recompensed with cold words and bitter neglect 
 would redeem his promise. 
 
 Over the browned, stern, noble face of Filippo Fiesoli the 
 warmth of his lost youth stole ; a look came into his glance 
 that only was not love because chastened by so utter a hope- 
 lessaess, and purified from all touch of passion. 
 
 ' All !' he murmured, in his snow-white beard, c I can give 
 you nothing, save an exile's gratitude and the blessing of an 
 
256 IDALIA. 
 
 old man near his grave. You noblest among women ! what 
 you have risked for us !' 
 
 Idalia's eyes softened with a mellow wistful tenderness, 
 with an unspeakable regret. 
 
 'Ah, Eiesoli! if all patriots were pure, all liberators 
 true as you are, my best friend, I would count every loss my 
 highest, holiest gain ! But there is so much dross amid the 
 little gold, there are such coward villanies masked under free- 
 dom's name. /, too, " noblest among women !" O Grod, 
 sometimes I think myself the vilest !' 
 
 He sighed ; he knew her meaning ; the grand pure heart 
 of the old patriot would not take on itself the falsehood of 
 flattering disguise. 
 
 6 You are noblest in much,' he said softly ; ' something 
 too pitiless, something too alluring, it may be, to the many 
 who love you ; but your errors are the errors of others, your 
 nobility is your own.' 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 ' G-entle sophisms and full of charity, but not true. My 
 errors are my own, woven close in my nature and my mind ; 
 such nobility as you speak of if I can claim it comes rather 
 from the recklessness of courage, the passion for liberty, the 
 hatred of tyranny, than anything better in me. But I am 
 not here to speak of myself; there is not an instant to be 
 lost ; wake Cesario, poor child, and then leave me. "We are 
 too used to life and partings to feel this sudden or strange ; 
 but, my dear friend, my honoured friend, peace be with you, 
 if we never meet again.' 
 
 She held out both her hands to him with a look on her 
 face that her lovers had never seen there, so gentle, so soft- 
 ened, so full of reverent sweetness. Pilippo J'iesoli stooped 
 over them in silence, pressing them in his own ; he was an 
 old man, very near his last years, as he had said, but perhaps 
 in all the homage that had been lavished on her, she had 
 never had one heart more nobly and more purely hers than 
 was that of the great age- worn patriot's. His voice was un- 
 steady as his farewell was spoken. 
 
 * Death will take me, most likely, before I can ever look 
 upon your face again; but my dying breath will be a 
 prayer for you.' 
 
 There was an infinite dignity, a sublime pathos, that 
 were beyond all pity in the benediction ; age had set its 
 
' THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD: 257 
 
 barrier of ice betwixt them, and the grave alone waited for 
 him, but the love wherewith he loved her was very rare on 
 earth. 
 
 Without another word he turned from her, and awoke 
 his son. The young soldier sprang up alert, and ready on 
 the instant : he had often wakened thus with the Sicilian 
 legions. As he saw Idalia, his beautiful Titian face flushed, 
 his eyelids fell shyly as a girl's, he sank before her on one 
 knee with the old grace of Venice, and touched the hem of 
 her dress with his lips. She smiled at him, an indulgent, 
 gentle smile, such as she would have given a caressing 
 animal. 
 
 ' There is no time to spare in courtesies, Cesario. The 
 moment is come. You are ready ? ' 
 
 The boy's lips trembled. 
 
 * A soldier is always ready, but if you would rather let 
 me die near you, than send me out to exile ? ' 
 
 She passed her hand lightly, half-rebukingly, over the silk 
 of his dark curls. 
 
 ' Foolish child ! you talk idly. To stay here were to be 
 locked in the dungeons of the Capuano. Go with your 
 father, Cesario mio ; your first duty is to him, your second 
 to Italy and to liberty/ 
 
 The youth's eyes gleamed with the fire of the South and 
 the fire of the soldier the fire that her words could light 
 as flame lights the resinous pine-wood. 
 
 ' My first is to you.' 
 
 She smiled on him ; she knew the romantic adoration 
 that he bore her would harm him, little, might lead him far 
 on noble roads. 
 
 ' Scarcely! but if you think so, then obey me, Cesario. 
 Give your thought, beyond all, first to your father ; give 
 the life that remains through all trial and all temptation to 
 Italy and to freedom.' 
 
 The boy's earnest, impassioned gaze looked upward at 
 her through a mist of tears. 
 
 ' I will ! ' he murmured fervently * I will.' 
 
 She drew her hand from him with a slight gesture of 
 pain ; she had seen that gaze from so many eyes, she had 
 heard that vow taken by so many voices. Eyes that were 
 sightless ; voices now for ever stilled, 
 
 ' Farewell,' she said gently, to both. c I will send my 
 
 s 
 
25^ ID ALIA. 
 
 Albanian to you he can be trusted; and you must go 
 down alone "to the shore. G-ive this to my friend, and he 
 will know you. He will be in waiting.' 
 
 She took from her hand one of her rings, a lapis-lazuli 
 stone of ancient workmanship, and held it ont to the elder 
 Eiesoli ; then, without longer pause, she passed from their 
 presence. The boy Cesario flung himself down on the 
 couch she had just risen from, and with his head bowed on 
 his arms sobbed like a woman he was a bold and gallant 
 soldier, but he was but a youth ; his father stood motionless, 
 the morning sunlight, as it strayed through the oval in the 
 casement, falling with a golden hue upon his grand bronzed 
 brow and the white sweep of his patriarch's beard. Dif- 
 ferently they both loved her, equally they alike knew their 
 love hopeless. 
 
 Idalia passed on to her own apartments. These were 
 not the first lives she had saved by many ; at personal cost, 
 personal peril ; saved with courage, and daring, aud fertile 
 expedient ; but they were as nothing to her in this moment 
 beside the many more that through her had been lost. She 
 had not yet slept or rested for a moment, but she felt no 
 sense of fatigue, no willingness to sleep. Alone, the proud 
 sapphire-crowned head of the coquette, the lionne, the 
 sorceress, the brow that would have borne so royally the 
 Byzantine diadem of her ancestral Comnmeni, drooped 
 wearily, yet not from physical weariness ; the flush upon 
 her cheeks had faded, and her form, with its trailing rich- 
 hued skirts, and jewels flashing in an Eastern splendour 
 was in strange contrast with the melancholy of her attitude 
 and of her thoughts as she stood there in solitude at last, 
 with the dawning light of the young day shut out by 
 draperies of falling silk, and a single Etruscan lamp only 
 burning near. 
 
 ' Now he has seen me as I am,' she thought ' as I am ! ' 
 A smile crossed her lips, but it was a smile more sad than 
 tears there was in it so much hatred of herself. ' It was 
 but just to him. No cruelty from me would kill his love, 
 but his own scorn may. They love me for my beauty, 
 because I charm their sight and their senses, because they 
 are fools, and I know how to make them madmen ! So 
 that a woman were lovely, they would care not how vile 
 she might be ! But behe has the old knightly faith, the 
 
1 THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD: 259 
 
 old gallant honour ! he gives his heart wifcli his passion he 
 must revere what he adores. He has seen me as I am to- 
 night ; the pain was deadly to him ; yet, if it rend me out 
 of his memory, he may live to be grateful for it.' 
 
 The warmth of the chamber seemed stifling to her, the 
 perfumed oil of the lamp oppressive ; the room itself, with 
 its hangings, its cabinets, its decorations, its countless 
 bagatelles of art and wealth, of extravagance and of effemi- 
 nacy, struck on her loathsomely. 
 
 1 Ah ! how like ruy life ! ' she thought, with an impetuous 
 scorn. * The pure day is shut out, and all that is heated, un- 
 real, luxurious, meretricious, worthless, is chosen instead ! 
 A diamond-studded, gas-lit, dangerous lie, instead of the 
 sunlight of truth ! ' 
 
 She pushed the heavy folds of a curtain back, and opened 
 the casement beyond it ; as the villa overhung the sea, so 
 the window jutting out overhung the rock, and gave to 
 view in one grand sweep the whole bow of the bay, with the 
 white mists of earliest day resting still midway between 
 earth and heaven. Sound there was none, save close at 
 hand the low music of a monaco's wing, and from afar the 
 swinging cadence of a chiming Angelus. 
 
 She stood silent, looking long outward through the 
 fragrant coils of orange-blossom and of climbing ivy that 
 hung in their green shadow before the oval of the window, 
 toward the waking world that smiled below. To her, whose 
 heart had never beaten for one of those which had throbbed 
 for her, there came at last some recoil of the suffering 
 which she had so often dealt, some touch of that futile pain 
 which for her and through her had been so often borne. 
 She saw still, in memory, the wondering and grieved re- 
 proach of the eyes which had haunted her throughout all 
 the past hours. 
 
 * Do I love ! I! 9 she thought, while a laugh half haughty, 
 half ironic, and yet more mournful than either, came on her 
 lips. And she turned back again from the brightness of 
 the day with a gesture of her old imperious disdain. She 
 was too proud, too sceptical, too used to command, too 
 unused to weakness, not to be loth to admit such yielding 
 folly in her, not to be contemptuous of her own softer 
 thoughts and tenderer impulses. Love ! to her it was a 
 fool's paradise, a gay and glittering masquerade, a sceptre 
 
260 1DAL1A. 
 
 with which to sway a court of madmen, a weapon with 
 which to reap the harvests -ef gold and power, a passion 
 that men got drunk with as with raki, and through which, 
 as they pampered or inflamed it, women could indirectly 
 rule the world. Her contempt for it had been as great as 
 the sovereignty with which she had used it. 
 
 It was bitter to her to think that she could have so much 
 weakness in her so much living still beneath all that she 
 had seen, known, done, to slay it by the roots. Something 
 of the warmth of passion, something of its tenderness, were 
 on her ; and she flung them away, she would not have them. 
 The unquestioning fealty which was ready to do her will at 
 all and any cost, the devotion to her which, without any re- 
 compense, any hope, any self-interest, accepted the peril 
 from which she had offered to free him, and with a simple 
 grandeur claimed the right to be true to his word : these 
 moved her as nothing else could have done. Tempests had 
 swept over her, leaving her utterly unswayed by them ; the 
 rarity which touched her as something strange and un- 
 familiar was the unselfishness of the love he bore her. 
 Many had loved her as well ; none so generously. 
 
 She could see the shore far below down through a 
 wreathing, shimmering interspace of green leaves. She 
 had rescued men at far keener closer danger than there was 
 in this. She had gone to Bussian mask balls, ignorant 
 whether at any moment the hand of an Imperial officer might 
 not be laid on her domino, and her fettered limbs be borne 
 away without warning, through the frozen night, over 
 leagues on leagues and steppes on steppes of snow, to the Si- 
 berian doom which awaits the defenders of Poland. She had 
 swept at a wild gallop through the purple gloom of the mid- 
 night Campagna with her courage only rising the higher, 
 her eyes only gleaming the darker. She had glided in her 
 gondola through balmy spring sunsets, when all Venice was 
 wreathed and perfumed with flowers in some Austrian jfeste, 
 and had laughed, and coquetted, and stirred her fan, and 
 listened languidly to the music, while hidden beneath her 
 awning was one whom the casemates of the Quadrilateral 
 Vvould enclose only to let him issue to his death, unless her 
 skill could save him. She had passed through many hours 
 of supreme peril, personal and for others, and the dis- 
 quietude had not been on her that was on her now 
 
'THE LIGHT IN THE DUST LIES DEAD: 261 
 
 She leaned there against the casement watching the 
 beach beneath, where it stretched out along the glittering 
 Eea. It was still only the daybreak, but the fisher-folk 
 were astir, in different groups, spreading out their nets in 
 the warmth of the rising sun, or putting out in their boats 
 from the shore. There was glowing colour, picturesque 
 movement, life, healthful, active, innocent, along the gray 
 line of the sand ; she sighed half impatiently as she watched 
 it. Was it good to have no thought, save of a few fish ? 
 no fear, save of the black swoop of the mistral ? no care 
 in life, save for those striped sails, and those brown keels, 
 and those sun-browned, half-naked children tumbling in 
 the surf? 
 
 No ; she did not so belie herself as to cheat her thoughts 
 into the lie ; she would not have relinquished the power, 
 the genius, the vitality, the knowledge of her life, for a 
 thousand years of the supreme passionless calm that looks 
 out from the eyes of Egyptian statues, far less for the dull 
 brute routine of peasant ignorance and common joys. 
 
 On the sands Erceldoune waited, leaning against a ledge 
 of rock, with his eyes fixed absently on the waters. Even 
 at the distance he was from her she could see the profound 
 weariness that had altered his bold and soldier-like bearing, 
 the hopeless melancholy that darkened his face as the light 
 of the dawn fell upon it. She was not a woman to wish 
 things done undone, or to know the vacillations of regret ; 
 yet, in the moment, she almost wished the words unspoken 
 which had been uttered by her in a sudden impulse and re- 
 solve to let him blind himself no longer. 
 
 ' It is useless to try and save him no\v,' she thought ; * he 
 will never forget.' 
 
 There was something which touched her infinitely in that 
 guard he kept there ; patient as the Pompeian soldier stand- 
 ing at his post, while the dark cloud of the ashes and the 
 liquid torrent of lava-flame poured down, certain as he that 
 no reward could come to him for his unrecompensed obe- 
 dience, save perhaps one death. 
 
 The Venetians left her garden. She saw them approach, 
 and address him ; she saw him start as the elder man 
 handed him the ring, and, as he took it, give one upward 
 glance at the eyrie of the villa where she leaned. Then he 
 signed to him the sailor whom he had first spoken with on 
 the night of his arrival at Capri. 
 
262 ID ALIA. 
 
 There was an instant's terrible suspense as the Capriote 
 stood curiously eyeing these two unknown sailors, whose 
 presence, on his shore he felt odd and unwelcome, since 
 living was poor in the Piccola Marina, and strangers likely 
 to take a share of it were commonly roughly handled : then 
 he gave good-humoured assent to whatever had been asked 
 of him, and launched his boat into the breakers with the 
 single force of his broad breast and brawny arms. He 
 motioned the unknown fishermen to take the oars, with 
 somewhat of a sullen grace, as though their advent still 
 annoyed him ; he took the helm himself ; Erceldoune flung 
 his limbs down across the benches ; the little skiff put out 
 to sea. Thus far the work was done. 
 
 As the boat left the shore he turned, rose slightly, and 
 looked back at Capri; that mute farewell, that speechless 
 witness of how his promise had been redeemed, smote her 
 keenly. 
 
 She watched the movement of the boat through the 
 waves, with the daybreak light upon the stripes of its 
 orange awning- watched it as it receded farther and farther, 
 the tall figure of the Capriote standing at the prow, in his 
 loose white shirt and his brown brigand-like Italian beauty 
 watched it till it swept out unarrested, unobserved, to 
 where the yacht rocked at anchor. 
 
 The boat reached the vessel's side ; a while longer, and 
 the anchor weighed in the quiet of the dawn, while the 
 only things that stirred on the whole width of the bay were 
 a few scattered fishing-craft. She, leaning there against the 
 gray of the stone, looking out through the wreaths of the 
 leaves, never left her watch, never relaxed her gaze. She 
 knew the tigers who slept yonder where Naples lay ; she 
 knew the cannon that would boom out through the sunny 
 air if the errand of the Etoile was dreamed of ; she knew 
 the dungeons that yawned in the Yicaria for those who 
 fled. She could not tell how much, how little, of the 
 escape that she had organised was known to the Bourbon 
 tourt ; she could not tell that the government of Francis 
 bright not be only seeming to slumber, that it might crouch 
 like a jungle-beast the surer to seize. She could not tell, 
 even though to no living being had a word been whispered 
 jf her intent ; she could not tell, for walls have ears wher9 
 tyranny rules and priest-craft listens, 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 263 
 
 Any moment while the anchor was slowly wound up- 
 ward, and the rigging of the yacht swarmed with eager 
 sailors, the alarm-gun might boom from Naples, and the 
 pursuit run down the schooner, boarding and swamping 
 her in the midst of the smiling seas of the tranquil 
 dawn. 
 
 At last she moved ; her white sails filled with a fair 
 wind, her helm was turned straight westward, her ensign of 
 St. G-eorge fluttered in the favouring breeze. With an 
 easy gliding motion, like a swan's, she passed through the 
 sunlit waters, unnoticed, unpursued. Against her rails 
 one figure leaned motionless ; his eyes were turned toward 
 the rock, hanging so far above, where the villa was sus- 
 pended like a falcon's nest ; turned there always while the 
 yacht passed onward, out beyond Capri, beyond Ischia, 
 beyond the range of Neapolitan guns and the pursuit of 
 Neapolitan ships, outward to round the snow peaks of the 
 eyrie of the Bonaparte eaglets, and to steer on toward the 
 southern coast of France, in safety. 
 
 As it receded, slowly, surely, till its sails looked no 
 larger :han the sea-gulls that flew past her, and the busy 
 day of the young summer awoke all around the semicircle 
 of the bay, then, only then, Idalia moved and left the ivy- 
 sheltered casement. From the glittering stretch of the 
 azure seas, as from the thoughts newly arisen in her, she 
 turned, with a pang of pain, with a throe of regret, the 
 bitterness of pride repelling weakness, the bitterness of 
 pride wirring with remorse. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 'MORE *REAT IN MARTYRDOM THAN THRONED AS 
 MATE.' 
 
 AT tie Prince of Viana's villa in the interior there was 
 a masqierade ; brilliant, gorgeous, like the splendid feste 
 of medieval Italy, of Venice in its Dandolo glory, when 
 the galbys swept home with the rich Byzantine spoils; of 
 Florence while Isabel Orsini was in her loveliness, and the 
 
264 ID ALIA. 
 
 Capello beamed her sunny fatal smile, and even grave Ma- 
 chiavel sauntered well amused through the festive Gardens 
 of Delight, when the Embassies of the Ten came in their 
 purple pomp, or the City of Flowers laughed through end- 
 less mirth and music. The fete was very magnificent at 
 the palace of Antina, given by lavish princely hands that 
 scattered their gold right and left, and vied with the Gram- 
 mont and the Doria brilliance away yonder in old Borne. 
 That at it other masks were worn than those black Vene- 
 tian ones of pleasure, that beneath the swell of the music 
 words of menace and danger were exchanged, that the 
 domino was only donned that the sword might be surely 
 drawn hereafter, that under the dewy orange-boughs, and 
 beside the starlit waters, and on the marble stairs, and 
 under the light exchange of frivolous wit, intrigues were 
 woven and dark plans made perfect, these no more dis- 
 turbed the gaiety and the glory of the Antina masquerade 
 than such had disturbed the laughing tide of festivilies in 
 Venice, or the garden fetes of the Tuscans in the Cinque 
 Cento. Bather they suited and enhanced it; it ivas in 
 Italy, and they made it but the more Italian. It was the 
 dagger of Sforza glancing beneath the Arlecchino spangles 
 and colours of Goldoni. Whoso cannot understand this 
 mingling the laugh and the harlequinade as reallyjoyous 
 as the steel and the stroke are surely subtle car never 
 understand the Italy of the Past : perhaps not the Etaly of 
 the Present. 
 
 Around one the masquers gathered with passing lomage, 
 around one the groups were more eager, more sedulous, 
 more vivacious in their wit, more earnest in their under- 
 current of political discussion than round any otler ; for 
 on the elegance of the azure domino was the well-known 
 badge of the Silver Ivy, that rallying symbol which 
 brought to her all the lovers and the vassals o:' Idalia. 
 She reigned there, as she had reigned wherever ler foot 
 fell, since the day, ' eight years before, when she lad left 
 the leafy shadows and the yellow corn-lands of Soarta to 
 come out to this world of mystery, intrigue, romance, 
 danger, and pleasure, which she had made so wblly her 
 own. 
 
 It has been said, ' Every woman is at heart a botemian. 
 Idalia was one to the core, all proud and patrician though 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 265 
 
 she was. The excitement and the peril of her life, with 
 its vivid colour and its changing chances, she would not 
 have exchanged for the eternal monotony of the most per- 
 fect calm ; not even when she most utterly loathed, most 
 utterly rebelled against the bondage which had entered in 
 with the life she pursued. She was weary with herself 
 often for the evil that she had done, she hated with an in- 
 tense hatred the chains that had wound themselves round 
 her freedom-loving, liberty-craving nature ; but all the 
 same, once plunged into the whirlpool of the dangers she 
 directed, of the excitations she enjoyed, Idalia would not 
 have laid them down and left them left her sceptre and 
 her peril without a pang bitter as that which tears life 
 out, without a lingering and unbearable regret. It is false 
 philosophy to say that those who have been once launched 
 on a career which bears them now in the sunlight, now in 
 the storm-shadow, now high on laughing waves of pleasure, 
 now low sunk down under black bitter waters, varying 
 ever, yet ever full of a tempestuous delight, of a headlong 
 risk, of an abundant luxuriant glow and intensity of life, 
 will ever willingly return to the dull flow of tideless and 
 uncheckered streams. They may in moments of exhaus- 
 tion fancy that they would willingly take the patience and 
 the monotony of serene unnoted lives human nature will 
 ever at times, be it in king or peasant, turn from what it 
 has to sigh for what it has not; -but it is only fancy, and 
 a passing one they would never for a second make it a 
 reality. 
 
 Thus it was with Idalia now ; remorse haunted her, cap- 
 tivity in a sense galled her with terrible fetters ; often she 
 hated herself and hated those around her ; yet once in the 
 vortex of the intrigues and the ambitions which had so 
 long possessed her, she forgot all else. Thus she forgot 
 all save them here at the Antina masquerade. It was 
 not that she was changed ; it was not that her other 
 impulses were not vitally and deeply true ; it was simply 
 that the dominant side of her character now came into 
 play, and the love of power that was in her usurped its 
 ancient sway. 
 
 Moreover, here, though she scorned and abhorred many 
 >f the companions and tools that the cause necessitated 
 and employed, the cause itself was a pure and lofty one j 
 
266 IDALIA. 
 
 one for which her will could never slacken, her love never 
 grow cold ; it was the freedom and the indivisibility oi 
 Italy. 
 
 This was in the hearts, often on the lips, of all those to- 
 night at Antina ; amid the music, the laughter, the wit, 
 the balmy air breathed over a million flowers, with the 
 melodies of nightingales' tender throats, and the flash ot 
 fire-flies among the groves of myrtle, and in the endless 
 reception-chambers, with their jasper and their onyx, 
 their malachite and their porphyry, stretching on- 
 ward till the eye was lost in the colonnades of pillars, in the 
 flood of light, in the sea of colour. It was a scene from 
 the Italy of the Eenaissance, from the Italy of the Cinque 
 Cento, from the Italy of Goldoni, of Boccaccio, of Tullia 
 d'Arragona, of Bembo, of Borgia ; but beneath it ran a 
 vein of thought, a stream of revolution, a throb of daring 
 that gave it also a memory of Dantesque grandeur, of 
 Gracchan aspirations, of Julian force : ' One Italy for the 
 Italians ! ' vibrated through it ; an echo, though a faint and 
 distant one, of the ancient challenge, * The whole earth for 
 the Romans.' 
 
 Suddenly through the glittering gaiety of the masque- 
 rade, the magnificence of the princely banquet, the mirth 
 of the Neapolitan revelries, an icy whisper ran ; it was 
 vague, unformed ; it died half spoken upon every lip, yet 
 it blanched the boldest blood ; it was but one sickening, 
 shameful, accursed word 'betrayed! ' 
 
 The music ceased, the laughs hushed, there was a strange 
 instantaneous pause in all the vivacious life, filling the 
 palace and the gardens with its colour and its mirth ; 
 there was such a lull as comes over sea and land before 
 the breaking of the storm. Men looked in each other's 
 faces with a terrible dread responsive in each other's eyes ; 
 glance met glance in a mute inquiry ; friend gazed at 
 friend in a wild search for truth, a bitter breathless thought 
 of unmeasured suspicion ; there was a chill, black, deadly 
 horror over all none knew whom to trust. On the still- 
 ness that had succeeded the music, the laughter, and the 
 festivity, sounded dully the iron tread of heavily-armed 
 men ; where the golden fire-flies glistened among the leaves, 
 glistened instead the shine of steel ; on the terraces and 
 far down the gardens gleamed the blades of bayonets, the 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 267 
 
 barrels of musketry; the earth seemed in a moment to 
 grow alive with swarming men, and bristling with levelled 
 weapons; gendarmes filled the piazza and the courts ; the 
 soldiers of Francis were upon them. There was an instant's 
 silence so intense that the murmur of the bubbling fountains 
 alone reigned in it ; then with a shock like thunder the bold 
 blood of the sons of liberty, growing desperate, thew them 
 in head-long violence unarmed upon their foes. Little avail ; 
 the solid line of steel was drawn around, with not an 
 inch unfilled ; they were hemmed in and caught in the 
 toils. 
 
 Carlo of Viana, with his careless eyes alight like a lion's 
 in its wrath, tore down from where it hung a keen Da- 
 mascus sword, placed amid a stand of curiously wrought 
 and antique arms, and strode over the mosaic pavement to 
 one of his guests, whose azure domino was broidered and 
 fastened with wreaths of silver ivy. 
 
 His voice shook as he stooped to her ear. 
 
 1 Madame Idalia this is more for you than us. Pol- 
 low me at once ; there is a secret passage that no living 
 creature knows besides myself; I can save you I will save 
 you!' 
 
 f I thank you deeply. But I shall not fly from 
 them ! ' 
 
 ' My G-od ! Not fly ? Do you not know that if you 
 are taken ' 
 
 Her lips might be a shade whiter, but her voice had no 
 hesitation as she answered him : 
 
 6 My fate will not be worse than others' ; whatever is 
 theirs, 1 share.' 
 
 Carlo of Yiana drew the broad blade with a ringing echo 
 from the sheath : 
 
 ' Mother of Christ ! then we will defend you while life is 
 in us ! ' 
 
 At that very moment the storm broke, the tumult 
 began ; the gay masquers fled in from the terraces and 
 gardens like sheep driven wild by a wolf-dog; the ban- 
 queters seized th'e antique weapons, the weighty cande- 
 labra, the bronzes, the toy daggers all and anything that 
 would crash through like iron, or be hurled like stones- 
 the double lines of steel drew closer, and filled in every 
 aperture, blocked every door of egress ; an officer ad- 
 
2 OS ID ALIA. 
 
 vanced to the centre of the great arch that spanned the 
 entrance of the first reception-room, and addressed the 
 Prince himself. 
 
 1 Eccellenza, in the King's name I demand your unquali- 
 fied submission, and your surrender to me of all suspected 
 persons notably, first, of the notorious revolutionist 
 known by the title of the Countess Vassalis. 5 
 
 For all answer with a mighty oath that rang through all 
 his banqueting-chambers, Viana lifted his arm, and whirled 
 in a flashing arc above his head the bright blade of the 
 Persian steel. 
 
 Idalia bent forward with a swift gesture, which caught 
 his wrist, and arrested the sabre in its downward course. 
 Then, turning to the King's officer, she removed her 
 Venetian mask, and looked at him calmly. 
 
 i If it will spare the shedding of innocent blood, you 
 know me now.' 
 
 For one moment there was a dead silence the hush 
 of speechless surprise, of speechless admiration ; the emo- 
 tion of a passionate love, of a passionate pride in and 
 for her, filled the hearts of her own people with an agony 
 of homage and of grief. The soldiers of the Bourbons 
 were arrested for the instant, paralysed and confounded as 
 they looked on her, fronting them with a proud serenity, 
 a dauntless, tranquil contempt, with the light on her 
 diamond-bound hair. Then, as the officer of the palace 
 troops advanced to arrest her, his soldiers drawn closer and 
 firmer round the banquetmg-hall, the shouts of 'Viva 
 Tltalia ! ' { Viva la liberta ! ' shook the walls with the roll 
 of thunder ; a hundred who would have died at her feet 
 to save a dog of hers from injury threw themselves round 
 her as in a guard of honour. Driven to bay, the lovers of 
 freedom, the haters of tyranny, were ready to perish, shot 
 down like hunted beasts, rather than ever yield. Carlo of 
 Viana flung himself in the van, his sabre flashing above his 
 head ; the gay and splendid dresses of the maskers, glit- 
 tering in the light, seemed to heave and toss like a sea of 
 colour ; they circled her like gardes du " corps ; their im- 
 provised weapons, torn from the tables, from the cabinets, 
 from the walls, whirled in the radiance that burned from 
 innumerable lamps. Idalia's eyes gleamed with such fire 
 as might have been in the eyes of Arternesia when she 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 269 
 
 bore her prow down ou the Persian ; of Autonina when 
 she pierced the armies of the G-oths, holding watch and 
 ward to sack Imperial Rome ; of Boadicea when she led 
 the Iceni on to the fasces and the standards of the con- 
 quering legions. She would have given herself to save 
 them ; but since they, with or without her, must be doomed 
 her whole soul rose responsive to the challenge of danger, 
 to the defiance of submission. 
 
 Her glance beamed on them with a superb light ; sign of 
 fear, thought of terror, there were none on her ; she stood 
 unmoved, the centre of that tossing ocean of colour, of 
 steel, of floating dominoes, of levelled pistols, and glanced 
 at Viana with a glance that thrilled him like flame, and 
 made him drunk like wine. 
 
 ' Eight. If they must take us, let us be dead first ! ' 
 
 As touchwood to the flash of fire, their blood and their 
 wills answered her bidding. With a single sweep of his 
 arm, Viana felled down the commander who faced him, in 
 a stroke that cleft straight through bone and brain ; it was 
 the signal of a life and death resistance. With a yell of 
 fury the soldiers closed in ; a single voice from one unseen 
 rose clear above the din. 
 
 ' Eeserve your fire ; cut those carrion down like straw, 
 and capture her alive ! ' 
 
 The voice was the voice of supreme command ; officers 
 and troops alike obeyed it. It was the mellow clarion tone 
 of Giulio Villaflor, if the Priest of Peace could be the chief 
 of such an errand. "With bayonets fixed, in ranks three deep, 
 pressing steadily through the courts and chambers, the 
 soldiers of Francis bore down on the band of the maskers. 
 Not a man wavered as the pointed file of steel pressed to- 
 wards them. Their masks flung aside, lest in that moment 
 of supreme danger any should deem them guilty of the 
 wish to hide beneath disguise, their right arms lifted, their 
 brave faces set, the Revolutionists waited the approach of 
 the loyalists waited till there was scarce a foot's breadth 
 between their circle and the naked blades levelled against 
 them. Then, with a marvellous unison, as she raised her 
 hand, they launched themselves forward, Viana in their van; 
 and the weapons with which the haste of extremity had 
 armed them fell with furious strength and lightning speed 
 
270 1DAL1A. 
 
 crash down on the ranks of the soldiers. Strange weapons 
 the embossed barrels of old Florentine arquebuses, the 
 butt-ends of toy ivory pistols, the bronzed weight of lifted 
 statuettes, the gold-handled knives of the banquet-tables, 
 the massive metal of Cellini vases, the arabesqued steel of 
 mediaeval rapiers anything, everything that could have 
 been torn down in the moment, from the art-treasures 
 round, were hurled as stones are hurled from a barricade, 
 down on the advancing troops of the King with mighty 
 force, with tremendous issue. The Bourbon legionaries 
 reeled and wavered under that pitiless storm, that fell like 
 thunder-bolts upon them. More than one swayed back 
 stone dead, as the bronze or gold missile of some statuary 
 or amphora felled him to the ground. Forbidden to fire, 
 they hesitated, dismayed, before that terrible band of revel- 
 lers turned to warriors, of maskers changed to foemen, of 
 idle laughing wits and dancers grown desperate, as men who 
 fought for more than life. The Eoyalists recoiled ; they 
 were chiefly mercenaries of various nations ; they could not 
 front the blazing glance, the tiger swoop, the proud, passion- 
 heated scorn, the fearless menace of Italian nobles and 
 Italian patriots. From the gloom of the night without, the 
 same clarion voice rolled, clear as a bell's, merciless as a 
 Nero's. 
 
 ( Cowards, perdition seize you ! Advance and fire on 
 them.' 
 
 It was a strange battle-field the beautiful ball- room and 
 ban queting-h alls of Antina! It was a strange battle-scene! 
 The circle of the dominoes, like a ring of many colours, 
 were belted round the form of Idalia like guards around 
 their menaced queen ; the dead men were lying with their 
 blood slowly welling out over the rich mosaics and the 
 velvet carpets ; the soldiers of the throne had halted in a 
 broken line ; the light that had been lit for the gaieties of 
 the masquerade was shining on carnage and on combat ; the 
 splendours of the palace were stretching out and away 
 beyond aisle on aisle of porphyry columns, through circle 
 on circle of rose-wreathed arches ; while without, through 
 the marble pillars of the piazza, were the silver silence of 
 the night and the shadows of innumerable forms gathering 
 closer and closer to seal all hope from those who fought for 
 liberty. 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 2? 1 
 
 There was a sharp, sudden, ringing clash as the bayonets 
 were withdrawn and the rifles levelled ; not one in the 
 circle swerved or grew the paler ; their eyes, steady but 
 full of flame like a lion's at bay, looked down the mouths 
 of the musketry. Id alia stood tranquil ; and as they saw 
 the serene disdain in that royal glance, the unwavering 
 courage on that rich and haughty loveliness, the troops ol 
 the King paused involuntarily. They dared not fire at 
 her. 
 
 The voice from the gardens rang imperiously through 
 the stillness. 
 
 ' Dastards, you shall be shot down with them ! Fire ! " 
 
 The last word was not for the halting and paralysed 
 soldiers of the front ; it reached farther, to where unseen 
 and massed in countless numbers, the picked men of 
 Francis's G-uard bad marched noiselessly through the oppo- 
 site doors of the banqueting-room, and circled the band of 
 patriots in the rear with an impassable barrier, meshing 
 them in one net beyond escape. They had not heard, they 
 had not seen, they knew nothing of the ambuscade behind 
 them, where they stood gathered around Idalia, facing their 
 foes and holding them back by the menace of their eyes, as 
 men hold back wild beasts, in gallant and dauntless chivalry, 
 willing each one of them to lay down their lives that night 
 rather than yield her up in passive cowardice to her foes. 
 They never saw, they never heard : behind them stole the 
 murderous tread, filling up the rear of the lofty hall with 
 rank on rank of soldiers. Then suddenly, as the word to 
 fire rang in its merciless command from the outer court, 
 the line of rifles belched forth its flame ; the sullen roar of 
 the shots echoed through the chamber, raking the glittering 
 colours of the masquerade robes as the driving hail rakes 
 the wheat and the flowers of a full cornfield. Shot down 
 from the rear in that craven murder, they fell, the balls in 
 their breasts or their temples a fourth of them levelled 
 low ; yet not a moan, not a cry escaped one of them ; not 
 a prayer for pity broke from the lips wet with their life- 
 blood ; not a sigh of agony escaped those whose nerves were 
 rent, whose bone was shattered, whose lungs were pierced 
 by that dastardly masked attack. JS"ot a cry, not a suppli- 
 cation, broke even from Idalia, as the crash of the firing 
 rolled over the devoted band that guarded her. JSTot for 
 
272 ID ALIA, 
 
 the first time did she look on bloodshed, nor for the 
 first time meet the likeness of her death ; but as they 
 fell downward at her feet, stricken like felled trees, a 
 mortal anguish came into her fearless eyes ; she stretched 
 her arms out less with entreaty than command. 
 
 ' Spare them ! To save them I will surrender.' 
 
 6 By Christ, not for ten thousand lives ! ' cried Carlo of 
 Viaua, where he stood out of the deadly press, his reeking 
 sword held aloft before her. ' Surrender you ! They shall 
 only take you when we all lie dead around you.' 
 
 She grasped his arm and looked up in his face. There 
 was no more of fear, no more of shrinking, than there were 
 on his own ; only in her eyes a superb heroism, on her lips 
 a passionate entreaty. 
 
 e Serve me better still, my noble friend. Turn your sword 
 here' 
 
 The tumult was at its height ; emboldened by the fate 
 of those shot down from the rear, the loyalists of the front 
 pressed in. "Wedged between two barriers, the patriots 
 fought with mad despair, with lion courage. Where Viana 
 stood, pausing one instant as she turned and made her 
 prayer to him, he looked down into her eyes with an agony 
 far greater than her own. He knew that death were 
 sweeter far to her than the fate that would await her 
 from her foes; he knew that she had in her the 
 courage of Lucretia, the force of the wife of Psetus; 
 but to slay with his own hand that perfect loveliness, to 
 destroy with his own steel the pulse of that splendid 
 and gracious life! He dropped his head with a shudder 
 * I cannot ! ' 
 
 Scarcely had the words left his lips, when the blade of a 
 bayonet pierced his lungs. He fell like a mighty cedar 
 lightning-stricken ; not dead, but dying fast. The roar of 
 the combat, the ring of the shots, the tumult of the conflict, 
 as the betrayed were pressed between the wedge of the 
 Royalist van and rear, were filling his palace chambers 
 with their riot and their anguish ; he knew no more of 
 sight, or sound, or life. He only looked up with blind eyes, 
 that, through their mists, vainly and solely sought for one. 
 His lips parted with a murmur : ' Idalia ! Italy ! ' Then, 
 with those names his latest thought, a shiver shook him as 
 the red blood streamed through all the laces and the silks 
 
GREAT IN MARTYRDOM. 273 
 
 the violet and the silver and the jewels of his aress ; and, 
 with one deep-drawn lingering sigh, he died. 
 
 She sank beside him on her knees, and her own danger, 
 and the conflict of the night that raged in its fiery struggle, 
 its mortal misery, around, died from her memory, and 
 grew dull upon her sense. She only remembered the man 
 who lay here at her feet dead dead through the love 
 he bore her; dead through the creeds she had breathed 
 in him ; dead for her and by her, as though her hand had 
 slain him. 
 
 The fearless grandeur faded from her face that had been 
 there throughout all chance of her own death ; it grew 
 white and cold and fixed ; a tearless grief, a burning re- 
 morse, were in her eyes, which only saw that crimson 
 stream of flowing blood staining the tesselated floor, and 
 that brave, bold, serene face turned upward to the light of 
 million lamps, studding like stars the vault of the dome 
 above. 
 
 ' Let them take me,' she thought ; ' it is just. What am 
 I better than a murderess ? ' 
 
 From the gloom of the outer court rang ouce more the 
 voice of command. 
 
 ' Seize her! You can choke the dogs of rebels at your 
 leisure.' 
 
 She never heard the pitiless clarion of those clear tones ; 
 she never felt the hiss of the balls past her ; she never saw 
 the ghastly conflict that filled the palace festive chambers 
 with its clamour and its carnage, as men armed strong 
 with the weight of tyranny and law pressed down on men 
 who fought for liberty, for conscience, for their land, and 
 for their lives. She thought only of the dead who lay 
 around her. 
 
 Two officers of the guard, obedient, stooped and laid 
 their grasp upon her. The action roused her from the 
 unconscious stupor with which she knelt beside the lifeless 
 limbs ; she shook them off and rose facing them, still with 
 that remorse in her tearless eyes, though on her face were 
 a scorn and a daring which held those whom she threw 
 off at bay as surely as the most desperate resistance of 
 shot or steel. 
 
 She glanced down the hall, under the dome of the light- 
 studded ceiling that stretched over so vast an area, of all 
 
 T 
 
274 JDALIA. 
 
 which hart been a few brief moments before filled with music 
 aud mirth and the murmur of laughing voices. She took no 
 heed of those who had sought to seize her ; but her eyes 
 gazed with an infinite yearning out on her defenders holding 
 that unequal life and death struggle between the closing 
 barriers of bayonets, and her voice echoed, clear and elo- 
 quent, yet with a music that thrilled the hearts even of her 
 enemies. 
 
 ''My friends my frk-nds! lose no more for me. Death 
 is liberty, but it cannot be mine; give me no other murdered 
 lives to lie heavy on my own. Save yourselves by sur- 
 render, by flight, how you can, and think no more of me. 
 The future will yet avenge us all/ 
 
 The voice of the chief in command rang down again from 
 the dusky shadows of the piazza. 
 
 i Soldiers ! seize and silence her. She speaks sedition/ 
 
 The officers, gentler than he who had hounded them on 
 to their work, stooped, hesitating, to her. 
 
 1 You surrender ? ' 
 
 She looked at them with a look that for the moment 
 flashed back all the proud contemptuous light upon her 
 face, and lit in her deep eyes the glow of the old heroism. 
 
 * If the carnage cease/ 
 
 The voice from the outer courts answered her, imperious 
 and unyielding: 
 
 c We make no terms with revolutionists and rebels/ 
 
 ' I make no peace with tyrants and assassins/ 
 
 Her return-defiance challenged her unseen foe with a 
 calm grandeur ; she stood above the fallen dead as some 
 prophetess of Israel, some goddess in the Homeric age, 
 might have stood above the slain, and called down ven- 
 geance. 
 
 From the darkness of the piazza a hot and heavy oath 
 broke through the clamour. 
 
 ' Yield ! or we will deal with you as we deal with men/ 
 
 A smile of utter unspeakable scorn passed over her lips 
 scorn for the cowardice that could threaten her thus 
 scorn for the craven temper that could deem death so vic- 
 torious a menace. 
 
 She looked down tranquilly on the gleaming barrels of 
 the rifles, and as her lover, in the far Carpathian Pass, had 
 given the word for his own death -shot, so she gave hers now 
 Her eyes rested steadily on the Royalists. 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT. 1 275 
 
 Tire.' 
 
 The soldiers of the King gazed at her, then dropped the 
 muzzles of their muskets slowly downward and downward; 
 they hung their heads, and their eyes fell, while from one 
 to another ran a sullen rebellious murmur. 
 
 ' Non possiamo ! ' 
 
 There was an instant's intense stillness once more ; the 
 tumult ceased, the clamour died away, the uplifted steel 
 sank, the iron grip relaxed ; aggressors and defenders, re- 
 volutionists and royalists, alike were mute and awed before 
 the courage of one woman. Then, with the fury of a 
 mighty oath, a fresh command was hissed in its ferocity from 
 the garden gloom, where the chiefs looked on into the 
 courts and chambers. 
 
 ' Make her captive dead or living ! ' 
 
 There were ruffians in that Eoyal Guard, brigands of the 
 Abruzzi, mountaineers of Calabria, who had imbrued their 
 hands in innocent blood, and knew no check upon their 
 crimes, though they would mutter Aves for their black and 
 poisonous souls like any nun before her crucifix. These 
 heard but to obey. They launched themselves upon her ; 
 they flung themselves through the press to seize her ; their 
 swords flashed naked above her head, their ravenous eyes 
 fed gloatingly upon her jewels and her beauty ; their brutal 
 hands stretched ruthlessly to grasp and crush the gold of 
 the shining hair, the mould of the delicate limbs, the 
 fairness of the transparent skin ; their gripe was on her 
 shoulder, their breath was on her bosom. With the horror 
 and the grace of outraged dignity, Idalia shook their hold 
 from her, and drew herself from the loathsome insult o( 
 their villainous contact; her eyes shone with the lustre of 
 a passionate scorn, her voice mellow, imperious, unshaken, 
 rang outward to the terrace where her tyrants herded. 
 
 'I surrender! not to escape death, but to escape the 
 pollution of your touch.' 
 
 CHAPTEE XXL 
 
 'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AKD I DID EAT.' 
 
 IN the Neapolitan palazetto, which was the residence of 
 Victor Yane, the light of the summer morning made its 
 
 T 2 
 
376 IDALIA. 
 
 way through half-closed blinds, the odours of orange and 
 myrtle were heavy to oppression on the air, the waters beat 
 a lulling measure below, at the foot of the little pier ; it 
 was still, soft, indolently charming, slumberously restful in 
 the noontide hush ; yet he himself commonly so calm, so 
 languid, so supreme an artist in the science of lazy plea- 
 sures had no repose in it or in his own life. He was pac- 
 ing up and down the chamber that opened on the terrace 
 with a restless impatience, a feverish irritation with all 
 things that were about him. He drank down some claret 
 fresh from the ice ; it seemed to have no coolness in it ; he 
 twisted some grapes asunder, and they seemed to parch his 
 mouth ; he smoked an opium-filled narghile, and flung the 
 tube away with a curse ; the nicotine had lost its charm, 
 and irritated where it was wont to soothe ; then he flung 
 himself down on a couch, with his head dropped on his 
 hands, and sat there immovable many moments, with a 
 quick shudder running through his limbs, and the silence 
 about him like a dead intolerable weight. For now that 
 his work was done he loathed it ; now that he had betrayed 
 her, he could have killed himself; now that he had given 
 her over to captivity and torture, he was haunted, and 
 wrung, and maddened with the thoughts that for ever pur- 
 sued him. Yet he would not have undone it if he could ; 
 he would not have foregone his revenge had it been in his 
 power ; since she was denied to him, he loved to know that 
 she suffered, that she had pain, and fetters, and shame, that 
 she would live to wish she had listened to his love, and to 
 feel the cost of having mocked him and repulsed him. 
 
 She had refused him all the sweetness of passion ; he 
 would not have loosened his hand on its vengeance. Since 
 she could never be his, let her lose all likeness of herself, 
 and perish as she might ! There was fierceness enough in 
 him to feel that ruthlessly ; there was sufficient savageness 
 in him beneath the polish of the world and the serenity of 
 his egotism to be eager thirstily and brutally eager to 
 know that what was beyond his reach, what he sought 
 vainly, what he desired unavailingly, would be scourged, 
 and defaced, and insulted, and shut out from all place on 
 the earth. And yet, though he had given her up to her 
 suffering, aud would not, had he owned the power now, 
 have released her from one pang of it ? he suffered himself 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT: 277 
 
 suffered a torture not less than that to which lie had de- 
 livered her. He knew the doom that would be hers under 
 the revenge of a Church and State so bitterly incensed 
 against her ; he knew that the net which had enclosed her 
 would never unloose to let her issue with her life; he knew 
 that if she ever came forth from the captivity into which he 
 had betrayed her, it would only be when bondage, and 
 stripes, and the companionship of infamy, and the approach 
 of age, would leave no trace on her of all which she once 
 had been; he knew for against them all his hatred had 
 been borne and his skill arrayed the full meaning of the 
 tyrannies of Bourbon and of Rome ; and there were times 
 when his passion endured agonies at the memory of the 
 scourge that would cut the fairness of her skin, of the 
 rough hands that would unveil her beauty, of the jail-ruffians 
 who would strip the delicate raiment off her limbs, of the 
 villainous glances that would gloat unchecked on her fallen 
 loveliness. Mercy he had none ; such love as he had borne 
 her was of the character to change into a relentless and en- 
 venomed hate ; but it was passion still, and there were 
 times when the thought of her yielded up to her adversary's 
 will, and buried for ever beneath the stones of a dungeon- 
 vault, drove his own revenge back into his heart, and tor- 
 tured him not less than that revenge could her. Moreover, 
 he had betrayed her ; he had sold her into the hands of her 
 foes, and though the subtle art of silken treachery had long 
 been a science in whose proficiency he took the highest 
 pride, there was manhood and there was dignity enough in 
 him to make his forehead burn with a red flush of shame 
 when there rose in remembrance before him the haughty 
 radiant challenge of her eyes, and to make him long to 
 know her dead in her youth, so that those eyes should never 
 be turned on him in accusation and rebuke. 
 
 ' Great heaven ! ' he muttered in his teeth, where he lay 
 with his head sunk on his arms, * if she would only have 
 believed I loved her ! ' 
 
 That was the one misery which had goaded him on to his 
 crime. Eor once in his life he had been in earnest ; for the 
 sole time, from his boyhood up, an emotion genuine, how- 
 ever alloyed, had risen in him. In what he had felt for 
 Idalia he had been true, with a truth he had never known 
 before ; for her he would have become anything that she 
 
278 ID ALIA. 
 
 had bidden him ; to win her he would have endured and 
 achieved all tasks she could have pointed out ; and in the 
 single hour in which this sincerity and this reality had pos- 
 sessed him, his own sceptical mockery had recoiled on him 
 in hers ; he had been powerless to induce her to hear one 
 beat save that of egotism in his heart ; he had been power- 
 less to make her credit one throb of love or loyalty in him. 
 That she should have rejected him he would have pardoned 
 her ; that she disbelieved him was the iron which went so 
 far down into his soul, and changed every desire in him into 
 one cruel thirst the thirst for his vengeance and for her 
 destruction. She had contemptuously doubted the force of 
 his love. Well! he had said in his teeth that she should 
 feel that force feel it in the weight of fetters, in the bur- 
 den of ignominy, in the oppression of dungeon solitude 
 feel it till she cursed the day that ever she braved it and 
 mocked at it. 
 
 A while ago, and he would have laughed in the beard of 
 any man who should have told him that such barbaric folly, 
 such desert passions as these, could ever blind and rule him. 
 Now he never resisted their sway, but let them burn out 
 his strength and consume his intellect as they would. 
 There were times when he shook opiates into his wines with 
 a hand that recked little whether it shook too little or too 
 much, and would have poured out a death-dose without a 
 tremor ; times when ambition seemed worthless as autumn 
 leaves, and he loathed life because life could never yield to 
 him the beauty of one woman. All who once loved Idalia 
 drank of a madragora that left them little of their natures, 
 nothing of their wisdom. Even he had no antidote against 
 it, but let it steal away his brain and pour its fire through 
 his limbs till the soft courtier grew a brute, till the subtle 
 politician became a fool, till the gentleman turned a traitor. 
 
 A sound, in one of the many chambers leading off from 
 the terrace-room in which he was, roused him. He was still 
 too much governed by long habit and discipline not to re- 
 cover himself instantly. "Whatever he felt was only given 
 way to in loneliness ; no looker-on could see any change in 
 his delicate immutable face, in his soft calm smile, in his 
 easy velvet indolence ; he would have profited little by hia 
 long study of the world if he could not have held Ins own in 
 finesse to the last. 
 
DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND 1 DID EAT.' 279 
 
 Into the apartment, with little ceremony and no apology, 
 Conrad Phaulcon came. His disguise was perfect. He was 
 used to assume one at any hour and for any need ; and in 
 the dress of a melon-seller, with his fair skin stained and 
 his auburn beard dyed black, his closest friend might have 
 passed him by, his sworn foe failed to challenge him. He 
 neither paused to watch nor ask if his host penetrated the 
 mask as he swept up towards Vane, his mobile mouth work- 
 ing, and his large brown eyes aflame. 
 
 ' Is this true ? ' 
 
 Victor had known him before he had heard his voice, and 
 was on his guard. He shrugged his shoulders where he 
 leaned against the side of the vine-shadowed window. 
 
 'You incarnate volcano, you will destroy us all someday! 
 An ostensible melon-seller forcing his way in to me in this 
 fashion ! Have you ever stopped to remember what the 
 household can think ? ' 
 
 * .Felix admitted me, and I gave him the password. But, 
 answer me, for Grod's sake, what of Idalia ? ' 
 
 ' What of her? Why, this of her, caro, that she is the 
 subject for a tragic study by that eminent artist, Monsignore 
 Giulio Villnflor, to which you will form a companion picture 
 if you trust to a basket of melons to pass you unnoticed 
 through Naples.' 
 
 The words were quite cool, quite unstudied, with just 
 enough of regret in their half-languid banter to keep them 
 from being mockery. Phaulcou's line frame shook passion- 
 ately as he heard; under the olive dye his cheek grew ashen; 
 he threw himself down and sobbed liked a child, wept as if 
 his heart would break, in uncontrolled emotion. 
 
 His friend stood looking at him some moments in silence, 
 with a certain impatient disdain. This Greek, handsome 
 as an Apollo, cruel at times as a Nero, and stained deep 
 with many a crime, was yet as a child in the sight of the 
 more controlled and astute Englishman ; a child in cowar- 
 dice, in impulsiveness, in caprice, in tyranny, in emotion, 
 with all a child's unguardedness, recklessness, mobility, and 
 love of torture. 
 
 ' Naturally, you regret,' he said at last very softly. ' You 
 nave not even killed your goose with the golden eggs your- 
 self, my poor Conrad, but see bird and gold both stolen at 
 a blow! Very naturally, you regret.' 
 
280 IDAL1A. 
 
 The silken irony, the mockery of pity, stung Phaulcon 
 like a shot. He started up, dashing the waves of his hair 
 out of his eyes, while great drops of dew stood on his fore- 
 head. 
 
 * Can you credit me nothing better than that ? ' 
 
 ' Caro mio, how can I credit you with anything bettei 
 than caring for money ? It is the one prudential virtue 
 which the world does crown.' 
 
 The Greek's teeth crushed his silken beard, while his 
 features quivered with the vivid uncontrolled emotion of 
 his changing temperament. 
 
 ' I am not thinking of her wealth ; I think of Tier : of my 
 own sins to her, of her beauty, of her genius, of her life.' 
 
 His voice sank in a deep sob ; he spoke but the truth for 
 the moment ; he thought for the instant not of himself, but 
 of Idalia ; not of his own danger, net of his own loss, but of 
 her torture. He loved her in his wayward tyrannous way ; 
 and for a while the love alone remained with him. 
 
 ' She is in the power of Villaflor,' he said fiercely. 
 Remorse was in him ; and remorse made him long to wreak 
 some savage vengeance somewhere ; he would have little 
 cared how or on whom. 
 
 ' They say so. You know as much as I do. It has been 
 a terrible blow to us ; to keep quiet and cover as much as 
 we can is all we &hall be able to do. There was great carnage 
 at Antina, and the arrests swept off all the musketry spared 
 among them your Countess. Indeed, she was doubtless 
 the chief object of all.' 
 
 ' "Where have they taken her ? ' 
 
 He spoke in his throat. At that moment he would have 
 rather had a hundred balls fired into his own breast than 
 have heard this of the woman he had so pitilessly chained 
 and tormented. 
 
 < Poverino ! how can \ve tell 1 It is not the fashion of the 
 court to disclose its secrets, nor of Monsignore to let profane 
 eyes see where his nets are spread.' 
 
 His voice was unmoved, and almost careless, though it, 
 wore a natural gravity of regret ; bub in his heart he endured 
 an agony greater than that of the man before him ; the 
 thought crossed him to what fate would the prince-bishop 
 devote a captive of the sex and the years and the charms of 
 the prisoner lie had betrayed to him ? 
 
"THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.' 281 
 
 Phaulcon's hand clencbed ; the muscles of his throat and 
 chest, where the loose shirt of the contadino left them to 
 view, swelled to bursting. Idalia was his treasury, his 
 sovereignty, his world, his sceptre; without her he was 
 nothing; of her he had made, with a twisted mixture in 
 him of fear and homage, of tyranny and weakness, of hate 
 and love, an empress who to him alone out of all the earth 
 was a slave, an enchanted wand with which he summoned 
 what he would, an idol that he treated as hunters treated 
 their statue of Pan when they reviled him because they 
 needed more wealth than he gave, and yet feared him with 
 a strange mingling of dread, of reverence, and of jealous 
 love. 
 
 ' Villaflor ? ' he repeated hoarsely ; ' that Satan of the 
 Church ? Better she had gone at once to her death. Are 
 you sure? How can you know ? ' 
 
 Vane had let slip in a momentary incaution the name of 
 his great priestly confederate ; he veiled the indiscretion 
 with his finest tact. 
 
 * How can I doubt ? ' he said, with an acrid impatience 
 that passed well enough for aversion to a mutual and om- 
 nipotent foe. * Was Giulio Villaflor ever absent from such 
 errands as those? Did his brain ever fail to hatch such 
 plots as those by which the maskers of Antina were en- 
 trapped, however little his hand might be seen, or his will 
 
 ( be guessed in them ? His special hatred always bore down 
 on the Countess Vassalis. There is no more doubt that he 
 works beneath this, if he do not wholly originate and govern 
 it, than there is no doubt that the sun is shining out 
 yonder. 7 
 
 Phaulcon swore a mighty oath in his teeth as his lips 
 shook, and his face flushed purple. 
 
 * If he harm her, I will find my way into his palace and 
 drive a dagger down his throat, though he stand at the altar 
 itself! ' 
 
 ' Canssimo . wnat would that avail, except to have you 
 hanged, or dispose^ 1 of in a still less humane fashion ? Ee 
 reasonable. Tragedy will avail nothing. If you killed 
 Villaflor there would remain a score of monsignori to take 
 his place and play his cards. The arrest of Madame de 
 Vassalis is a terrible stroke for us; we could better have 
 offered to lose fifty men than to lose your irresistible Idalia. 
 
282 ID ALIA. 
 
 At the same time, we shall not better her, and we shall surely 
 imperil ourselves and all our projects, if we go like men in 
 a melodrama slaying priests and calling on the gods for 
 vengeance.' 
 
 ' What ! You would have us stand calmly by in inaction 
 while she may be may be ' 
 
 The words choked him ; he knew what the power of Giulio 
 Villaflor meant to all, meant above all to a woman. 
 
 * Inaction ! What action can you suggest ? ' 
 
 The Greek was silent; his swift thoughts swept far over 
 a thousand schemes, that rose only to bear with them the 
 sentence of impossibility. 
 
 4 1, as eagerly as yourself, would be the first to try all 
 things, and to risk much in the service of the Countess 
 Vassalis,' pursued Vane with the soft, even, almost unnatural 
 calm which he had held throughout his interview with the 
 Roman prelate ; ' but, frankly, I see nothing that is to be 
 done with any sort of benefit. To penetrate the secrets of 
 the government will take time, and, what we have very 
 little of, money ; to avow ourselves her partisans will be only 
 at once to share her imprisonment and be lodged in the 
 casemates yonder; to attempt a rescue requires the one 
 thing we do not possess knowledge of where she has been 
 taken. What remains ? We are as helpless, so far as I 
 can see,asif their chains were already about our limbs. There 
 is nothing for it yet, at least except to wait and watch/ t 
 
 P haul eon sank down again, with his head drooped and 
 his hands locked savagely one in another. 
 
 ' You are right, I daresay,' he said bitterly ; ' and very 
 cautious ! But you never loved her/ 
 
 There was not even the flicker of an emotion, not the 
 faintest flush on his companion's face ; but a smile passed 
 for a second over his listener's lips. He had not loved her ! 
 he whose thwarted love had betrayed her to her fate ! 
 The Greek's utter ignorance was almost ludicrous to him. 
 
 1 Your heart and your conscience have come into sudden 
 play, Conrad mio,' he said indolently. ' 1 never knew before 
 that you kept such old-world weaknesses ; no one would 
 have accused you of them.' 
 
 ' Well, I have been guilty enough to her,' he answered 
 sullenly, with a dark red flushing his cheek ; he was ashamed 
 of this better emotion, as the man he was with now had 
 
' THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT.' 283 
 
 always made him ashamed of any purer or higher touch that 
 lingered in him. 
 
 1 It is rather late in the day to think of that.' 
 
 * Too late ! my Grod ! ' 
 
 A terrible remorse was on him, passing, fitful, evanescent, 
 but very ardent, very contrite, while it was in its first poig- 
 nancy, while he thought of the ghastly doom in which had 
 closed the splendid life that he had made and marred, the 
 career to which he had wooed and to which he had enchained 
 the youth and the power and the genius of Idalia a remorse 
 in which he suffered acutely ; in which the uncertainty and 
 the peril of her unknown fate were tortures to him ; in 
 which he seemed very vile, very accursed in his own sight. 
 
 His friend looked on impatiently ; it incensed him to see 
 this callous, thoughtless, tyrannous, unscrupulous Greek 
 moved by her danger thus ; it made his own traitor-shame 
 weigh heavier on his heart. He did iv>t lose his self-com- 
 mand; but he spoke almost insolently on the spur of the 
 misery that he choked down out of sight. 
 
 * Tour beautiful Countess is too fair for the scourge and 
 the cell there is no doubt of that. I daresay she will never 
 be condemned to them. Giulio Yillailor lias too good a taste 
 for such dainty paintings to shut them in solitude ; he will 
 not be likely to let so rare a flower wither in a prison-court. 
 Miladi Idalia has better coin to buy indulgence with than 
 all the gold of Europe.' 
 
 In his own wretchedness it was a cruel relief to him to 
 fling dishonour at the woman he had betrayed, and to tor- 
 ment the man whose self-accusing contrition made him feel 
 more sharply his own baseness. 
 
 Conrad Phaulcon started up impetuously, with deadly 
 blfgphemies muttered under his breath, as he paced the 
 chamber like a leopard lashed to fury. 
 
 ' You do not know Idalia,' he said savagely. ' She would 
 die sooner ' 
 
 Vane laughed a flippant, nonchalant, silvery laugh. 
 
 * O, believe me, fair women are not so enamoured of the 
 ugliness of death ; and, as for the rest, she has gone very 
 far for the sake of public liberty. She will scarce grudge 
 a good price for personal freedom. Not know Idalia? 
 Altro ! I don't think, with all your title to her confidence, 
 that you know her very thoroughly yourself. Perhaps she 
 
284 ID ALIA. 
 
 will treat with Villaflor de couronne a couronne. We are 
 playing a losing game ; she will have the tact of her sex, 
 and go over to the stronger side. She is far more fit for 
 courts than for conspiracies. She could make good terms, 
 I have little doubt ; and I would back her to match the 
 bishop in subtlety I could scarcely give as much praise 
 to any one else in Europe.' 
 
 ' You mean that ' 
 
 ' That she will forsake us and coalesce with the royalties. 
 All women are rakes at heart, as Pope says ; and he should 
 have given an alliterative line to it all women are royalists. 
 They may talk liberalism ; but they are Optirnates to the 
 core, and adore a despot, public or private. Madame de 
 Vassalis will see herself in imminent danger ; she will barter 
 herself and her knowledge and her power to buy her emanci- 
 pation. Not a doubt of it. She is a republican ; she is of 
 the advanced school ; she is " of us. 39 O yes ; but she is a 
 woman of the world a wonderfully clever one, too and 
 she will do what is expedient, and never die for a chimera.' 
 
 He more than half believed what he had said ; he saw 
 far into Idalia's character, but not far enough to fully gauge 
 its depth. He had, moreover, a natural disbelief in the 
 existence of any nature proof against a bribe, or capable of 
 preferring a creed to a sovereignty. The Grreek looked at 
 him with fiery scorn. 
 
 * You think that ? I tell you that, rather than play for 
 one hour into the hands of King or Church, Idalia would 
 suffer a hundred deaths. Her word is her bond, and treachery 
 has no place with her ; she will never buy liberty by a rene- 
 gade's cowardice ' 
 
 ' Sublimely virtuous, but scarcely true, I fancy. Miladi 
 is too world-wise to be an idealist.' 
 
 He spoke carelessly ; but such conscience as was in him, 
 and all manliness that had not been polished away by the 
 plane of sophism and of expediency, were pierced to the 
 quick by the words that unwittingly stung him so closely. 
 
 4 By the way,' he went on carelessly, 4 I daresay that the 
 court, having snared her, would be willing to treat with 
 you. What do you say, amico mio ? You have n@t made 
 a very good thing of Liberalism. Would you try Absolutism 
 for a time, and change the Phrygian bonnet for a Neapolitan 
 coronet ? ' 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ATE, AND I DID EAT: 285 
 
 ' Well, you. Jf they do not take you prisoner too you 
 may conclude very good terms just now, in all probability. 
 Our party is bruised, but not killed. We have danger 
 enough in us to render us worth bribing, though not strength 
 enough to give us a straw's weight of success. Under the 
 circumstances, you might make a very lucrative bargain. 
 There is no reason on earth why a democratic condottiero like 
 you, my good Conrad, should not be metamorphosed into a 
 courtier and a son of the Church. What do you think of it ? ' 
 
 Phaulcon's eyes had fastened on him throughout his 
 speech with a glistening light that he he who had told the 
 prince-bishop that he could buy this man at a moment's 
 notice had construed as the eagerness for change, for 
 security, and for a costly bribo, of an avaricious and reckless 
 adventurer. As he ceased, the Greek's rich voice broke 
 across his final words like thunder. 
 
 ' By heaven, if I thought you spoke in earnest I would 
 kill you where you sit ! If I did such villainy as you hint 
 at, I should deserve the shot or the steel that would find 
 its way to me as surely as night follows day. You tempt 
 me to such shame you ! ' 
 
 Victor raised his hand with a slight warning gesture ; 
 the gesture that controlled his companion's tumultuous 
 passions like a spell. 
 
 ' Why not ? to try you ? Frankly, I scarce gave you 
 credit for such sublimated idealogy and self-devotion. Do 
 you mean to say that you would rather swing or be shot 
 by the Bourbons to-morrow than get a court place and an 
 Italian title ? ' 
 
 He spoke with a contemptuous, incredulous insolence ; 
 he would as soon have expected Vesuvius to vomit gold and. 
 diamonds as to find anything like loyalty and probity in the 
 man he dealt with a man who checked at no crime, and 
 knew no contrition. 
 
 The G-reek flushed restlessly and painfully under the 
 brown dye of his skin. 
 
 * Sneer as you will,' lie said sullenly, ' I have so much 
 conscience in me, whether you believe it or not. I am vile 
 enough, I daresay, but I am not so vile as that. There are 
 few sins I have not plunged into, there is not one that I 
 fear ; but a renegade I never was yet, and never will be. 
 
286 IDALTA. 
 
 P>j heavens! if I felt myself . turning traitor, if I thought 
 that my strength would fail to keep me true, 1 would set 
 the mouth of a pistol against my own head before my lips 
 had time to dishonour me ! ' 
 
 In the moment he was true ; in the moment the one 
 higher thing in his nature asserted its domination ; with 
 all his falsity, his guilt, his ruthlessness, his baseness and 
 these were very black he was loyal to an idea, he was 
 iaithful to a bond. He would betray others without a 
 scruple, but he would not turn a traitor to his cause ; he 
 had so much still left of affinity with the codes and the 
 freedom that he ostensibly served. It went far to redeem 
 him, all warped and erring though it was went far to raise 
 him above the higher intelligence and the finer subtlety of 
 the man who tempted him. 
 
 Vane heard him with an acrid wrath ; this madman, this 
 tool, this wax in his hands, this guilt- stained adventurer, 
 whom he thought no more of than he thought of any pistol 
 that he could use as he would, full of danger to others, but 
 to him a mere toy of wood and of steel, shamed him, stung 
 him, escaped from him. "What Conrad Phaulcon shrank 
 from as too foul to stoop to must be foul indeed ! 
 
 * I congratulate YOU on your new nobility, mon cher, J he 
 said indolently, with that covert sneer which the Greek 
 had learned to dread as a hound dreads the lash. ' I did 
 not know there was anything you had scruples about, but 
 I am glad there should be ; it is a new experience ! I 
 take your assurances, however, cum yrano salis ; you are 
 quite wise to make them so fervently, seeing that, as you 
 observed, a shot or a stab would follow your desertion as 
 surely as night follows day. And now, you will allow me 
 to remark that you are very imperfectly disguised, that you 
 \vill involve me very disagreeably if you are discovered here, 
 and that I shall thank you to remove yourself from Naples 
 at once.' 
 
 'Butldalia? 
 
 1 You can serve Idalia in nothing by putting yourself 
 and every one else in jeopardy. The Church has her ; the 
 Church does not lightly let go its prey. All that can be 
 done, you are sure, will be done ' 
 
 'But ' 
 
 Victor lifted his hand again ; a very slight gentle move* 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME, AND I DID EAT: 287 
 
 merit, but before it the fiery impetuosity, the mutinous im- 
 patience, of the Greek fell into a soldier's submissiveness, 
 a spaniel's docility. In their armies there were many ranks, 
 bnt there was only one discipline implicit obedience and 
 silence unto death. If his chief had bidden him throw him- 
 self from the heights of Tiberio, Phaulcon would have cast 
 himself headlong down without a question, when once they 
 stood on the ground which that slight gesture warned him 
 they were on now the ground of authority on one side, of 
 obedience 011 the other. 
 
 ' Leave all to me. And for the present quit Naples while 
 you can if you can. Go to the old quarters at Paris im- 
 mediately, and there await instructions. Adieu ! ' 
 
 Phaulcon's eyes looked at him with a piteous entreaty ; 
 he did not speak, but the great muscles of his throat swelled 
 and throbbed, and his nervous hands clenched ; the mute 
 appeal spoke better than any words his prayer against that 
 merciless dismissal. 
 
 1 Go, carOj said his tyrant gently ; but the gentleness was 
 immutable and cold. 'If you feel such tenderness for your 
 fair Countess, you should not have drawn her into such 
 dangerous paths. Make yourself easy ; she can take care 
 of herself; there are few men and I doubt if Giulio Villa- 
 ilor be one of the few who can match the wit and the 
 science of La Vassalis. Now, go ; your presence is em- 
 barrassing, and your melons are a blunder; but you always 
 would be so impetuous! Bon voyage; and if the Bour- 
 bonists should stop you on the way, remember and die 
 mute. An unpleasant and discourteous allusion, I confess ; 
 but one must face possible contingencies.' 
 
 Canrad Phaulcon looked at him one moment with a fierce 
 glare under his curling lashes ; but for the bond that bound 
 and the authority that fettered him, he would have tossed 
 up the Northerner's slender frame in his strong lithe arms, 
 and dashed on the marble without those subtle astute brains 
 that baffled and that ruled him. Then he dropped his 
 head as a chidden hound drops his and went. 
 
 Alone, his chief sat motionless, his eyes fixed, his arms 
 resting on the table before him, his face white and rigid as 
 though its profile were the profile of a marble bust. He had 
 been bitterly stung, though he had never shown it ; he had 
 deeply moved, though he had given no sign of it. This 
 
288 IDALIA. 
 
 laxvless tigei', this velvet-skinned wild brute, this worthless 
 adventurer, this mountain- thief, who shot men as willingly 
 as he shot sea-birds, had flung off treachery as a villainy too 
 black for him ; and he a scholar, a gentleman, a wit, a man 
 who ridiculed the barbaric errors of crime, and who knew 
 that he had in him intellect to compass the statecraft of half 
 a world had found no issue for his ambitions, no crown to 
 his career, no end for his attainments, except a traitor's 
 shame ! No rebuke from pure or lofty lives would hove 
 made him feel his own degradation so deeply as the revolt 
 of the man whose hardened guilt he had known so long, 
 and whose scruples he had never before found check at any 
 baseness that was offered him ; the man in whom he had 
 himself killed all remnant of better instincts, and whom he 
 had looked on as a mercenary, to be hired at will for any 
 infamy by whichever side could bid the highest. No scorn 
 from those of stainless honour or of blameless deeds could 
 have cut him so unendurably as the contempt for his owr. 
 sin of renegade betrayal which had flashed from the glance 
 and lashed him in the words of the Greek, whom he had 
 known steeled to all remorse and careless of all disgrace. 
 
 ' Faugh ! ' he thought, with a disdainful bitterness that 
 availed little to reconcile him to himself; 'his is just such 
 bastard honour, such childish folly, as we see a thousand 
 times over in the most shameless scoundrels of Europe. The 
 brigand murders at his fancy, and reverences a leaden saint 
 in his hat ; the brutes of the Abruzzi flay their prisoners, 
 and pray to the Madonna; the soldiers of the Pope kill 
 women and children as they would cut the throats of pigs, 
 and tremble when their master blesses them on Easter-day; 
 it is all over the world, that trash of superstition, that fit 
 of spurious repentance, that ague-attack of poltroonery 
 which men, because they are ashamed of it, dignify into 
 conscience or creed ! He would sell his soul to the devil 
 if there were such a thing as a devil, and yet he prides 
 himself on clinging to an idea which he has never followed 
 except for the sake of adventure and self-interest, and to a 
 cause which he has never embraced except as a vent for his 
 own listlessness and discontent ! And men call that king 
 of straw, that random folly, that weakness cloaked in 
 borrowed purples, honour!' 
 
 But the ironies that he wove to himself, the con tempt IT. 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME AND 1 DID EAT: 289 
 
 which he strove to steep and still the pangs of shame that 
 Conrad Phaulcon's single virtue had awakened, had little 
 potency. He was a gentleman, and the disgrace of his sin 
 was as gall to him. Something of that humiliation and un- 
 endurable hatred for his own act which made Iscariot slay 
 himself, finding no value in the silver pieces for whose glitter 
 he had wrecked his peace and sold the guiltless, smote even 
 through the ice-mail of his graceful callousness, the steel 
 cuirass of his worldly policies. 
 
 And though cowardice had no place in him, as it had 
 in the fiery but mobile temper of Phaulcon a shiver ran 
 through him as he thought of those words ' the shot or the 
 steel that follows the renegade, as the night follows the day.' 
 He knew that they were no hyperbole, no metaphor; he 
 knew that men who were false to the political Order of which 
 they were sworn, died so by that Order's vengeance, almost 
 as surely as darkness falls on the sun's setting died with a 
 dagger-stroke in the winter nights of Rome, a pistol-shot in 
 the gay chambers of Paris, a blow from behind in the riotous 
 carnival times of Venice ; died wherever they were, struck 
 by unerring hands, and knowing that it was but wild justice 
 for their own Judas sin, though the world saw in their fall 
 but some common street scuffle, some murder of continental 
 lawlessness, some thief's assassination for a few gold coins. 
 
 He knew it, and a chill tremor passed over him as he 
 mused. But a few months before, a sculptor had been found 
 at the door of his studio in Eome with a great wound slashed 
 across his breast, and the blood choking his voice, so that he 
 died speechless. The talk of the day had drafted that death 
 in among the deeds of violence that Roman thieves will deal 
 in, and babbled of the insecurity of life under the Papal 
 tenure, and of the sad fate of the young genius struck down 
 for a few bajocchi on his own threshold. Victor Vane had 
 been aware, as many like him also, that no Eoman thief had 
 been the dealer of that stroke home to the lungs as the 
 sculptor felt his way up the dark winding staircase, whose 
 blackness the oil flicker of a single lamp only rendered 
 ileeper gloom ; but that it had been a pitiless vengeance for 
 an oath taken in boyhood, and in manhood broken. 
 
 He knew it ; wherever he went, whatever he did, how- 
 soever high he rose in eminence, whatsoever fruitage he 
 gathered from the seed of treachery, the possibility of that 
 
290 IDALIA. 
 
 doom would pursue -him, the dread of it would haunt him 
 a- worse fate than the stroke itself, sharply and swiftly dealt. 
 The sword would ever hang above his head wherever his 
 banquet should be spread, whatever nobles and princes 
 should be summoned to it. Let him dupe his early com- 
 rades, or reign in his new sovereignties as he would, he 
 could never dismiss this from, him this chance, that soon 
 or late the vengeance for his desertion would search him 
 out, and strike him in the hour of his surest security, of his 
 proudest triumph. 
 
 Yet the step was taken ; there was no receding now, and 
 he knew that he had in him to rule empires if once he could 
 grasp but the hem of power. He ground his teeth where 
 he gazed down on the mosaic on which his arms rested, 
 with the sharply-defined delicacy of his features death- 
 white in the golden sun-glow that fell through the broad 
 leaves of vines. 
 
 C I was wrong to say there is no devil,' he thought; 
 * there is one that cripples the strongest and tempts the 
 wisest, and sets the fool above the sage, and kicks genius 
 into a hovel to die, and gives diadems to idiots, and makes 
 great lives plod wearily for daily bread round the ass's mill, 
 and in the ass's shafts ; there is a devil that runs riot in the 
 world, flinging all the prizes to the dullards who let them 
 rust, and tossing all the blanks to the men who only want 
 a chance to prove their mettle ; there is a devil that leaves 
 thrones to brainless dullards, and scratches out the winning 
 blood from every race because it has no pedigree, that fills 
 swine's troughs with pearls, and seals lips that drop elo- 
 quence ; there is a devil that flings the wheat to the flames, 
 and calls the chaff blessed bread, that lames the boldest ere 
 they can start, and curses the new-born child in his cradle j 
 there is a devil the devil of Caste ! ' 
 
 "When the failings of Democracy are hooted against her, 
 me fair thing in her should be remembered that in her 
 sovereignties this one deadly bitterness, this passionate, poig- 
 nant regret for all he might have leen, had not Position 
 warped, and cramped, and proscribed, and starved him, can 
 come unto no man. 
 
 And there is no evil worse than this ; for by it the man 
 fasts back on accident (and often with a terrible justice) all 
 the errors, the failures, the sins, and the disgraces of his life. 
 
'THE DEVIL TEMPTED ME AND I DID EAT: 291 
 
 'I never had a fair field !' it may be sometimes a coward's 
 apology; but it is many a time the epitome of a great, 
 cramped, tortured, wasted life, which strove like a caged 
 eagle to get free, and never could beat down the bars of the 
 den that circumstances and prejudice had forged. The world 
 sees the few who do reach freedom, and, watching their bold 
 upward flight says rashly, * Will can work all things.' But 
 they who perish by the thousand, the fettered eagles who 
 never see the sun ; who pant in darkness, and wear their 
 breasts bare beating on the iron that will never yield ; who 
 know their strength, yet cannot break their prison ; who feel 
 their wings, yet never can soar up to meet the sweet wild 
 western winds of liberty ; who lie at last beaten, and hope- 
 less, and blind, with only strength enough to long for death 
 to come and quench all sense and thought in its annihilation, 
 who thinks of them who counts them ? 
 
 "Where he sat with his teeth clenched, and the nerve of 
 his lips twitching, the finished tactician cursed his fate as 
 passionately as any GHlbert on his death-bed, any Mirabeau 
 in his dungeon. A consuming passion was upon him, and 
 under it his philosophies mocked and his worldly wisdom 
 forsook him. It had made him a traitor ; it made him now 
 weak as any woman. While he had lightly laughed with 
 a scoff of her sorcery over the Prelate, his heart had been 
 sick with jealousy and dread. He had remembered too late 
 what manner of man Griulio Yillaflor was ; what manner of 
 ransom the voluptuous Churchman was likely to exact from 
 such a captive as he possessed now. He had thought too late 
 that, in yielding her up to her foe, he was delivering the 
 woman he loved to one who would feel the spell of her beauty 
 as utterly as he, and would be armed with the power to do 
 with that beauty howsoever he would. So that he were re- 
 venged on her, he had never heeded how that vengeance 
 might recoil. It smote him. keenly now, as he mused on the 
 amorous, ruthless, unscrupulous priest to whom he had sur- 
 rendered her. 
 
 In the power of Giulio Villaflor! He turned hot and 
 cold as the memory passed over him. He had delivered her 
 into bondage, that she might be shut away from all eyes 
 that her smile might be seen of none that what could not 
 be his should be no other's that the empire of her sorcery 
 should end for ever in a life of ignominy, of suffering, and of 
 
292 ID ALIA. 
 
 slavery. But now he shuddered where he sat immoveable, 
 with the yellow light streaming down through the vine; he 
 had given her over to one who never spared ; to one who 
 would look on her loveliness at once with the admiration of 
 a voluptuary and the sway of a tyrant ; to one who could 
 offer her release from lifelong misery as the purchase-coin 
 of her love, or could take it, if denied, with the mailed grasp 
 of an irresistible and irresponsible dominion. 
 
 It fascinated him with its very horror, it enchained him 
 with its very torture, this thought which he had flung at the 
 name of Idalia, to insult her and to taunt his companion, 
 and which grew into a phantom that he could not exorcise, 
 a vision that he could not drive away. Every second was 
 horrible to him ; he saw the sovereign grace, the proud glance 
 of the woman he had betrayed ; he saw the full lustrous eyes 
 of the arrogant priest as they would be bent upon her; and 
 he ground his teeth as under some bodily agony he had 
 dealt himself a sharper torment than any he had condemned 
 her to endure. He had given her to bondage yes, but he 
 had given her also to Giulio Yillaflor! 
 
 There are women who rouse a passion far more intense 
 than can be held in the word love, which makes the man 
 who feels it lose all semblance of himself which sweeps 
 away his memory, his honour, his reason, his ambitions, his 
 very nature, and leaves him no sense of anything save itself. 
 This was the passion which made her traitor now cold, 
 and keen, and subtle, and world- worn, and sceptical as he 
 had been choke down the great sobs in his throat, as he 
 thought : 
 
 ' Only to know her dead, so that no other can ever look 
 on her only to know that ! Dead, dead, dead she would 
 seem mine then ! And yet, I should rifle her grave, like the 
 madman in legends, for one sight of her face, for one touch 
 of her lips T 
 
 CHAPTEE XXII. 
 
 THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 IN the interior stood a small castellated building, flanked 
 with towers of a singular solidity and strength, and case- 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 293 
 
 ments built deep into the solid masonry, the narrow slits 
 and dwarfed arches of the early centuries. The country 
 round was dreary; marsh and osier bed, with the rushes 
 turning from spring green to autumn hues as the season 
 varied, and to the left interminable olive-fields, bounded in 
 the distance with a sombre line of cypress, had little beauty, 
 even when the southern sunset gave them its glow ; and the 
 place where the building stood a black and broken pile of 
 irregular rock, with a lake below, hemmed in by dark and 
 stunted trees lent only a deeper gloom and loneliness to 
 the landscape. In the middle ages, the towers had been a 
 robber's stronghold, called the Vulture's Ages, and sorely 
 feared by travellers; now it was Church property: a few 
 Cistercians held it as their convent, and if it were ever used 
 for other purposes, the slow swinging of the matin's bell, 
 which dully droned over the desolate lands around, stilled 
 all rumour of the fact. 
 
 A tempestuous sun was setting in the west ; intense fire 
 lighted for the moment all the rugged and monotonous ex- 
 panse, flamed in the salt and sluggish waters of the tarn, and 
 reddened all the arid desert of the parching turf. Through 
 a lancet window it shone into a darkened barren room ; the 
 gray stone floor uncovered, the pine-wood walls as bare, and 
 the meagre furniture of a convent-cell, the only things that 
 garnished it. To and fro in the narrow limits paced, as a 
 lioness may pace her den, Idalia. She was a prisoner of a 
 King and of a Church two jailers that never in any age 
 have loosed their prey. 
 
 The hour had come that she had long foreseen must 
 sooner or later be her fate. She was in the hands of foes 
 whom but a tithe of all that she had done would have sufficed 
 to hound to their worst fury. Pear was not in her now ; the 
 blood of Artemesia and of Manuel was in her veins, and the 
 fire of the Sea Queen and of the Imperial Soldier flamed too 
 hotly and too proudly there to let dread enter. But a 
 terrible chafing sense of utter impotence a longing to dare, 
 to defy, to vanquish, while she was here a captive a fearful 
 knowledge, a passionate regret for all that she had lost, for 
 all she might have been, made the slow moments' torturing 
 passage unendurable made her hands clench, her eyes flash, 
 her whole frame quiver and rebel in mighty longing, in fear- 
 t'ul bitterness. 
 
24 IDALIA. 
 
 She knew that she had in her what would have found 
 power to rule an empire ; and she was here the prisoner of 
 a priesthood ! 
 
 But a more intense and a more poignant pang than that 
 of her own adversity, of her own peril, was in her for other 
 lives lost through her for the manhood that had reeled 
 and fallen at her feet, for the sightless eyes that had looked 
 up to hers, for the dead, slaughtered through a too true 
 adherence to her will, a too obedient rendering of her word. 
 True, the liberty for which they had conspired was the just 
 heritage of man, and the noblest cause for which human 
 life can ever be laid clown ; true it was for their country, 
 and that country's welfare and freedom, that they had 
 fallen; but this was no opiate to still the remorse that 
 pierced and pursued her. She knew that the cause had 
 been far less to those who had died before her than the 
 smile of her own eyes ; she knew that with her beauty, and 
 her power, and her sorcery, she had wooed them to passion 
 only to drive them there, by their fealty to her, to perish 
 like netted stags. She knew that it had been through the 
 beguilement of her own unsparing temptation, her own 
 ruthless witchery of fascination, that those who had been 
 murdered in the night just gone had entered on a career 
 which, without her, they might never have embraced. 
 
 The very masked banquet at which they had been trapped 
 and slain had been given through her, given for her, and 
 turned by her to that end for which the soldiers of the king 
 had shot them down as rebels. She knew that but for her 
 they would be living now in the fulness of their freedom 
 and their manhood ; and the remorse of an assassin seemed 
 to weigh on her and haunt her, with the blood-red glow of 
 that dying sun, in which the uplifted eyes of Viana, as they 
 had sought hers through the mists of his last agony, seemed 
 ever to gaze on her. 
 
 She was proud, she was daring, she was unscrupulous, 
 she was self- controlled to a marvel, she was, as men counted, 
 cruelly heartless ; but in that moment Idalia could have 
 doomed herself to the curse of an eternal travail of expiation 
 in that moment she could have rent out her living heart 
 where it beat, and have flung it to the kites that hovered in 
 the dusky glow of twilight as the vilest, darkest, most 
 accursed thing that ever beat with life. She had the cold- 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 295 
 
 ness of the world, and the pitiless serenity of one long used 
 to study strong emotions only as tools to power ; but 
 beneath her acquired calm and cynic indifference the 
 fervency of southern nations still slept in her, and she 
 loathed herself with the fierce unsparing hatred with which 
 men hate their direst foe. 
 
 She did herself injustice in much, and loaded herself with 
 heavier reproach than thafc which had a right to rest on her ; 
 but it is ever thus with natures strong, bold, imperial, and 
 used to command, when from the exercise of unmerciful 
 dominion they change to the lash of self-rebuke and self- 
 detestation ; as kings in monastic days laid down the 
 sceptre and took up the scourge. 
 
 Of her own fate she scarce took a thought ; she knew 
 well enough that little mercy would mingle with it ; but 
 all her heart, all her mind, all her longing were with those 
 dead men who had perished for her, those noble and daunt- 
 less lives which had been struck down around her as though 
 they had been murrained sheep, In her youth, in her 
 beauty, in her wealth, in her supremacy she was flung into 
 captivity, and knew that endless imprisonment, if not the 
 shame and labour of some still more humiliating torture, 
 would be her doom, but no throb of pity was in her for 
 herself; the only thought upon her was the thought of 
 those whom she told herself that she had murdered. 
 
 The bolts of the cell were undrawn with a slow grating 
 sound ; she turned and faced the door ; it opened, and 
 Giulio Villallor entered the chamber. The ruddy flame-like 
 light just fading in the west was shed full upon her ; the 
 mask dress she had worn had not been changed, and the 
 diamonds on it flashed amid its scarlet, its black, and its 
 gold ; in her weary musings she had thrust back from her 
 temples the masses of her diamond-crowned hair; and 
 though her face was very colourless, and her eyes heavily 
 circled, she had never looked more magnificent than she 
 looked now, as she turned with an empress's challenge. 
 
 Yillaflor, entering with the soft and courtly step of his 
 habitual grace, started and paused, with a Eomau oath 
 murmured involuntarily in his surprise and his admiration 
 He had seen her in Paris, in Spain, in Yienna, but in that 
 instant her loveliness literally struck him blind ; he came 
 to arraign a captive, and a queen faced him in haughty and 
 
296 1DALIA. 
 
 silent disdain. Fluent, facile, a statesman and a church- 
 man, a libertine and a courtier, be bad for tbe moment no 
 words ; be was held in check by his own rebel prisoner. 
 
 She looked at him, and a slight smile of contempt passed " 
 over her face. 
 
 ' Ah, I thought so !' she said calmly. c So your lambs 
 were the wolves, holy father ?' 
 
 The Prince-Bishop changed colour ever so faintly ; the 
 sarcasm of the accent, rather than of the words, pierced his 
 armour of omnipotence and self-love ; he understood why 
 men had dreaded the lash and the steel less than they had 
 dreaded the lightest touch of this woman's scorn. But he 
 was a powerful and accomplished personage, to whom defeat 
 or opposition were heresies unknown; he recovered his 
 momentary discomfiture, and came nearer to her, the warm 
 afterglow on his stately nature and his handsome majestic 
 form, while his lustrous eyes smiled gently. 
 
 * My daughter, it has grieved us sorely that you should 
 have been so long in rebellion against the Anointed of God; 
 and believe me the harshness of coercion has only been 
 resorted to in the last extremity, and with the deepest 
 reluctance and regret.' 
 
 Idalia where she stood turned her head, and let her eyes 
 rest full on his, with a meaning more than any words could 
 ever have expressed. 
 
 * Monsignore, it will be as well for us to lay aside tbese 
 euphuisms. Neither of us believes them, and they weary 
 botb. Let us suppose them already uttered, and speak 
 more truly if a priest can speak so. I am your captive; 
 it has long been one of the supreme ambitions of your life, 
 and one of the most relentless efforts of your Church. I 
 have baffled you long ; you have trapped me at last. There 
 is no more to be said.' 
 
 Monsignore, the silken and astute diplomatist who wove 
 the finest meshes of Court and Vatican intrigue, and was 
 to be embarrassed by no living antagonist's skill, felt the 
 blood burn under his olive skin, and felt the weakness of a 
 bitter anger rise in him beneath the brief, tranquil, ironic 
 words of his captive. Monsignore was never angered ; the 
 dulcet sweetness of his bland repose was never stirred by 
 so provincial and unwise a passion ; and he knew her power 
 by that pulse of wrath she could stir in him. Yet he 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 297 
 
 restrained it perfectly ; he bowed with the grace for which 
 lie was renowned at St. Cloud and Compiegne. 
 
 ' Pardon TS\Q,Jlgliuola mia ' 
 
 ' Pardon me, Monsignore ! I am not of your communion ; 
 call me simply Madame de Yassalis.' 
 
 The Prince-Bishop made a gentle deprecatory gesture 
 with his white and elegant hands. 
 
 ' Even those who have strayed from us we stili hope to 
 reclaim ; and I speak as beseems me in the name of the 
 ; Church. You have thought " there is no more to be said," 
 since by force you have been brought within our authority. 
 You err greatly ; there are many things.' 
 
 Her old superb, disdainful smile came on Idalia's face ; 
 the entrance of the churchman had roused in her all her 
 native pride, all her worldly brilliance, all her royal defiance; 
 she knew well enough with whom she had to deal, and the 
 assumption of authority awoke in her all her dignity and 
 dauntlessness. 
 
 ' Many things?' she repeated tranquilly. ' Possibly ! You 
 would wish to know from me your captive the secrets of 
 my party, the names of my associates, the securities of my 
 wealth, many other matters that you consider have become 
 yours by right through my conquest ?' 
 
 Giulio Yillaflor looked at her curiously, a little 
 bewildered. 
 
 'It is so, my daughter,' he said blandly. 'We would 
 rather, you will be sure, receive these our rights, as you 
 justly say voluntarily from you than be compelled to 
 extract them by harsher means. 1 
 
 She laughed a little ; a soft, mocking, ironic laugh. 
 
 ' I imagined so. Well it is as I said ; there is nothing 
 to be discussed between us ; for all the weight of your 
 Church, all the steel of your Swiss, will not force one word 
 from me. 9 
 
 Monsignore started, and the purple blood flushed under 
 the olive of his cheek and brow ; his lips quivered, his teeth 
 clenched on the full scarlet under lip. It was so utterly 
 new to Giulio Yillaflor to be mocked and bearded and by 
 a woman too ! 
 
 His dulcet courtliness gave way, his mellow and honeyed 
 sweetness curdled, the fire flashed into his eyes that had 
 used to burn in the darkling glance of the men of his great 
 
298 IDALIA. 
 
 Hierarchy when Savonarola braved them or Kings defied 
 their legate. 
 
 ' " Will not " is never said to Eome !' he answered, 
 with the haughty grandeur of the mighty days of tho 
 Papacy. 
 
 IShe faced him with a sovereignty not less disdainful and 
 supreme. 
 
 * Indeed ! I think many who have said it have been slain 
 by Eome, silent unto death !' 
 
 His face darkened more and more ; ' contumacy ' was the 
 deadliest sin in his eyes ; he would have stricken it out 
 with the iron heel of Torquemada or Ximenes. 
 
 ' Some crave death, and are forbidden it ; they must live 
 to do our bidding.' 
 
 The words were uttered low, and the menace, though 
 vague, was pregnant. For the moment there was intense 
 silence, but her eyes never shrank, only in them deeper and 
 deeper gathered the mute and fiery scorn. 
 
 'You threaten me?' she said with cool contemptuous 
 carelessness, reckless how she provoked, so that she stabbed 
 him. * It is scarcely worth while to so stain your manhood 
 and your calling, Monsignore. I am in your power. There 
 is* little dignity in menace to a prisoner.' 
 
 The kingly potentate, the silken churchman, the absolute 
 tyrant, the tortuous courtier, shook in all his limbs with 
 rage. She took his weapons from him, she rent his panoply, 
 she silenced his eloquence, she pierced his nets, and an 
 insidious passion crept in on him. She looked so beautiful 
 there, in the fading russet light, with her Greek grace and 
 her ironic pride, and her fettered, untamed, deathless 
 royalty ! 
 
 e She is a Semiramis ! She is a sorceress !' he muttered 
 in his throat, as he turned and paced the cell a moment, to 
 still the feverish, angered, impatient bitterness rising in him 
 and unnerving him. He felt to her as in the days of the 
 Middle Age men felt to those women whom they sent to 
 the stake for the dangerous sorcery, the white magic, of 
 their too great charms. 
 
 She waited there, serene, unmoved, her eyes looking out- 
 ward at the desolate and barren marshes, her hair slightl) 
 pushed back from her brows, the richness and the glitter o t 
 her mask-dress the sole point of colour in the gray gloom 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 299 
 
 of the cell. She looked like a picture burnt in on the 
 darkness of the naked prison wall. 
 
 His glance, licentious and ruthless under the velvet 
 gentleness of his long-studied regard, devoured her love- 
 liness with thirsty, astonished admiration. He had said of 
 her that she had the daring of the Caesars, but he thought 
 now that she had the intoxication of a Cleopatra. He had 
 heard of her power, he had heard of her witchery, he had 
 heard of the insanity of men who loved her and thought a 
 world well lost for her ; he felt and understood the mean- 
 ing of those stories now. And a proud, eager, cruel light 
 dawned on his face. ' Altro /' he murmured to himself, 
 with the mocking smile of his full lips. What mattered it 
 her defiance, her beauty ? She was his captive ! Nominally 
 the king's captive, virtually his. What mattered 
 resistance ? 
 
 He paused before her, subduing the glow of his thoughts 
 beneath the fall of his silken lashes, long and soft as the 
 lashes of women ; and his voice had its sweetest melody. 
 
 4 Madame de Vassalis, hear me, You have said justly 
 you are a prisoner ; in the power of a sovereign you have 
 conspired against, of a government you have sought to 
 undermine. To underrate your power for rebellion and for 
 evil would be absurd ; it has been vast, and wrought by 
 the surest spells that subjugate the heart and the soul of 
 man ' 
 
 Her delicate, merciless smile arrested the words on his 
 lips. 
 
 * What do you know of those spells, holy father ?' 
 
 Though her life was in this man's power, to use as he 
 would, she could not restrain the irony that gave her, the 
 captive, so keen a weapon against her tyrant. A smile for 
 which she could have killed him gleamed under his drooped 
 lids. 
 
 4 Had I never known them until now, this moment had 
 sufficed to teach them !' 
 
 A haughty impatience swept over Idalia's face. 
 
 6 Sir ! i have had my surfeit of such compliments. Prom 
 a priest I may surely look for immunity from their weari- 
 ness.' 
 
 The tiger-glitter glistened more darkly in his soft brown 
 veiled eyes. How could he deal with this woman ? M enace 
 
300 IDALIA. 
 
 had no terror for her, homage no charm ! Unconsciously 
 his voice hardened and grew more imperious ; she was the 
 first who had ever braved or baffled him. 
 
 ' Madame,' he pursued, disregarding her words, f you 
 know that you are liable to the full rigour of the law ?' 
 
 ' 1 know that I am in the power of those who never failed 
 to use that rigour with or without right !' 
 
 6 The Church cannot err/ he said, with the certain fiery 
 majesty which, tyrannous and blind in its own belief of 
 infallibility as it was, was yet the truest and greatest thing 
 in him. ' You fall within the pale of its most severe jus- 
 tice ; yet the Church, as you know well, will not deal with 
 you; your sins will be left to the Secular Arm. Your 
 wealth will be confiscated, your power crushed, your life 
 passed in a felon's cell. You must know this.' 
 
 * My wealth cannot be confiscated,' she answered negli- 
 gently, ' for there is none of it lodged in Italy ; you could 
 scarcely imagine me so incautious ! That you will give me 
 no liberty while I have life I perfectly understand, and that 
 King Francis and the Pontifical States alike treat the love 
 of freedom and of justice as a convict's crime, all Europe is 
 well aware. If you allude to my riches, imagining that I 
 will purchase my safety, you err ; I will not swell a tyrant's 
 treasuries to gain a personal indulgence.' 
 
 Rage, hot and lowering, flushed Giulio Yillaflor's brow as 
 he heard ; yet something of that* unwilling homage which 
 had been wrung from him when he had said, f She has the 
 daring of the Caesars !' was wrested from him now in am 
 admiration that was half amaze, half intolerance ; wholly 
 sudden and very ferocious passion was controlled beneath 
 the suave mellow hypocrisies which by long usage had 
 become to him as second nature. 
 
 ' Madame,' he said, with a wave of his long delicate hand, 
 ' there are enormities and conspiracies of such magnitude 
 that the wealth of the world could not purchase condona- 
 tion or escape for them. Those of the Countess Idalia must 
 be expiated ; they cannot buy absolution either from the 
 Church she has blasphemed or the throne she has shaken. 
 Captivity awaits you captivity till death. Has it no 
 terrors for you for you, in your beauty, your youth, your 
 magnificence, your reign of love and of pleasure?' 
 
 She looked him full in the eyes. 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 301 
 
 * Mon sign ore, you use strange language for a priest. 
 Whatever my fate be, I merit it ; not for the things which 
 you quote against me as crime, but for luring to their graves 
 the lives you and your murderers slew last night.' 
 
 The nerves of his cheeks quivered with agitated wrath ; 
 not for his bishopric would he have had it known that he 
 had looked on at the slaughter, and given the death-word 
 at the Villa Antina. She laughed, in the aching bitterness 
 of her heart, and in her dauntless scorn for the foes who 
 had netted her in like a wired bird. 
 
 6 Ah, that was a noble exploit, beau sire ; a gentle and 
 holy duty of an anointed of Christ ! The cross has led the 
 van of the slaughterers of life and of liberty many a time ; 
 you but followed the mission of priests in all ages to sow 
 broadcast war and desolation, and to pile dead bodies by 
 fire or by steel for the glory of God in the mission of peace ! 
 G-O and kneel with Viana's blood on your head ! go and 
 fill the throne of St. Peter with the murder of patriots 
 heavy on your soul! Go you have done no more than 
 the men of your office have ever done since Hypatia was 
 slain by Cecil, and the early Christians tore and fought for 
 rivalry in Alexandria, and Rome, and Byzantium !' 
 
 The light of the sun had died out, there was only the 
 eilvery gleam of a lamp Giulio Yillaflor had brought in in 
 his hand, arid set down on the narrow stone table ; in the 
 mingled radiance and shadow she stood before the omnipo- 
 tent churchman, in whose hands her destiny was held, as 
 though she were a feudal monarch who lashed a disobedient 
 vassal with her displeasure and disdain. He stood, doubt- 
 ing his own senses ; he the superb priest, he who aspired to 
 the triple tiara, he the friend of emperors and the ruler of 
 palace consciences, to be arraigned by a revolutionist, by an 
 adventuress, whom his will could consign to the Vicaria, to 
 linger there for life ! He was convulsed scarce less with 
 amaze than with wrath; and yet through all something of 
 homage was wrung to the majestic courage which thus 
 defied him. 
 
 1 Per fede!' cried the prelate, the fury and the amaze- 
 ment in him breaking through the ever-impenetrable mask- 
 ing of his dulcet graciousness. e Per fede ! you are bold 
 indeed !' 
 
 * I leave cowardice to ecclesiastics, who net brave men 
 
302 IDALIA. 
 
 ]ike foxes, and who menace a captive when she can no 
 longer revenge." 
 
 A flush of shame and irritation came on his cheek ; he 
 was intolerant, cruel, cunning, an intriguer, a liar, a man 
 of unscrupulous ambition, of intense and overweening pride 
 and vanity; but he was withal a gentleman, and he felt the 
 sting of the rebuke. 
 
 ' I came not to menace, but to persuade/ he said, re- 
 straining the ardour she had roused in him, and bending on 
 her the full lustre of his soft eyes. * My daughter, you 
 cannot suppose but that it is with the utmost repugnance, 
 and only at the last extremity, that force will be resorted 
 to by those you have so justly aroused against you. Tour 
 years, your sex, your brilliance, all render the task of chas- 
 tisement, the exercise of severity toward vou, a most pain- 
 ful duty.' 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 * Neither royalty nor priesthood is likely to suffer much 
 from compunction ; and as for the things you name, I take 
 no refuge in the shield of my sex's weakness. I believe 
 few men have merited your hatred and your rigour, or the 
 vengeance of any tyranny, more than I have done.' 
 
 Again she broke his patience, again she rent aside the 
 courteous, polished suavity which never until now had 
 failed him. 
 
 'You speak idly, 5 he said, with a jarring anger and inso- 
 lence in his voice. ' You toy with words you know not the 
 meaning of; you little dream what our " rigour," what our 
 "vengeance" can be to those who brave us !' 
 
 Her eyes rested calmly and contemptuously on his. 
 
 ' Do I not ? When my best-beloved friend, Virginia 
 von Evon, was scourged in the streets of Pesth because she 
 \\ould not yield up an Hungarian " rebel" who had trusted 
 his life to her keeping ; when Pauline Lasla perished under 
 the ice and the irons of Siberia because she had carried 
 despatches for a Polish liberator; when the Countess 
 Eossellio, at eighty years of age, was thrown into a dun- 
 geon by your order because she had lost her two noble sons 
 in the cause of her Italy ; when the wife of Manuel Canaro 
 was shot down before his eyes by the soldiers of the Pope 
 for no sin save that of loving liberty and him too well ; 
 when I have seen those and a score more martyrs like them, 
 
THE CAPTIVE OF THE CHURCH. 303 
 
 do you think I know notiiing of how your hierarchy and 
 your monarchy can revenge themselves on women ? It is 
 you, Monsignore, who speak idly; lam well aware that 
 you will essay captivity first, and if that do not break me 
 into betraying my friends to you and assigning you my 
 wealth, why, then, that you will try torture ! It may be 
 as well to spare you the probation, and to let you know 
 that, though you have fettered me, you have not yet van- 
 quished me, and never will. Others have died silent, and 
 so can I.' 
 
 The words were spoken tranquilly, with no haste, with 
 no excitement in them ; only beneath their repose of utter- 
 ance was that fine, keen infliction of scorn, that proud, un- 
 yielding patience of resolve, which goaded and incensed 
 him as no torrent of reproaches or of lamentations could 
 have done. And yet, even in his wrath, even in his amaze, 
 even in his outraged majesty as priest and autocrat, he 
 could not but yield her admiration admiration that stung 
 and fanned the passion in him to fire. He stood before 
 her, as a Papal Legate might have stood before an Empress 
 who defied his mission and the might of E-ome, rather than 
 as before a helpless and rebel captive. 
 
 1 True !' he said, with that grandeur of dominance which 
 made the iron priests of a dead age the scourge and terror 
 of empires. c True ! the Church must cut off and root up, 
 even with steel and flame, the unworthy and the accursed 
 who deny her supremacy. Pity can have no place where 
 her holiness is menaced, where her kingdom is denied, 
 where her reign is outraged. True ! even your sex can- 
 not spare you from the chastening that she must, in the 
 fulness of her divine love, bestow on you for the purifica- 
 tion of your heresies and your rebellion ' 
 
 She stayed him with a gesture. 
 
 6 Nay, Monsigore ! we are not in the Cinque Cento, and 
 you cannot burn me, though you can slay me more slowly 
 and more cruelly, perhaps. A truce to this melodrame ! 
 We are both of the world ; let us speak without tragedy. 
 You say the Secular Arm will deal with me for my " crimes," 
 why then are you here ?' 
 
 The direct question staggered him slightly ; but Griulio 
 Yillaflor was very rarely at fault ; he bowed with grace. 
 
 ' Because I would fain save you, were it possible, from 
 the fruits of your own misguided recklessness.' 
 
304 ID ALIA. 
 
 ' I thought so,' she said calmly, while his eyes fell beneath 
 her smile. 'I have said, I betray no one ; and I give no 
 bribes.' 
 
 ' In gold no. And I seek none.' 
 
 He leaned nearer to her, and his voice sank very low ; 
 the flush burnt darker in his olive cheek, and his eyes gazed 
 on her beauty with a boldness that gleamed out under their 
 veiled and velvet softness with a tiger-like ferocity, that 
 those knew well as their death-doom who dared cross the 
 will of Monsignore. 
 
 ' In gold no ! ' she echoed. ' You seek my political 
 secrets. "Well, you will never have them. 5 
 
 ' What ! ' His voice was very low still, and vibrated 
 with the intensity of restained passion through the silence 
 of the cell. l You will renounce your pomp, your wealth, 
 your pleasures, your ambitions, your freedom, for the toil 
 of a convict, the chains of a felon, the solitude of a dun- 
 geon, the slow, festering, hopeless, endless existence of a 
 prisoner whom no power can release save the warrant of 
 death!' 
 
 Her face was still, set colourless as marble, and as 
 firm. 
 
 ' Yes, if liberty be only to be bought by the shame of 
 treachery.' 
 
 He looked at her, forced out of himself, as it were, by 
 the tribute she wrung from him. 
 
 1 Mother of G-od ! What a man you would have been I- 
 you would have ruled the world ! ' 
 
 She smiled with a disdainful weariness. 
 
 ' "Who knows ? I might have been a court ecclesiastic, 
 and sold my soul for power to a sacerdotal lie ! ' 
 
 The satire pierced him to the quick, and all the darker 
 and more cruel impulses returned on him. He stooped 
 and laid his hand, with the amethyst ring that glittered 
 like a basilisk's eyes, down upon hers ; his voice stole very 
 low on her ear. 
 
 ' Idalia ! women of your beauty can bribe more potently 
 fchan by gold or state-lore. You shall buy your freedom if 
 you will from me.' 
 
 She understood him; the blood flashed back into the 
 colourless weariness of her face ; she flung his touch 
 off as though it had pollution j she faced him there in the 
 
THE CAPTIVE OP fH CHURCtt. 305 
 
 dimness of the lamp-light with a look in her eyes before 
 which he, all fearless, steeled, and omnipotent though he 
 was, cowed like a lashed hound. Even G-iulio Villaflor 
 lacked the boldness which should dare twice tempt her 
 with that alternative to purchase back her liberty. 
 
 ' Monsignore, 3 she said briefly, and each word cut like 
 ice, * if I refuse to be a traitress, I shall scarce consent tc 
 be your mistress. It were a poor choice of dishonour ! ' 
 
 He could have killed her in her haughty beauty, in her 
 unsparing answer that laid bare the shame and evil of his 
 own heart, that spoke out so mercilessly the meaning of 
 his veiled words, of his hinted tempting ! She had dared 
 him, she had refused him, she had unmasked him well, 
 she should know of- what fashion was the vengeance of B/o- 
 man blood, of ecclesiastical dominion ! He bent to her, 
 his lips close to her hair, his eyes looking into hers, his 
 brown smooth cheek darkly stained with the purple flush 
 of passions which nothing but that calm scorn of her fixed 
 gaze, which never left him, which never drooped beneath 
 the fierce menace of his own, held in any check. 
 
 c Madame de Vassalis, you might have given your beauty 
 for your freedom and your wealth ; you have refused. So 
 be it ! It is in my power without terms or concession. 
 You might have reigned my mistress. You shall be now, 
 instead, my toy for an hour, and languish, later, till the 
 grave, in the King's prisons or the galley's shame. You 
 were unwise, my brilliant revolutionist, to make a foe of 
 me; you are mine, body and soul, in life and in death 
 mine to take when I will, to give where I choose ! ' 
 
 And, with these words, he flung his violet robe closer 
 about him, and, without a glance at her where she stood, 
 swept across the stone floor of the convent cell and left her 
 presence ; his keen ear had heard the footfall of a monk 
 without. 
 
 ' I come, my son I come ! ' he said gently, in his sweet 
 lingering voice. ' The captive is contumacious still, but 
 with discipline and persuasion, she may still be reclaimed 
 to the august faith. Draw the bolts well so! so! and 
 deal gently with her ; she will see her error.' 
 
 Alone where the silver lamp shed its lambent flickering 
 light, Idalia thrust her hand within the folds of the rich 
 scarlet and weighty broideries and s \veeping lace of the 
 
306 ID All A. 
 
 masquerade dress she still wore, and drew half out from its 
 resting-place in her bosom, a delicate gold-sheathed Vene- 
 tian stiletto, a jewel-studded toy slung by a chain round 
 her throat. She looked at the slender, glittering, lithe 
 blade, and smiled as she put it back. 
 
 * His ! while that steel will release me the moment his 
 lips dare touch mine.' 
 
 For she had in her the temper of Lucretia ! 
 
 CHAPTEE XXIII. 
 
 1 BIEtf QTTE TOI.' 
 
 IK the warm light of the summer morning the yacht 
 steamed her way once more into the harbour of Capri. 
 The Venetians were safe, and Erceldoune returned to 
 suffer, as he knew, and suffer hopelessly, yet no more able 
 to hold himself back from it than the mariners were able 
 to turn their prows from the magic music of yonder Siren 
 Isles. Groups of fisher-folk were talking together gravely 
 and with an unwonted sadness on their ruddy sunburnt 
 faces ; as he waded through the knee-deep surf he noticed 
 it his thoughts leapt to her in an instant he asked the 
 sailor nearest him what ailed them. The sailor was the 
 man whose brother he had once rescued from the churning 
 seas below Tiberio. 
 
 1 It is the Contessa Idalia, Signore/ 
 
 1 What of her?' 
 
 ' They have arrested her ! ' 
 
 * Arrested her ? ' 
 
 He staggered against the brown timbers of a boat rest- 
 ing on the sands, and clenched them hard to keep himself 
 from reeling like a drunken man. For the moment old 
 usage in many countries gave the word no meaning on his 
 ear save in its criminal sense. 
 
 ' So they say, Signore/ answered the sailor, while his 
 strong teeth set mastiff-like. ' If I had been there, they 
 should not have touched the hem of her skirts ! It was 
 done at the Villa Antina, in the interior ; the soldiers shot 
 many, I've been told.' 
 
'RIEN QUE TOI. 1 307 
 
 ' Many ! Who ? ' 
 
 ' Conspirators, Signore so they say/ replied the Capri- 
 ote, who scarcely knew the meaning of the phrase, and 
 thought the world governed to perfection if it proved a 
 good fishing season, and many visitors came to the coast. 
 ' Some tell that his highness of Viana was killed. I don't 
 know about that ; but Miladi Idalia is a prisoner of the 
 King;?,' 
 
 With an oath, mighty as ever rang over the marches 
 from the fierce lips of Bothwell, Erceldoune strode from 
 him wellnigh ere the words were ended, and plunged down 
 into the thicket of vegetation that led to the beetling cliff 
 on which her villa stood. The sun was scorching, the 
 ascent on the slope that faced the sea perilous to life and 
 limb ; there was no more than a perpendicular granite slab 
 towering many feet above the water, covered with foliage 
 and rock-flowers. But he was a trained mountaineer ; he 
 knew the ice-slope of the Alps as well as he knew the 
 Border-land ; he was up it with the swiftness of thought, 
 swinging himself in mid-air from the tough coils of the 
 tangled creepers till he reached the summit, and forced 
 his way, without pause or ceremonial, into the court of the 
 forsaken dwelling. 
 
 ' No one passes ! ' 
 
 A soldier on guard stood within the arched entrance. 
 Then he knew that it was true, and that she was lost to 
 him, lost to the fangs of the Church, to the dungeons of the 
 Bourbons. 
 
 1 By whose order are you here ? ' 
 
 The words were hoarse and faint; he felt his lips parched 
 with a dry white heat. 
 
 ' The order of the King.' 
 
 ' The King's ? Stand off ! ' cried Erceldoune, as though 
 the very name of her tyrant maddened him, l What right 
 have you, for all the despots who curse Europe, to invade 
 her privacy, to violate her home ? ' 
 
 The sentinel said nothing, but lowered his bayonet till 
 the blade was levelled against the intruder's breast. At 
 that instant the deep howl of the hound moaned down the 
 silence. Erceldoune shook with rage as he heard it. Was 
 not her dumb beast even spared ! He wrenched the wea- 
 pon by the gunbarrel from the soldier's hand, flung himself 
 
3o8 1DALIA. 
 
 on the slight frail form of the Neapolitan, and, tossing him 
 aside lightly as a broken bough, dashed across the court to 
 where the dog was chained. It was the work of a second 
 to unloose and free him. Ere even that was wholly done, 
 however, the three soldiers left on guard of the villa which 
 had been rifled by governmental order of all papers, plate, 
 jewels, and articles of value, roused by their comrade's cry, 
 poured into the square court, and levelled their bayonets 
 at him. 
 
 'Stir, and you are a dead man!' said the corporal in 
 command. 
 
 A laugh was the only answer Erceldoune gave. His 
 blood was up, and in his misery and his fiery rage he 
 cared nothing, and almost knew nothing, of what he did 
 or said. 
 
 1 At them, Sulla !' he cried in Servian lifting his hand. 
 
 "With a bound the giant hound sprang on the soldier of 
 Francis, and hurled him down as if he had been a dead 
 boar. Erceldoune with the single blow of his left hand 
 levelled another to the ground; and before the last sentinel 
 could take aim or raise his fallen fellows, he sprang through, 
 the gateway, and, with the dog at his side, dashed headlong 
 through the gardens and down the mountain road, without 
 pause, without heed, well-nigh without sense. 
 
 The glow and colour of the world of summer blossom, 
 the fragrant stillness of the morning, the swinging of 
 matin-bells from a chapel far above, the golden fruit that 
 he tossed aside or trampled out as he rushed down the 
 steep incline, all seemed dizzy, unreal, intangible : only 
 one remembrance stood out clear before him she needed 
 him. He felt giddy and blind ; a sickening oppression was 
 on him ; the intense odours of the myrtle and orange- 
 flowers were intolerable to him; he felt maddened and 
 senseless with pain ; but he was not a man to yield to 
 misery or dread while action was possible, while daring and 
 skill could avail aught. Eire burned in his eyes, his lips 
 shook, his teeth clenched like a vice ; he grasped the wolf- 
 hound's mighty mane in a gesture that Sulla understood 
 as though volumes had been said in it. 
 
 '"We will save her, or kill them? 
 
 The dog seemed instinctively to know that in his 
 liberator was the avenger of his mistress. He accepted 
 
QUE TOi: 309 
 
 tho lead, and followed passively. Eepeated peril ana 
 dangerous emergencies, often met and vanquished by 
 himself alone, had given Erceldoune the energetic vigilance, 
 the knowledge, and the patience of a soldier ; his own 
 nature rash, impulsive, and hotly impetuous, the habit of 
 long and arduous service had taught him the value of 
 coolness and of self-restraint. His passions and his fiery 
 chivalry of temper could have led him now to any madness, 
 could have led him to seek out Francis in his own palace, 
 and strike him down before all his nobles and all his guards, 
 as her tyrant and her abductor. He had the blood in him 
 of. Border chiefs who had fought for Mary Stuart, and 
 Scottish soldiers who had served with Gordon's archers, of 
 haughty Castilians, who had died for a point of honour, and 
 steel-clad Spaniards who had conquered with the Great 
 Captain ; and a vein of the old dauntless, reckless, fearless, 
 romantic knight-errantry of a dead day was in him, little 
 as he had known it. His rival had not erred when he said 
 that the ' Border Eagle' should have lived in the Crusades. 
 But not the less did he know now that discretion and self- 
 control were needed to serve her ; not the less did he bend 
 to their curb the violent longings of his own wretchedness. 
 He paused a moment where a deep leafy nest of rock 
 and foliage screened him from all sight, and tried to still 
 the throbbing misery of his thoughts, and search out the 
 nearest clue to find her. She was in the power of her 
 foes; royal soldiers held her villa; that she was deeply 
 compromised in political matters was evident ; where she 
 might now be taken the jailers who held her alone knew. 
 He shuddered as he remembered all the histories he had 
 heard of the vengeance of the monarchists on those who 
 had defied them. Her dog was with him ; the sentinels 
 would tell the story of his onslaught on them ; if noticed, 
 he would be suspected and watched, possibly even arrested. 
 To go to Naples was to risk arousing suspicions that might 
 render every effort to save her useless. He must bo un- 
 known, untracked, or he could do nothing ; yet he must 
 keep the hound with him, for no aid could be so sure to 
 track her as Sulla's scent and unerring instincts of fidelity. 
 'The dog stood now beside him, the fine nostrils quivering, 
 the ears pointed, every nerve on the stretch, and every 
 now and then a piteous anguish in tho browu lustrous 
 
310 ID ALIA. 
 
 eyes as they were turned on him with a low heartbroken 
 moan. 
 
 He stood and thought some moments ; then rapidly, and 
 keeping ever under the deep shelter of the leaves, he made 
 his way by winding paths to the hut of the sailor whose life 
 he had saved long before on San Constanza's day. It 
 stood near the beach, hid under a great ledge of rock, like 
 a sea-gull's nest. As it chanced, the fisherman safe without 
 in the sun, singing and mending his nets : he was only just 
 back from a long sail to Calabria. Erceldoune went up to 
 him, and held out his hand. 
 
 1 Nicolb, do you remember the night under Tiberio ? ' 
 
 The nets fell on the sand in a heap, all sea- stained and 
 clogged with weed. The marinaro, with tears of delight in 
 his bright black eyes, and a thousand cries to the Madonna 
 delP Mare, thanked him and blessed him and worshipped 
 him, and would have knelt down at his feet had he been 
 allowed. Life surely was no great matter there in the 
 Piccolo Marina, getting scant bread from the depths of the 
 waters, spreading the nets on the low flat shingle-hut roof 
 to dry, and going out in peril of storms for sake of a piece 
 of dry fish for hungry mouths to eat ; yet it must have had 
 its pleasures too, for the fisher Nicolo was grateful for 
 saving of it as though he had been crowned with gold. 
 
 6 Tou will do a thing for me, Colo ? ' asked Erceldoune, 
 as he arrested the torrent of gratitude. 
 
 6 1 will risk body and soul for you, Signore ? ' 
 
 ' I believe you would. I only want you to sell me a 
 fishing-suit such as you wear, and some of your fishing-nets 
 and lines.' 
 
 4 1 will sell you nothing, ' lustrissimo,' said the sailor 
 doggedly, and with a certain wounded pride. ( I will give 
 you everything my poor hut holds.' 
 
 ' And I will take it as willingly. Forgive me for using 
 the word of barter.' 
 
 The Capriote's eyes beamed with delight at the concession 
 and the comprehension. 
 
 ' Come within, eccellenza.' 
 
 Erceldoune bent his lofty head and entered the low, 
 square, sea-scented hut, with the half-naked children, 
 handsome as young seraphs, running wild, and the yellow 
 gourds, and dried herbs, and onion-ropes hanging from the 
 
' RIEN QUE TOi: 311 
 
 tafters. As it chanced, there was a suit, unworn except on 
 saints' days, and of full size, for the marinaro was of high 
 etature and powerfully built. In a few moments his own 
 white yachting dress was changed for it ; he set the scarlet- 
 tasselled cap on his head, wore nothing over the loose 
 striped shirt that left his arms so free, and flung some nets 
 over his shoulders. With the bronze hue of his skin and 
 the sweeping darkness of his beard, no casual glance would 
 have detected him to be other than a Capriote. 
 
 ' Shall I pass as a marinaro ? ' he asked the sailor. 
 
 Nicolb smiled. 
 
 ' You look more like a king in disguise.' 
 
 'I am sorry for it. Now, while I wait here, will you pull 
 out to the yacht, give the captaiu this ring from me as cre- 
 dentials, and bid him send me, by you, all the gold and cir- 
 cular notes I have on board, my pistol-case, powder-flask, 
 cartridge-case, and shot-belt, and a pocket-flask of brandy ? 
 Say nothing of my disguise, and be as quick as you can, for 
 Grod's sake.' 
 
 The Capriote obeyed, got his little boat out rapidly, and 
 pushed off from the shore with hearty good will. Ercel- 
 doune sat at the hut-door with the hound crouched at his 
 feet, and his eyes fixed on the waste of waters. All the 
 glories of the bay were spread before him ; but it might 
 have been a sand-desert for aught that he knew or saw. 
 The fishing- skiff flew light and swift as a bird over the sea; 
 but to him it seemed scarcely to move : every moment was 
 a pang, every minute appeared eternity. While he waited 
 here in the noontide glare, how might she not be tortured ! 
 while the hours flew on, how might not her foes be wringing 
 her proud heart! Time was passing so fast, three days, 
 they said, had gone by since the arrest at Antina ; heaven 
 only knew how many leagues she might have been borne 
 since then ; to what remote, inaccessible recesses of Alps 
 or Apennines, monastic prison or mountain-shut morass, 
 she might not have been taken ere now ! Tb* fever of an 
 intolerable agony possessed him. While he was in action 
 he could bear it ; it was something, at least, to be in search 
 for her, to be in her service, to be on her track ; but to sit 
 here while those eternal matins tolled the passing seconds 
 away, and the fishing-boat seemed to glide snail-like over 
 the width of the sea ! The swinging monotone of the 
 
312 ID ALIA. 
 
 chapel-bell, the measured dips of the oars, seemed to beat 
 into his brain and drive him senseless. "What was it to him 
 that she had told him his passion was hopeless ? If he 
 could give her back her freedom and her happiness, he felt 
 that he could die in peace. 
 
 Nicolb returned very rapidly, laggard as the time had ap- 
 peared, bringing all for which he had been sent. The 
 money was the whole, or very nearly, of his three months' 
 pay just drawn some two hundred pounds or less of 
 circular notes in a chamois-leather pouch. He left, unseen, 
 several gold pieces of it in a wooden bowl, from which the 
 fisherman was used to drink his onion soup ; then slipped 
 the pistols in his sash and the pouch in his shirt, and turned 
 again to Nicolb. 
 
 ' Now take me across, some way off Naples, if you can, 
 and let me land unnoticed in the nearest route for Antina.' 
 
 The marinaro, with all the alacrity of his craft, had ready 
 his sailing-boat a small lugger, awkward but sea- worthy 
 in very little time, and, with his eldest son at the helm, 
 pushed off once more into deep water. Erceldoune sat 
 silent and deep in thought, the hound at his feet, couched 
 on the bottom of the vessel, watching him ever with deep, 
 keen, mournful eyes. The day was beautifully still ; the 
 bay alive with innumerable craft, and gay with sails of 
 tawny stripes and flags of all nations' hues. Naples lay 
 white and matchless in her sunlit grace ; he saw no more of 
 the glory about him than though he were blind. He 
 thought they sailed slowly as a death barge ; in truth, the 
 lugger danced over the light curled waves and through the 
 snowy surf as brightly as a monacco on the wing. 
 
 Nicolo knew every inch of the coast, and landed at length 
 in a small lonely creek, hidden in profuse vegetation, where 
 there was just depth enough to steer the vessel in, and let 
 the beach be reached by wading. 
 
 ' Yonder lies Antina, Signore,' said the fisherman ; ' a 
 league to the left by that road where the cvpresses are. 
 You see ? ' 
 
 Erceldoune took the man's brown hand in his and wrung 
 it hard. 
 
 ' I see ; I cannot thank you now, Nicolo. Later on, if I 
 live' 
 
 The Capriote. fixed his large black eyes tenderly and wist- 
 fully on him. 
 
' RIEN QUE TOi: 3*3 
 
 ' Eccellenza, you go into some danger. Let me be with 
 you.' 
 
 Erceldoune shook his head. 
 
 ' Why not, Signore ? ' pleaded Nicolb entreatingly. 
 ' AVhen I was in peril, you came to me, down into the 
 churning seas, at risk of your own life. The boys can take 
 the boat back. Let me come.' 
 
 Erceldoune put him gently back. 
 
 * Not now, Colo, though I could wish for no better com- 
 rade. But what I do, I must do alone.' 
 
 He broke from the man's entreaties and conjurations, and 
 went up through the tangled thickets of arbutus and 
 through the fields of millet rapidly, and never looking back, 
 every moment was so precious. The fisherman stood 
 watching him sadly. 
 
 * It is she] he said. 'It is so with them all. She is a 
 sorceress. I am glad I crossed myself whenever I met her, 
 though old Bice calls her an angel, because she promised 
 Fanciulla a dower. I am glad I crossed myself.' 
 
 A league brought him to Antina a league that lay 
 through olive grounds, and green fields of maize, and vine- 
 yards, and sunburnt grass-land, which his slashing stride, 
 that was the walk of the mountaineer, covered rapidly. To 
 anything like fatigue he was insensible. Since the hour 
 when she had found him in the pine woods his life had been 
 spent in one vain pursuit the search for Idalia ; yet never 
 had he sought her as he sought her now. 
 
 He passed into the villa grounds : nearer the building he 
 dared not venture ; it would be occupied, in all likelihood, 
 also by soldiers, and the sight of a fisherman loitering so 
 far inland would of itself excite suspicion. But toward the 
 entrance the hound paused, tore the earth up in mad haste, 
 snuffed the ground, ran round and round again, threw his 
 head in the air, then gave a deep-mouthed bay of joy, and 
 looked back for a sign to Erceldoune. He stooped and laid 
 his hand on the dog's mane ; his own heart was beating so 
 thickly that he felt sick and reeling. Here his one hope 
 had centred, that Sulla would find her trail. 
 
 6 Seek her/ he said simply. 
 
 The hound needed no other command ; with his muzzle 
 to the earth he tore it up by handfuls, searching hither and 
 thither j then settled to his work as the pack settle to line- 
 
314 ID ALIA. 
 
 hunting, and dashed off not inward toward the gardens, 
 but out to the open country. Stooping an instant ere ho 
 followed him, Erceldoune, whose eye and ear were well- 
 nigh as trained as an Indian's for they were those of one 
 of the first deer-stalkers of Scotland saw the mark of 
 wheels, very faint on the parched arid turf that was dry and 
 bare as bone, but still there. Hope rose in him if he 
 were not too late ! 
 
 Onward he went in the burning sun-glare, with the 
 weight of the nets on his shoulder, and the heat pouring 
 down into the scarlet wool of the fishing-cap ; onward, 
 where the dog led through the long heat of the day, through 
 the shades of evening, through the stilly silver starlight, as 
 one succeeded the other. It was tedious, arduous, wearying 
 work ; bringing so little recompense, needing such endless 
 patience. Often the hound lost scent, and had to try back 
 to where he had lost the sign of the wheels, as though it 
 were the slot of a stag ; often the dry crisp grasses or the 
 baked white dust of the roads bore no scent at all, or the 
 crossing and recrossing of other tracks blurred the marks 
 and confused the trail ; often the impress of a mule's hoofs, 
 or the heavy footprints of a contadina had struck out or 
 overlaid the faint traces which only guided the dog. Often 
 also for a priest, or a peasant party going to an infiorata, or, 
 worse yet, for a set of soldiers scouring the country, he had 
 to seek shelter in some dank dell of woodland, on some 
 sandy pine-knoll, under the gray twisted olives, or beneath 
 a tumble-down shed, and hide, as though he were himself 
 the prisoner hunted, forcing Sulla to lie still beside him. 
 But he had spent many a long day in the patient toil of 
 deer-stalking in the Highlands at home, and he brought 
 the same wariness and the same long endurance here. If 
 he had once abandoned himself to the misery of thought, to 
 the fierceness of vengeance, he could never have borne ihe 
 intolerable slow-dragging bitterness of this endless search ; 
 but he would not give way to them, and he would not let 
 them urge him into the madness which could have made 
 him dash down into Naples and demand her at the hands 
 of the Bourbon. He knew that if it were possible to save 
 her, thus only could it be done ; and he gave himself to the 
 toil without pause, and with a, self-restraint that cost him 
 Tii ore than all. 
 
'RIEN QUE TO/.' 315 
 
 Three days and three nights were spent thus ; he began 
 to think in his agony that he should only find her if ever 
 he found her dead. His search was chiefly made after the 
 sun was down ; the day, when he had not to secrete himself 
 and the hound from those who might have thought their 
 aspect suspicious, and from village authorities who might 
 have challenged his appearance away from a seaport, he 
 spent in questioning the country people, as far as he could, 
 without exciting wonder or counter inquiry. Happily, he 
 could speak the Neapolitan patois to a miracle, and he sup- 
 ported his character of a fisherman well enough with most ; 
 gome thought, like Nicolo, that he looked more like a prince 
 in disguise, but he was frank and comrade-like with them, 
 drank with them, ate their own coarse food, and could give 
 them a hand in mending their roof after a storm, in digging 
 a trench round their olives, or in reaping their maize, and 
 he lived so like one of themselves, that he soon conciliated 
 them, and persuaded them that he was a paid-off mariner 
 who had sailed to far distant places, and liked now to 
 wander at will over the country. 
 
 Prom them he gleaned various news ; nothing that told 
 him, however, the one great thing where Idalia had been 
 taken. When the sun sat each day, and he was free from 
 observation, he put Sulla on the track again, from the spot 
 where they had last left it, and worked on the line unweary- 
 ingly through the nights. The hound had been perfectly 
 trained, and understood what was needed of him to a mar- 
 vel ; he had attached himself to Erceldoune with a strange 
 sagacity of instinct, seeming to lay aside the jealousy he 
 had hitherto shown him for the sake of their mutual love 
 and service to the one both had lost. Such sleep as he was 
 obliged to take he took in the hottest hours of the day 
 under the screen of millet-sheaves, or in the cool shade of 
 deep ravines filled with chestnuts or cypresses ; with the 
 fall of evening he resumed the search, and through the clear 
 lambent light of the Italian moon, or in the gloom of 
 frowning hills and woods, the two shadows of the man and 
 dog glided unceasingly, bending down and seeking hither 
 and thither ; some who saw them crossed themselves, and 
 took them for the shades of some ghastly huntsman and his 
 phantom hound ; others, more practical, took them for 
 truffle seekers, despite the gigantic size of the animal. Not 
 
3* / AHA. 
 
 one ever ventured to stop them ; a rough muleteer once 
 tried a parley in the midnight on a lonely hillside path, 
 and said something, with a menace, of his fancy for the 
 brandy-flask, whose silver head he saw under the folds of 
 the waist-sash ; but a blow with the butt-end of one of the 
 pistols soon silenced him by levelling him with the brown- 
 burnt moss, and Erceldoune was molested no more. Slowly, 
 very slowly, and with an infinite toil and patience, he 
 worked his way by the guidance of the hound's ]ead, till 
 the dawn of the fourth day brought him into the rugged, 
 desolate, morass-intersected country, where, dark and sullen 
 above the miasma-haunted lake at its foot, the square 
 castellated building of the isolated monastery stood among 
 its stunted trees, with the bare gray cliff towering at its 
 back. It was a red, stormy, misty, oppressive morning, 
 very hot and poisonous in its beat as the steam rose up 
 from the black still waters and the wastes of swamp, while 
 beyond stretched the gray of the monotonous olive and the 
 still more distant black peaks of cypress-topped hills, as the 
 hollow booming vesper-bell of the monks swung wearily 
 through the heavy air. -TlTere is no fortress here; is the 
 dog in error ? ' he thought, as he entered on the dreary 
 desert of the level marshy land, with no sound in it except 
 the echo of the tolling bell and the noise of the moor-fowla 
 startled from their rest among the reeds and sedges. But 
 the hound held on, growing keener and hotter as the scent 
 grew stronger and the wheel-marks plainer in the damp 
 sodden ground than they had been on the dusty roads and 
 the traversed highways. "With his muzzle to the ground, 
 ihe dashed onward mile on mile across the country at a 
 speed < that taxed the Border fleetness of his companion. 
 There were quagmires, morass, hidden pools, sponges of 
 mud, email lagunes hidden under treacherous grasses or 
 rushes, unseen pools where the water-birds brooded by 
 hundreds, swamps where a single false step would be death 
 for any sinker under the yielding, soaking, nauseous mass ; 
 but the hound never missed his footing or erred in his 
 'going, and Erceldoune followed him through the gray of 
 the morning; his heart beat to suffocation, the brown 
 lonely waste reeled before his eyes, the hot noxious air 
 seemed to weigh down his breath and stifle him, but a 
 delirium of hope c'irae ou him the dog must be near at 
 
'RIEN QUE TO/.' 317 
 
 last! Straight in. bis level chase, straight as though ho 
 were running down a stag across an open plateau, fleet as 
 the wind, and with his mighty crest bristling and his eye- 
 balls red with flame, Sulla led on, across the marshes, across 
 the shallow ponds, over the trembling mass of water-sodden 
 earth, through the steaming vapour rising from the lakes 
 led on till he stood nnder the broken granite crags on 
 which the monastery was raised above the still, black, 
 reedy surface of the lake. 
 
 Then, with one rolling bay like thunder, he woke all the 
 echoes of the lonely silent dawn. Afar from on high, 
 through the gloom of an arched casement, through the 
 swaying flicker of dank leaves, through the transverse lines 
 of iron bars, eyes dark as night, weary as pain, looked down 
 on him they were the eyes of Idalia. 
 
 She sat in the monastic cell which was her prison-cham- 
 ber, with the bare hot glare of the sunlight, that burnt all 
 nature black and barren, and made the disease-laden vapours 
 rise up from the swamps below, scarcely entering through 
 the narrow lancet-chink that was the sole casement of this 
 cold stone cage, in which they had shut their brilliant 
 pluinaged bird. Her hands rested on the slab of granite 
 that was her only table ; links of steel held the wrists 
 together : they had allowed her no change of raiment, and 
 the lustrous colours and gold broideries of the mask dress 
 still swept the damp flags of the floor, though all jewels had 
 been taken from. her. She had been here six days and six 
 nights a captive of the Bourbons ; what was yet worse, a 
 captive of the Church. 
 
 Food of the coarsest and the scantiest was all that had 
 been allotted her, and once ' for contumacy ' her priestly 
 jailer's hands had been stretched to tear down the silks and 
 lace from her shoulders, and bruise and lacerate them with 
 the scourge ; once, when the dignity that they were about 
 to outrage so foully had made the monk, who was bidden to 
 the oifice, drop the lash, aghast and trembling, and his 
 superior, who had directed the infamy, feel too much shame 
 in the moment to hound him on to his work. They had 
 desisted for twenty-four hours more. ' By then/ they had 
 muttered, 'the rebellious subject might have broken her 
 silence, and become less obdurate to the due demands of 
 the Church and King.' 
 
3i8 ID ALIA. 
 
 The twenty-four hours had well-nigh gone by, but Idalia 
 had given no sign of yielding; she had scarcely spoken since 
 the day that Griulio Villaflor had quitted her presence. 
 She knew that the lightest word might be construed into 
 confession, or used as evidence against those whom they 
 wanted her to betray; and she had strength in her to endure 
 torture unflinchingly, without breathing one syllable that 
 should sound as an entreaty for mercy, or be translated 
 into a hint against her comrades in adversity. She knew 
 well what she had to anticipate ; she did not seek to palliate 
 to her own thoughts the horror of the doom that awaited 
 her ; she knew that only by death, self-dealt, could she 
 escape the passion of the libertine who held her in his gripe ; 
 she knew that when that had had its way, and grown sated 
 of its own violence, she would, if she lived, drag out 
 existence in agony, in shame, in felon companionship, in 
 hopeless bondage ; she never veiled from herself the depth 
 and the despair of the wretchedness that awaited her, and 
 she knew that not even her sex would shelter her from the 
 barbarity of physical torture, till that torture should kill 
 her bodily strength, or her persecutors learn that it was 
 powerless to destroy her resolve and break her silence. 
 She knew the fate that awaited her, but never for one 
 instant did the thought glance by her that she could pur- 
 chase freedom from it all by betraying those whose lives 
 she held in her keeping, or by going willingly to the loathed 
 love of her ecclesiastical captor. Such weakness as that 
 was not possible to her nature ; she had a virile courage, a 
 masculine reading of all bonds of honour ; this woman, bred 
 in luxury, in self-indulgence, in power, in patrician tastes 
 and epicurean habits, had the nerve in her to endure all 
 things, rather than to purchase her redemption by a traitor's 
 recreancy. 
 
 She had been successful hitherto in concealing from her 
 jailer the slender shaft of the stiletto, and she was pre- 
 pared in extremity to use it ; she had too much of the old 
 Grreek heroism to fear such a death, and had too many of 
 the old, dauntless, pagan creeds not to hold its resource far 
 nobler than a long dishonoured life of endless misery. 
 
 Where she leaned now, with her chained hands lying on 
 the stone, and the darkness and the silence of the stone cell 
 about her, her face was colourless, but it had on it no fear, 
 
*RIEN QUE TO/.' 319 
 
 no Weakness : it was only grave, and Tery weary. Her 
 thoughts had gone to many scenes and memories of her past 
 the past which, in eight brief years of sovereignty, had 
 been fuller and more richly coloured than a thousand 
 drawn-out lives that never change their gray still calm from 
 the cradle to the grave. Endless hours of those dead years 
 rose before her to haunt her in this black solitude, in these 
 chill iron-bound walls, in which the magnificence of her life 
 had ended hours in the lustrous glare of Eastern suns, 
 under the curled leaves of palm, and the marble domes of 
 ruined temples ; in the laughing riot of Florentine nights, 
 when the carnival-folly reeled flower-crowned adown the 
 banks of Arno ; in the gaslit radiance of Paris, when the 
 fetes of the Regency revived for her ; in summer evenings 
 in Sicilian air, when the low chants echoed softly over 
 Mediterranean waters, and the felucca, flower-laden, glided 
 through the starlight to music and to laughter ; in palaces 
 of Rome, of Vienna, of Prague, of Venice, where the dawn 
 found the banqueters still at their revels, and no wines that 
 flushed purple and gold in the blaze of the lights and the 
 odours of perfume intoxicated the drinkers like the glance 
 of her eyes, like the spell of her smile all these scenes rose 
 up above her, and filled with the hues of their life and their 
 splendour the barren, bitter, stone-locked loneliness in which 
 she was immured. She had loved her reign ; she had loved 
 her sceptre ; she had loved those years so crowded with 
 triumphs, with pleasures, with mirth, with wit, with radiance, 
 with homage, with peril that only lent them keener zest, 
 richer flavour; she had loved them, though beneath the 
 purples fetters had held her, and amid her insouciance 
 remorse had pursued her ; she had loved them and they 
 were dead for ever. She was chained here a prisoner of 
 captors who never spared until their brother-tyrant, Death, 
 claimed their spoil and their prey at their hands. 
 
 1 It is just only just,' she thought, where her head 
 leaned on the cold steel clasping her wrist, and the black 
 moisture-dripping blocks of the cell enclosed her as though 
 already she were in her grave. ' I sent them to their 
 graves ; it is only just that I should have a felon's doom.' 
 
 A shiver ran through her like a shiver of intense cold, 
 though the close air of the cell was oppressive and scorch- 
 ing. It was not for her own life, but lor the lives that had 
 
320 ID All A. 
 
 fallen around her, like wheat beneath the sickle, in the 
 banqueting-halls of Antina. 
 
 The silence was unbroken ; one burning ray of the outer 
 sun stole through the loophole and flashed on the steel 
 gyves enclosing the hand whose lightest touch had thrilled 
 men's veins like fire, and impelled them where it would ; 
 the dank, noiseless, gray gloom was like the gloom of a 
 charnel-house. Suddenly on that stillness broke the chal- 
 lenge of the hound's bay. 
 
 Idalia started ; she knew the familiar sound that rolled 
 out like the roll of a clarion. The colour flushed her face, 
 she moved rapidly to the casement ; through the glare of 
 the hot, pitiless sun below, beneath the shelving precipice 
 of rock, she saw the dog and saw who was his comrade. 
 
 She knew him in the first moment that his longing eyes 
 looked upward, and knew his errand there knew that he 
 had come to save her, or to die with her. 
 
 6 G-od ! he, too !' 
 
 The words escaped her involuntarily where she stood 
 alone, leaning against her prison bars, as the hound shook 
 all the echoes from the rocks around with the impatience of 
 his summons ; she had seen so many perish, she would fain 
 have saved this man. 
 
 Through the space of the sultry white sun-glare that 
 severed them his eyes met hers, and spoke in that one look 
 all the force of the ardour, all the fidelity of devotion, that 
 had brought him once more to the woman who, for good or 
 evil, had become the ruler of his life. At that gaze her own 
 eyes filled, her lips trembled ; such love had been often- 
 times lavished on her, yet never had it moved her as it 
 moved her now. She had told him that no other thing save 
 misery could come to him through her ; she had forbidden 
 him even the baseless solace of hope ; she had bid him fear, 
 scorn, hate, flee from her; and nothing had killed his 
 loyalty, nothing had burnt out his passion. 
 
 A glow of warmth passed over her ; an infinite tender- 
 ness made the tears gather in her eyes as she saw this faith 
 against all trial borne to her, this chivalry through every 
 ordeal stanch to her. 
 
 ' If a straight stroke and a lion heart could deliver me, 
 how soon I should be free P she thought. * He comes too 
 late too late!' 
 
'RIEN QUR TO I. 9 321 
 
 Too late ; not alone to unloose her bonds and rend her 
 from her jailers, but too late to wake her heart to his, to 
 find her life unusurped, to be sufficient for her in the lotus- 
 dream of love. 
 
 The step of a monk was heard without as one of the 
 brethren passed to fetch water from a well that was built 
 under the shadow of a few cypress-trees some score yards 
 from the convent. She left the barred casement, signing 
 her lover toward the deep shade where the blackness of 
 overhanging rocks made a refuge into which not even the 
 noon-rays could penetrate. 
 
 He comprehended and obeyed the gesture to secrecy and 
 silence ; his heart was beating to suffocation, his blood felt 
 on fire, wretchedness and rapture rioted together in him. 
 He had found her ! So much was mercy ; but she was in 
 the gripe of those who never spared ; she was in the power 
 of those who never unloosed their prey ; the battalions of 
 an army could scarce avail to wrench her from the united 
 hate of Bourbon and of Rome. He knew it ; he knew that 
 he was but one man against the whole force of a govern- 
 ment and a hierarchy, but the Border boldness in him rose 
 the higher for that ; the reckless romance of the old Spanish 
 Paladins that slept in his blood awakened as wildly as it 
 ever awakened in the comrades of Campeador or the knights 
 of Ponce de Leon. 
 
 ' I will deliver her, or die for her !' he swore in his throat : 
 and he had never yet broken an oath. 
 
 Forcing the dog to quietude, he drew back from the 
 monastery into the shade of the stunted cypresses, and 
 threw his lines into a lake-like pool that lay at the foot of 
 the rocks ; an angler's pursuit went well enough with his 
 barcarole's dress. The water was reedy, yellow, stagnant 
 in places, with islets of river grasses, in which water-fowl 
 herded by thousands ; but the care of the monks, who made 
 their sole repast from its treasuries, kept it well stocked 
 with fish, and in a brief time he landed both dace and roach, 
 though his strong wrists trembled as they had never done 
 when a Highland salmon had dragged him miles down the 
 length of a moor J and river in a wrestling duel that lasted 
 from noon till evening. 
 
 The monk, returning with his buckets from the well, saw 
 the sacrilegious raid upon the heaven-dedicated food, and, 
 
 T 
 
322 ID AH A. 
 
 as the angler bad relied on, drew near him in wrath and in 
 rebuke. 
 
 ' Nay, good father,' said Erceldoune, lifting the fish to 
 him, * I am an idle fellow ; grudge me not a chance of doing 
 a trifle for Holy Church. I am more used, may be, than 
 your brethren to filling a creel quickly.' 
 
 * My son, you are welcome to our charity,' replied the 
 monk, a little confused at finding a robber offer him so 
 willingly the spoils. ' All 1 meant was, that of truth such 
 varlets and ruffians poach on the waters, that we are obliged 
 to guard them something strictly. You have a supple wrist 
 and a marvellous strength ; we/ added the friar, with a 
 sigh of envy, ' angle all day sometimes, and catch nothing.' 
 
 ' Let me fish for you, father,' said Erceldoune. His heart 
 throbbed with hope and dread as he preferred a request on 
 which all his future fate would hang ; but he had control 
 enough to speak carelessly, and his Neapolitan accent was 
 so perfect that the monk never doubted his country. ' Let 
 me fish for you, and give me in recompense a night or two's 
 lodging ; I shall be well paid.' 
 
 * You are poor, my son ?' 
 ' Poor enough.* 
 
 ' And a wanderer ?' 
 
 ' I have been a wanderer all my life.' 
 
 * In truth ? You are a fine fellow, and if you really want 
 the Church's alms ' 
 
 The Cistercian hesitated ; a monastery could scarce refuse 
 its charity, yet the orders of the superior were strict to 
 treat all strangers with circumspection, and, if possible, to 
 admit none. 
 
 6 See here, father,' said Erceldoune rapidly. ' I want nc 
 man's alms, lay or clerical ; but if you like to strike a bar- 
 gain, here is one. You are not much of sportsmen, I 
 fancy ; now I have all that lore by heart. I am a wild 
 fiarcarolo, but I know none could beat me in river-craft or 
 in shooting. You have ospreys and cormorants in these 
 sedges that eat half the fish in the lake ; you have wild swans 
 that would make you savoury messes to sicken you for 
 ever of maize and of lentils ; you have shoals of small fresh- 
 water fish that I will snare by thousands in my nets, and, 
 salted they will last you the whole winter through ; let 
 tne work for you on the water, and give me in payment a 
 
QUE ro/. 323 
 
 .edging for myself and my dog. I will warrant you you 
 shall have the the best of the bargain.' 
 
 His voice shook a little with an eagerness he could not 
 repress. The monk, a comely, good-humoured, elderly 
 man from the Umbrian marshes, a poor brother who did 
 servile offices, and was at once porter and angler and hewer 
 of wood and drawer of water for the monastery, felt his 
 eyes glisten and his lips taste savoury things as he thought 
 of the wild swans in a pottage, and his own labours ligh- 
 tened by the stalwart arm and the fearless skill of this 
 adventurer. He looked a moment curiously in Erceldoune's 
 face ; its frank, bold, proud features won his trust instantly, 
 as they won the trust of all who looked on them ! he 
 glanced longingly at the fowl-filled sedges. 
 
 6 "Wait a moment, my son. I have no power to grant 
 your request myself, but I will go speak with the almoner, 
 and see what we can do. If the Father Superior will lis- 
 ten to your wish, I shall be glad enough for one, -for Holy 
 Mary knows it is hard work and thankless to find food for 
 seventy hungry mouths and lean stomachs in these barren 
 lands. Wait a second, and I will be back.' 
 
 He heaved up the water-buckets, and went his way with 
 bent shoulders and plodding steps. Erceldoune stood by 
 the lake-side, with his eyes fastened on the barred loophole 
 whence the eyes of the sovereign of his life had looked 
 down on him. He thought he saw the gleam of her hair 
 in the shadow on high ; he thought she gazed on him, 
 though for both their sakes she dared not do so openly ; he 
 felt his cheek change colour like a woman's ; he felt his 
 limbs tremble as with a woman's tremor ; all chance of 
 aid to her, of deliverance for her, rested on this one hazard 
 he had tried of obtaining entrance to the convent that was 
 her prison-house. 
 
 It seemed to him an eternity while the monk was absent; 
 anxiety made his eyes blind and his head swim as he saw 
 the brother at last returning ; if his request were denied ! 
 if his disguise were penetrated ! The first words he heard 
 made him feel giddy with their joy. 
 
 ' My son, be it as you will,' said the monk ; ' and I pray 
 you kill a swan quickly. The Father Superior is pleased 
 to grant your prayer, and we will lodge you and give you 
 food, if you will shoot and fish and labour in the marshes, 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 IDALIA. 
 
 as you Lave said, till our buttery be stocked and our waters 
 be well netted.' 
 
 Erceldoune bent his head, so that the rush of vivid joy 
 that flushed his face should not betray him. 
 
 ' I will labour for you, father, night and day if you will,' 
 he said briefly. 
 
 Would he not have laboured like a galley-slave through 
 summer drought and winter chills if, by his labour, he 
 could have bought one smile from her or spared her a 
 moment's paog! Then, without more words, he loaded, 
 fired, and brought down a wild swan on the wing. 
 
 ' Chee-e-e ! ' murmured the Cistercian, ruffling the snowy 
 plumage and thinking longingly of the savoury stew that 
 would vary their refectory fare that night, while he stared 
 at the barcarolo as at a stranger from some unknown world. 
 c You are a wonderful shot, my friend. If you go on like 
 that, we shall have the best of the bargain, as you said, for 
 you will find but sorry lodgment with us. Can you sleep 
 on a shakedown of dry grass ?' 
 
 6 1 have slept on bare earth and bare decks many a time 
 before now.' 
 
 Truly ? Yet you look of noble blood ?' 
 
 ' Grood blood is scant use if our fortunes be low. 1 
 
 ' Ah ! You have fallen on evil days ? ' 
 
 * Very evil.' 
 
 * And you were of proud stock once ?' 
 
 ' Grood father, I thought in the eyes of the Church all 
 men were equal.' 
 
 He spoke curtly, to rid himself of the Cistercian's rest- 
 less curiosity, and flinging his fishing-shirt open at the 
 breast, he set himself to fixing the stakes and the nets at 
 the head of the great pool. Every sort of wood and water 
 lore had been familiar to him from his earliest boyhood ; 
 every secret of the loch and heather he had learnt from the 
 days of childhood. With all the skill and strength that 
 were in him he went to the toil of working for the monas- 
 tery fare, of reaping such a harvest from the marshes and the 
 sedges and the lakes as should make the brethren give him 
 lodging with favouring cordiality and without questions, 
 He worked like a slave, in the scorch of the Italian sky, 
 conscious of no fatigue, sensible of no pain ; he worked for 
 her, and on him her eve might rest from her prison-chain- 
 
'RIEN QUE TOir 325 
 
 ber. It gave him a Samson's force, an Indian's patience. 
 "Wading knee-deep through the pools, he stretched his nets 
 across the head of the water, as he had known the poachers 
 to do many a night across the weir of Highland rivers. 
 Afraid of wasting such powder and shot as he had with him, 
 he made a sling from a strip of his sash, and slew with 
 unerring aim the wild teal that flocked among the osiers, 
 till they were flung in scores on to the arid banks. He 
 mowed down the reeds where the fish-destroying birds 
 were sheltered, so that they should haunt the monastery 
 waters no more, and bore the rushes in great sheaves to 
 land. He laboured without rest, and doing the work of 
 twenty men, in the full downpour of the vertical heat, and 
 all through the length of the day, while his friend the 
 Umbrian brother sat luxuriously, with folded hands, star- 
 ing at .him like an owl lazily blinking in the sunlight. 
 
 He laboured without ceasing, and with a hot joy at his 
 heart. Afar, where the gray wall towered, the eyes of 
 Idalia watched him, and with sunset he would have earned 
 the right to sleep under the roof that made her prison. It 
 sufficed, with his high hope and his high courage, to give 
 him almost happiness. He could not believe that love 
 like his would ever be powerless to defend and to release 
 her. 
 
 All through the long day he worked unweariedly among 
 the reedy waters, under the frowning shadow of the monas- 
 tery-crowned rocks. And from her cell she gazed on him; 
 on the bold heroic cast of the head, arid the sun-warmed 
 brow from which the waves of hair were dashed ; gazed 
 on him where, under the cypress shadows, through the sear 
 rushes, through the sullen waters in the yellow glare, he 
 toiled, as peasants toil, for her for her, though she had 
 bidden him forsake even her memory for ever ; though she 
 had told him that suffering alone could be his portion 
 through her. 
 
 Out of the gloom and silence of her stone-locked cage 
 she gazed down on him at his labour through the long hot 
 hour of the southern summer day ; and her eyes were 
 heavy with a regretful languor, her lips parted with a sigh 
 of weariness. 
 
 1 Too late !' she thought, ' too late !' 
 
 The sim sank down, a globe of red flame in an angry sky; 
 
326 IDALIA, 
 
 the day was done, and with it the day's travail. More had 
 been gathered in it out of the wastes around than the lag- 
 gard tempers of the slothful brethren gathered in a month. 
 Erceldoune stooped eagerly, and drank long draughts 
 of thin crimson wine out of a half gourd-rind that 
 the Umbrian monk held to him, looking at him the while 
 with a curious, compassionate, wondering, envying glance. 
 
 i You are tired, my son. Ah, what limbs ! what strength ! 
 Come within ; you shall sup with us, and have such a 
 dormitory as we can give you. Bring the great beast too, 
 if there be no danger in him ; certes, he is a giant like 
 you.' 
 
 Erceldoune, as he lifted his head from the wine, felt his 
 face as flushed as the stormy sunset light that fell on it; a 
 wild senseless joy was on him ; he should be within the 
 walls that held her ! He laid his hand on the hound's 
 collar, with a gesture to silence well enough understood by 
 the animal, and followed mutely the brother. 
 
 Jagged precipitous flights of steps, rough hewn in the 
 rock itself, led up to the monastery. The entrance-door 
 was a low-browed iron-studded arched barrier of oak, im- 
 pregnable as granite. It yielded slowly, unwilling, with a 
 grating jar as the monk pushed it open. 
 
 * Enter, my son.' 
 
 Erceldoune stooped, and passed through it into the 
 vaulted stone passage-way within, dark as twilight; the 
 door swung weightily back to its place, the great bolts 
 rolled into their sockets; the dying day and the living 
 world were alike shut out. Thus far one desire of his 
 heart had fulfilled itself : he shared her prison-house with 
 Idalia. 
 
 ' This way, my son,' said the Umbrian, as he turned down 
 a tortuous vaulted passage which led to the monks' dormi- 
 tories small stone cells one in another, with dried grasses 
 shaken down, as he had said, for pallets, and the moisture 
 dripping from the naked walls. The Cistercians of this place 
 were very poor ; and Griulio Villaflor loved vicarious mor- 
 tification, and was very stringent on his monks' asceticism 
 and devotion, visiting the slightest laxity with a fearful 
 rigour. 
 
 The poor brother, at whose girdle hung the huge keys 
 of the ecclesiastical fortress; motioned to one of the little 
 chamber*, 
 
*R IEN QUE TO/.' 327 
 
 1 This is yours, my son. I will come to you in half an 
 hour. We sup then in the refectory.' 
 
 Erceldoune, left in solitude, closed his door and drew its 
 massive bolt ; then, stripping off his clothes, dashed the cold 
 water that stood in a pitcher over him, rearranged his fisher- 
 dress as best he could, slung the pistols again in his sash, 
 dropped beside the dog on the hay, and let his head sink on 
 his hands. He was beneath the same roof with her ; the 
 knowledge made his heart beat thickly, and his temples 
 throb. But how to save her ? 
 
 It would be as dangerous to wrench her from the jaws of 
 the Church as to rend an antelope from a panther's jaws and 
 talons. Yet his teeth ground together under the sweeping 
 darkness of his beard, his hands felt for the butts of his belt- 
 pistols. 
 
 ' I can die with her, at least,' he thought, e and send some 
 of her foes to damnation first.' 
 
 His love was too fervent and too true not to be pagan in 
 its longing and his vengeance. 
 
 The half hour soon passed as he sat lost in thought, 
 feverish, tempestuous, conflicting. The Umbrian brother 
 came to him. 
 
 ' Our supper is ready, my brother ; it is richer than com- 
 mon, thanks to your woodcraft and your angling.' 
 
 Erceldoune followed him, leaving the hound at guard. 
 
 A long arched stone corridor led to the refectory a deso- 
 late dimly-lit hall of the same rough-hewn stone, with a few 
 feeble oil-lamps flickering in the great sea of gloom. The 
 board was simply spread with fried fish and a simmering 
 soup, in which the wild swan and some of the water-fowls 
 were stewed with lentils and capsicums. Some seventy 
 monks sat round it, breaking black bread, and scenting 
 longingly, though with downcast eyes and immutable lips, 
 the unwonted savour of the fare. As his ringing steps 
 sounded on the stone floor the recluses looked with a dreary 
 dull wonder at this man with his superb manhood, with his 
 luxuriant beard and his stalwart build, with his mountain 
 freedom of glance and of movement, who seemed to bring a 
 draught of wild, strong, fresh forest breeze into the darkness 
 and solitude of their prison. 
 
 He made hia reverence gravely to the white-haired elder 
 whom they pointed out aa the Superior, then seated himself 
 
328 IDAL1A 
 
 at the lower end of the board, and took the food proffered 
 him. Many eyes studied him inquisitively ; but no questions 
 were asked ; an unbroken silence prevailed as the meal went 
 on. The order was sternly ruled sternly in especial when 
 any wayfarer or stranger was present ; it had a great fame 
 for sanctity ; and that odorous reputation went far to cover 
 any whispers that might steal abroad of other and less holy 
 uses to which its highest director might turn it. 
 
 1 Great heaven ! ' thought Erceldoune, as he glanced down 
 the long table at the close-shaven silent guests that sur- 
 rounded it, while his hand went instinctively to the abun- 
 dant falling masses of the silken hair that covered his chest, 
 'can living breathing men, men in their youth and their 
 strength, exist like that ? ' 
 
 His thoughts swept over the many varying years of his 
 own life, so full of colour, of peril, of adventure, of change ; 
 of wandering in divers lands, of danger in deserts and on 
 seas, of pleasure in countless cities, of world-wide range of 
 travel, of communion with every nation, of gay nights in 
 western palaces, of wild rides through eastern heats. And 
 then men lived like this, while all the earth was free to them ! 
 
 He spoke to none of them ; he bore them a fiery hate be- 
 cause they were her priestly jailers; and even so much 
 needful reticence as lay in breaking the bread of these men 
 under a false semblance, while the intent to deliver their 
 captive was hidden in his heart, savoured too much of a taint 
 like treachery not to be bitter to him, imperative as it was 
 in her service, and just as it was in its employ and errand. 
 
 To Erceldoune it were far easier to deal a straight swift 
 stroke, such as that with which men of his race had felled 
 Paynim foe or Southern invader, than to carry through any- 
 thing that involved a touch of what looked to him like de- 
 ception. His life had brought him into many critical 
 moments when silence, acuteness, and caution had been as 
 compulsory as hot action and reckless daring ; and he had 
 never been found wanting in them. But the rush of a lion, 
 the swoop of an eagle, were more his instinct and his war- 
 fare ; and he chafed feverishly under this part that he played 
 for her sake in the Italian monastery. 
 
 The supper was brief. He had hoped the monks might 
 be, as he had known many, laughter-loving riotous brethren, 
 gossips in their cups, and not averse to heavy libations, frow 
 
'RIEN QUE TO/.' 329 
 
 whom he might have gleaned some hint or knowledge of her. 
 They were not ; a cold, still, harsh asceticism brooded over 
 them; they were chiefly saturnine, worn, impassive men, 
 whose faces were chill and unreadable as masks of stone; 
 there was nothing to give a suspicion that anything save the 
 severest form of religious devotion and abstinence reigned 
 there ; nothing to hint that there was a prisoner within 
 their keeping. There was not one from whom he could 
 expect to extract any hope, except the poor porter and 
 water-carrier, on whose round jocund face not even the 
 silence and the hard labour of his life could impress either 
 spirituality or resignation. 
 
 The monks filed slowly out of the dark, narrow, vaulted 
 hall ; the Umbrian and one other remained to clear away the 
 remnants of the meal. 
 
 '"Will you take this to your dog?' said the priest, as he 
 heaped up the remnants. ( You did well not to bring him 
 here ; the Superior would not have loved so big a brute.' 
 
 4 Thanks,' said Erceldoune, as he took some broken food ; 
 1 and do you come to my cell, good father ; I have something 
 more cheering in my flask than your water and goat's milk.' 
 
 The Umbrian' s eyes glistened with delight, though a 
 shadow of grievous disappointment .stole quickly over his 
 features. 
 
 6 Another night, my sou ; to-morrow night I shall be free,' 
 he whispered. ' This evening I must attend the offices. You 
 know your way back, and you can undress by moonlight. 
 We have no other light, save in the chapel.' 
 
 Erceldoune, wearily enough, nodded assent, and with a 
 brief word of thanks paced through the long passages to his 
 dormitory. He could do no more ; he must wait and watch, 
 and be content that he was near her. He could not tell in 
 what part of the building she was lodged ; he must await 
 time to learn that, and learn the means to reach her. With 
 the morrow he might bribe or stupefy the Umbrian with 
 drink till he reached his confidence ; for the present there 
 was nothing for it, without exciting suspicion, except to 
 remain in the sleeping-place allotted him, and labour afresh 
 for them with the dawn. 
 
 The little slit, uuglazed and narrow as a hand's breadth, 
 through which the luminous silver moon poured down, waa 
 high above his head; he swung himself upward and looked 
 
33 WALIA. 
 
 out. The waters and marshy plains, with the dark belt of 
 cypress afar off, slept calmly in the white and glistening 
 night ; all was very still, only broken by the cry of a water- 
 bird, the rush of an aziola, or the hoot of an owl. As he 
 gazed the outer bolt of the stone door of his cell was drawn 
 sharply and swiftly. He dropped to his feet with an oath. 
 
 * Do not blaspheme, my son,' said the Umbrian's voice 
 through a chink. ' It is only our custom with strangers.' 
 
 He was a prisoner for the whole length of the summer 
 night. 
 
 "Well, the prison was hers ; it was something to share it. 
 
 He undressed, laid his pistols ready loaded by his side, 
 drank thirstily of the cool water with which the pitcher had 
 been refilled, and threw himself on the dry grasses, with his 
 arm flung round the hound's neck. They were comrades ; 
 they were both here to save her. 
 
 He lay long gazing at the glimpse of starry sky that 
 gleamed above, while the chimes tolled slowly from the bell- 
 tower of the Cistercian monastery, and the moonlight poured 
 down on to his mighty limbs stretched there in rest, and the 
 gladiator breadth of the vast uncovered chest ; only to know 
 that he was beneath the same roof with her through the long 
 silent hours made his brain giddy, his heart on fire. 
 
 It was very long before at length a fitful, restless, dreamy 
 sleep came to him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 LION AND LEOPABD. 
 
 WITH the first break of the dawn, freed by his Umbrian 
 friend, he went back to his work on the waters. The cool 
 long hours were precious for labour ; and he desired so to 
 gratify and serve them that the brethren should be loth to 
 lose his services. He was thankful that he was given liberty 
 at all with the sunrise. "When the bolt of his cell had been 
 drawn, a horror of dread had stolen on him that his errand 
 was suspected, and that he was trapped like a fox in a 
 keeper's gins. 
 
 The morning was balmy, clear, and beautiful \ even tbe 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 331 
 
 naked wastes and smoking marshes looked brighter in its 
 light, and he went forth with the scythe, and the nets, and 
 the lines across his shoulder, and the hound following close 
 in his path. He had strapped his gold about his waist, and 
 he brought the dog with him. The hound's eyes asked, with 
 as much eloquence as human lips ever framed, to be allowed 
 to seek out his mistress ; but he was perfectly trained, and 
 he understood at a glance that the time for his search of her 
 had not yet come. As Erceldoune descended the steep in- 
 cline of rock-steps, he glanced up at the lancet window at 
 which yesterday he had seen the woman who was the single 
 thought and idol of his life ; she was not there. Though he 
 knew nothing of it, her prison-chamber had been changed for 
 one in which there was no casement one to which light and 
 air only strayed through by a score of circular holes pierced 
 in the stone- work, high above the reach of her gaze a cham- 
 ber on which no eyes could look, from which no cries could 
 be heard. His heart sank at the dark vacancy which was 
 alone seen through the bars, whence a few hours before her 
 eyes had dwelt on him, from which she had watched him all 
 through the length of the previous day. It was bitter work 
 so to rein in his impulse that he did not rush blindly into the 
 den where she was hidden, and see what a sure shot and a 
 merciless blow could do to free her. He choked the longing 
 down as best he could ; he knew there were seventy men 
 there who would swing the ponderous gates to on him, and 
 shut in with him for ever every chance of rescue for her ; he 
 knew that the only hope for her, or for himself, lay in the 
 course he now pursued ; and he went out to his toil. There 
 was abundance both of sport and of labour in those wild 
 marshes and ill-preserved pools to have occupied for months 
 one who brought to them the lore and the skill of Scottish 
 moorlands, and he returned to them with unflagging perti- 
 nacity, mowing down the osiers, slinging the teal, and wid- 
 geon, and mallards, reckless of season,, so long as they served 
 to fill the monks' buttery ; stretching the nets and thrashing 
 the sedges till the frightened fish swam in by the score ; 
 working through hour on hour till the Umbrian brought him 
 his mess of breakfast-soup, and some tough cakes of rye, and 
 sat down beside him under the stunted cypresses, gazing with, 
 devouring delighted eyes at the stores of food laid upon th$ 
 banks, 
 
33 a ID ALIA. 
 
 c Thanks, father ; but that is a poor breakfast for either 
 of us. See here ; I have done better than you,' said Ercel- 
 doune, as he stooped over a fire he had lit with the touch- 
 wood, and broke the clay covering off two succulent water- 
 birds and half-a-dozen dainty trout, that he had baked in a 
 sportsman's fashion, practised many a time in Canadian 
 woods, and Kansas wilds, and Thuringian forests, and 
 Australian deserts. The eyes of the monk glittered with 
 glee ; he dearly loved savoury food, and abstinence was a sore 
 trial to him. 
 
 'Eat of them as you will,' said Erceldoune, as he laid 
 them on the slab of rock that served as a table. ' They are 
 better than rye bread, at any rate ; and if you fear the breth- 
 ren, not a soul can see you here. You seem very strict in 
 your order ?' 
 
 The Umbrian sighed, and shook his little brown bullet 
 head, while he betook himself to the precious banquet in 
 silence. 
 
 6 Yet you have a woman in your holy walls ?' 
 
 He spoke abruptly ; it was fearful to him to speak of her 
 and he could have better loved to force the answer out by a 
 sterner mode than words. 
 
 The Umbrian started, and flushed guiltily. 
 
 c Nay, my son, you make a strange error. By all the 
 saints of the calendar, nothing feminine ever * 
 
 6 Spare your perjuries, father. I saw her yonder.' 
 
 He motioned his head backwards to the frowning wall 
 behind them ; his pulses beat like sledge-hammers as he 
 spoke. 
 
 The Umbrian hung his head, and hastily gobbled up a 
 liver wing. 
 
 e A delusion of the eye a snare of the senses, my son. 
 May be your thoughts run too much upon women.' 
 
 Erceldoune swept the board bare of all the untasted fare. 
 
 ' By my faith, you are a good comrade. I have brandy 
 that will make you dream yourself in paradise, and we would 
 have had a carouse with it to-night ; but since you tell me 
 such lies, when my own eyes saw her yonder, you shall have 
 no drop of the cognac as long as you live, and every fish I 
 have heaped on these banks I will fling back in the lakes 
 again, and leave you to fill your own buttery as you best 
 mav.' 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 333 
 
 The Umbrian, terrified and aghast at what he had lost, 
 seized the ends of his companion's sash imploringly. 
 
 ' O, my son, do not be so rash ! Set down the good food ; 
 to waste it is a sin. You did see her ; you are right. But, 
 for pity's sake, never breathe it.' 
 
 * What is she, then ?' asked Erceldoune, as he gave back 
 the birds and trout, that had served him so well, into the 
 eager hands of the monk. ' And why should you deny it, 
 except that priests always deny any truth ?' 
 
 * She is a prisoner, and a rebel ; and you should not blas- 
 pheme.' 
 
 ' "Whose prisoner ?' 
 ' The king's, my son. 5 
 
 * The king's ! Has he no prisons of his own, then, that 
 he must borrow your convent ?' 
 
 The Umbrian hesitated ; lie was sore afraid to answer the 
 question, but he was more immediately afraid that his im- 
 petuous questioner should sweep his meal away again. 
 
 ' Monsignore Villaflor is interested in her recovery to the 
 One Faith, my son/ he said, slowly and unwillingly. 
 
 4 Griulio Villaflor !' The words leaped from his lips ere 
 he knew they were spoken ; the blood rushed into his face, 
 his hands clenched ; the name confirmed his worst horror, 
 his worst dread. He knew the temper and the repute of 
 the mighty Italian ; he shivered where he stood in the hot 
 sun. 
 
 ' What do you know of our holy father in God, my son?' 
 
 Erceldoune turned his eyes full on him. 
 
 ' What do you know ?' 
 
 The other flushed shamefacedly ; he was an honest 
 peasant in his way, to whom the mask of sanctity was very 
 irksome, and the great ecclesiastic, and the uses to which 
 the monastery was put, had alike cruelly gone against his 
 simple instincts of a just life. 
 
 ' You must not question me, my son ; I know nothing 
 nothing save to obey the little I am ever told.' 
 
 ' What are you told of this captive, then ?' 
 
 ' That she is a sceptic and a revolutionist a very evil 
 and fatal woman.' 
 
 * And his Holiness of Villaflor, out of his divine love, 
 wishes to reclaim her into the bosom of the Church !' 
 
 The words were hot and acrid as they were hurled through 
 
334 IDALIA. 
 
 his set teeth : it was all he could do to keep any chain or 
 them. 
 
 The Umhrian winced under their sting. 
 
 * Surely, my son. It would be well that she should be 
 reclaimed. But, of a truth ' 
 
 ' What ! can a priest speak truth p 1 
 
 ' Hush, my son ! you must not be so bitter upon the 
 appointed of G-od. 1 was going to say' the monk played 
 restlessly with the savoury bones he had been crunching, 
 and the colour burnt in his yellow cheek, as his voice sank 
 low, and his eyes glanced around furtively c whether it was 
 sorcery given her by the Evil One or no, I cannot tell ; but 
 there was such a look in her eyes ah, Madonna, she has a 
 fearful beauty ! that when they bade me scourge her for 
 contumacy, the lash dropped from my hands ; I was as one 
 paralysed. I could not I could not !' 
 
 With a cry as though the scourge came on him, cutting 
 into the livid flesh, Erceldoune sprang to his feet ; his hands 
 fell on the Cistercian's shoulders, swaying him to and fro. 
 
 ' Scourged her ? scourged her ? O G-od ! they never 
 dared ' 
 
 ' I dared not,' muttered the TJmbrian, sorely in fear ; 
 ' they were bitter upon me, but they did not force it then. 
 She will have the punishment to-morrow, if she have not 
 yielded ' 
 
 'Yielded to what?' 
 
 ' Yielded to the persuasions of the Church, my son.' 
 
 Erceldoune flung him off with a force that made the 
 Umbrian's blood run cold. 
 
 * Yielded to the passions of Q-iulio Villaflor, you mean. 
 You hell-hounds ! you fiends !' 
 
 His voice choked in his throat ; the muscles of his chest, 
 where the fishing-shirt was open, swelled convulsively ; he 
 felt blind with rage and agony ; the monk watched him in 
 wonder. 
 
 ' The sight of her beauty beyond those bars has stirred 
 you strangely, my son. Yerily, she is a sorceress, as they 
 say. You feel marvellously for a strange woman.' 
 
 Erceldoune shook in every limb with the effort to control 
 what, betrayed, must betray both her and him. 
 
 * That she is a woman, and you are brutes, is enough! 
 What man that had not the heart of a cur could hear such 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 33S 
 
 infamy and keep his peace ? It is well the lash dropped 
 from your hands, or I would have shaken life out of you 
 where you stand !' 
 
 The Umbrian gave a shudder. 
 
 ' Truly you could do it, for you are a son of Anak ! I 
 must leave you now ; I am due with the Almoner ; and as 
 for that little matter of the brandy, I will come to your cell 
 after supper, if you be still in the mind/ 
 
 He made his way back with speed, anxious to get out oi 
 reach of this unchained lion ; and Erceldoune stood alone 
 in the hot sun-scorch, with shivers of fire and of ice, turn 
 by turn, in his veins. 
 
 "Whatever could be done for her must be done swiftly, or 
 it would be too late. 
 
 Across the pitiless clearness of the transparent air there 
 was alone in the arid wastes about him the figure of a 
 pifferaro, a mere lad, singing a barcarolle, whose burden was 
 borne musically and wildly over the marshes as he toiled on 
 his way with his monkey on his shoulder. With lightning 
 quickness, Erceldoune, keeping out of the sight of the mon- 
 astery casements, waded through shallow pools and dashed 
 through thickets of osier till he reached the boy a bright 
 eyed, bright-witted Savoyard, with a dirty tattered sheep- 
 skin foi clothing, and a little ape for a comrade, and a light 
 childish heart, that made him happier than a king. Ercel- 
 doune glanced at him, and saw intelligence and frankness 
 both in the arch brown ruddy face of the little bohemian ; 
 he stopped him as the boy was leaping from tuft to tuft of 
 the rank grass that studded the shaking quagmires, and 
 stretched his hand out with a broad gold coin. 
 
 4 Had you ever so much in your life ?' 
 
 The Savoyard opened wide his keen, dancing black eyes. 
 
 'Never ! Of a truth, signor fiarcarolo, if that is the fish 
 you angle out of these pools, your craft's a thriving one !' 
 
 ' You shall get just such fish yourself, if you choose. 
 Will you go on an errand for me ? You shall have this coin 
 as you start, if you will, and ten like it when you come 
 back and show me the errand is done.' 
 
 The pifferaro stretched out his little tanned hand. 
 
 i Give it here,' he said laconically. ' The errand is done.* 
 
 Erceldoune tossed him the gold. 
 
 ' The errand is this. Do you know Ferratino ? f 
 
3J6 ID ALIA. 
 
 The boy nodded assent. 
 
 e Go thither, then ; quick as a lapwing, straight as a crow 
 flies. Bun as if you ran for your life. Take a paper I will 
 give you to the villa, and say it is for his Excellency the 
 Baron ; he will send word by you, yes or no. Bring the 
 word to me here, truly and instantly, and you shall have 
 ten of those pieces, I promise you. Can you do the distance ? 
 It is far.' 
 
 The Savoyard laughed, his bright eyes all glittering with 
 eager zest. 
 
 4 1 have done farther for a dozen bajocchi. You shall 
 have your answer as fast as a pigeon could bring it. Give 
 me the paper. I shall find you here ?' 
 
 'Yes; on these waters. Wait a second while I write, 
 and then be off like the wind.' 
 
 As he spoke, he tore a leaf out of a pocket-book in which 
 his circular notes had been sent from the yacht, and wrote 
 with its pencil a few rapid lines. They were simply in 
 German : 
 
 * DEAR ANSELM, I am in pressing need. Send me at 
 nightfall two of the fastest horses you have ; let some boy 
 ride them who cannot speak a word of Italian, and wait with 
 them, unseen, in the cypress grove under the monastery of 
 Taverna wait all night till he sees me. Do no more than 
 I ask, for God's sake ! I know I need not say, grant my 
 request ; our alliance is too old and too sure. Eorgive all 
 that sounds strange and vague in this, and send me simply 
 word, "Yes " or " No," by the Savoyard. 
 ' Yours ever, 
 
 * EULKE EECELDOUNE.' 
 
 Men of his temperament make firm and warm friend- 
 ships among men. The Hungarian noble to whom he 
 wrote, and who, as he had remembered, occupied a villa 
 some dozen miles from the wastes in which he stood, was a 
 generous, reckless man of pleasure, who, he knew well, 
 would have done far greater things than this at his entreaty, 
 and would have the sagacity to do as he asked, and no more. 
 Ernst von Anselm and he had once passed through a mad 
 night together on the burning decks of a ship in the 
 midst of the broad Pacific, when mutiny and drunkenness 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 337 
 
 ill a Lascar crew had added their horrors to the pande- 
 monium ; and together, back to back, against a legion of| 
 devils, and in the red-hot glare of leaping flames, had sent 
 their bullets through the ringleaders' brains, and saved the 
 vessel alike from fire and from anarchy. From that hour 
 they had been friends, true and close and tried, in that 
 noble friendship of brethren which is worth all the love of 
 women. 
 
 The little pifferaro, flinging his ape over his shoulder, 
 where it gripped a sure hold, darted off over the dreary 
 plain, as he had promised, as fast as a pigeon could fly ; 
 that broad gold coin locked in his hand, and the promise 
 of ten more like it, lent him the speed of a desert pony. 
 * I shall go back a millionnaire to my people ! ' thought the 
 child in his glee. There was hardly so much money in the 
 whole of the little hamlet that had given him birth, where 
 it nestled in a sleepy hollow under the brown hills of 
 Savoy. 
 
 Erceldoune looked after him a secondthe careless child 
 was a frail little basket-boat to launch on such stormy 
 waters weighted with the fate of two lives ! Then he went 
 back to the work of the monastery, labouring all through 
 the noon-heat among the sedges and the still shallow yel- 
 low lagunes, working as men only work when in that 
 ardour of physical toil, that restless bodily exertion, they 
 give vent to the thoughts which, if they paused to muse 
 a moment, would unman and madden them. He felt as if 
 the hours would never move ; the sun seemed to stand 
 Btill ; the blazing radiance of the day had a sickening op- 
 pression what might she not be bidden to suffer in it ! 
 
 He knew the temper of Giulio Villaflor, that leopard of 
 the velvet skin and of the unsparing fangs. He shuddered 
 as he looked on the rugged silent pile that kept her chained 
 for such a tyrant. He had never fancied that the world 
 could hold such agony as those burning, endless, intolerable 
 hours brought him, as he plunged down eagerly into the 
 coolness of the waters to chill the torture in him, and la- 
 boured to kill thought under the burden of corporeal fatigue, 
 under the fever of ceaseless activity. 
 
 The day grew on ; noon came and passed ; the glow of 
 light lay clear and golden over the plain and the breadth 
 of the sheeted waVer ; the hours were tolled monotonously 
 
3^3 IDALIA. 
 
 from the eampamla, ever and again the drone of the monks' 
 voices rising in regular diapason, in chant or office, swelled 
 through the narrow apertures of their chapel casements, 
 and echoed with melancholy rise and fall over the silence. 
 When he heard it, deadlier oaths than his lips had ever 
 breathed were hurled over the slumbering pools at the 
 priestly formulas that sheltered a Nero's cruelties, a 
 Borgia's lusts. Once or twice a peasant or a muleteer 
 passed across the horizon line; otherwise there was nothing 
 to break the eternal sameness of the glittering sunlight, 
 the sear country, the cypress points cutting so sharply 
 against the intense blue of the sky. He knew what men 
 had felt who had lost their reason through a captivity that 
 made them dwell in one unending solitude look on one 
 unchanging scene. 
 
 The deep radiance of colour that precedes the sunset was 
 just flushing earth and sky, as the shrill hoot of an owl's 
 note pierced his ear a night-bird's cry in the sunshine. 
 He guessed at once that it was a signal of the little pif- 
 feraro, and followed it. Under the reeds some half mile 
 or less from the monastery, the boy was crouched, panting 
 like a tired dog, but glowing with life and zest and eager- 
 ness as he lifted his hot brown face. 
 
 ' I have done it ! ' he cried, with all a child's exultation. 
 ' Here is your answer written. Stay here, lest the crows 
 yonder should spy on us. Let priests smell gold, and it's 
 all up with him who owns it.' 
 
 Erceldoune took the paper and read it, lying there under 
 the shelter of the sedges. It was in German ; the Baron 
 was from home, but an old lackey, who had chanced to be 
 the first to greet the Savoyard, seeing an open scroll and 
 pressed by the boy's urgency, had read it, had hesitated at 
 first what to do in his master's absence, but knowing how 
 well Anselm loved the writer, had known he should run 
 no risk by compliance, and might by refusal risk much dis, 
 pleasure. He wrote now in reply, with sagacity and fore* 
 sight, promising that the horses should be in waiting at 
 nightfall with a lad to hold them, and that as they would 
 be something worn by the transit, another pair should be 
 in readiness at the gates of Ferratino in case Erceldoune's 
 ; errand should bear him near, which in all likelihood it 
 might, since all things must pass by there to reach the road 
 to the shore. 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 339 
 
 His hand shook with joy as he read, and scattered the 
 old man's tremulously-written characters in fragments lest 
 they should tell tales. So far the means for flight were 
 secured, could her freedom be compassed. He had not 
 much gold about him, but he gave double the fee to the 
 little pifferaro, while the child stared in amaze at the 
 twenty shining yellow pieces. He caught them greedily, 
 yet when he had them he was half stupefied with the enor- 
 mity of his possessions. 
 
 The pastor, and the bailiff, and the innkeeper never had 
 more than that all put together ! ' he murmured, his 
 thoughts drifting to the village of his birth, with its little 
 steeple hidden under chestnut-leaves, and its mild-eye6 
 herbs browsing on the green breadths between the rocks. 
 ' That is no barcarolo ; and, whatever the mischief is, I will 
 be bound there is a woman in it/ considered the shrewd 
 little lad as he went on his way, the gold safe in the bosom 
 of his sheepskin shirt. 
 
 "With the dead mallards and teal flung over his shoulder, 
 and with a great osier-basket of fish filled to overflowing, 
 Erceldoune passed, unsummoned, from the lake side up the 
 rock, and to the monastery gates. He thought they might 
 make question of letting him enter for a second night's 
 lodging, and without entrance all hope of her rescue was 
 ended. The Umbrian, however, who through the grating 
 saw the abundance brought in for the larder, admitted him 
 instantly, with many praises of his industry and adorations 
 of his skill. 
 
 ' Tou have a heavy door there ? ' said Erceldoune, turning 
 to glance at the ponderous mass of iron-clamped oak that 
 swung slowly behind him. 
 
 f Ah heavy indeed !' sighed the Cistercian, as he stooped 
 to draw the huge bolts, which were only drawn stiffly and 
 with effort in their sockets. ' It is heavy enough, but it is 
 these are the misery.' 
 
 ' These ? I will soon make them run smoother. I have 
 something of a smith's skill. Fetch me a file and a little 
 oil.' 
 
 The Umbrian fetched them gladly, marvelling what man* 
 ner of man this was who knew every craft under the sun. 
 A little while, and the rusted iron ran noiselessly and 
 smoothly in their massive channels | the monk's lament had 
 
340 ID ALIA. 
 
 given him an opportunity more precious than any other 
 could have been in that moment, and in easing the run of 
 tbe bolts for the gatekeeper's indolence, he paved the way 
 to a facile exit by night from the monastery, if by any 
 means he could also obtain the great key that swung from 
 the Umbrian's girdle. 
 
 6 You have a wonderful science, my son/ said the Cister- 
 cian, with musing amaze. * You can do all things that you 
 turn your hand to, it seems ! ' 
 
 I have lived in many countries and with many men.' 
 1 You must have been more than a mere barcarolo, my son? ' 
 ' 1 told you I have been a " wanderer " from my birth,' 
 said Erceldoune, with a smile at the play on the Celtic 
 meaning of his nationality. ' The career is a bad one for 
 gold, but it is the best in the world, I fancy, for learning 
 self-help and other men's virtues.' 
 
 * But you must learn much vice, too, my son ? ' 
 Erceldoune shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' What of that ? Vice is a good teacher too, in its way, 
 and one must take the warp with the woof.' 
 
 ' But, you know, one cannot touch pitch, my son, and 
 keep undefiled.' 
 
 Erceldoune laughed a little. 
 
 ' Good father, where is the man that did ever keep so ? 
 And as for that, the pitch will not stay long unless the 
 surface be ready for it. But, for heaven's sake, chatter no 
 more ; 1 love speech little at any time, and now I am 
 famished.' 
 
 4 Truly you have earned your supper ; and as for that 
 little matter of brandy ? I have not tasted a drop since I 
 was in Naples, seven seasons ago ! ' 
 
 * All right. I have the best cognac in a flask here; if 
 you will come to my cell after supper, you shall be heartily 
 welcome to a draught of it.' 
 
 The monk's eyes sparkled with glee ; lie nodded a hasty 
 assent, arid, relieving his guest of the fish and the birds, 
 took him for the second time to the refectory. The same 
 silence, the same rigour, the same fare prevailed ; the same 
 double line of lean, immutable, saturnine, emaciated faces 
 were in the dim light of the stone hall ; the same swift 
 upward glance was cast on him as he entered ; the same 
 abstracted severity of repose was observed throughout the 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 341 
 
 meal. He had no wish to break it; only for her sake 
 could he so far restrain the hatred in him toward the men 
 who were her torturers and her captor's tools, as to share 
 their bread, justly as he had earned it, and to sit in such 
 semblance of amity with them as lay in this compulsory 
 companionship. Some among them noted that there was a 
 dark shadow on the strange barcarole's face that had not 
 been there so deeply on the previous day, and the monk 
 nearest him heard a heavy oath muttered under the waves 
 of his beard when the blessing before the refection was 
 chanted ; it was a curse on those who covered the lusts of 
 a velvet-voiced priest with the savour of sanctity, with the 
 odour of rituals. Often, moreover, his passionate eyes 
 flashed over the countenances around him, seeking to read 
 by instinct which among them was the brute who had dared 
 bid the lash be raised against her ; had he known, scarce 
 every memory of the prudence and the abstinence needful 
 for her sake would have availed to chain back his arm from 
 a blow that would have felled the offender level with the 
 flags of the stone floor. 
 
 The meal ended, a fresh torture waited him : the Superior 
 summoned him to the head of the table, and held a long 
 converse with him, the rambling verbosity of old age com- 
 bined, in the incessant vagaries of his interrogation, with 
 the subtle veiled promptings of curiosity and cunning. 
 There was that in the bearing and the glance of th6 
 stranger they harboured which made the priests uneasily 
 suspect that this was too bold a lion for their episcopal lord 
 to welcome, were he aware of the shelter they gave. Er- 
 celdoune saw the suspicion, and saw that he must allay it, or 
 all hope of sufficient freedom for the purpose he held would 
 be for ever denied him. With an effort which cost him 
 far more than any physical toil or bodily strain could ever 
 have done, he forced himself into the part it was imperative 
 to play. Lie he would not, not even for her ; and reserve, 
 he saw, would confirm all the doubts rising in the breasts 
 of his jailers and auditors ; he cast himself into a bolder 
 venture. ' These men," he reckoned, with a swift glancb 
 over them, c must be of two classes only those who have 
 forsaken the world, and those who have never known it ; to 
 hear of it will enchain equally those for whom it is a lost 
 land, and those to whom it is an unknown one.' On that 
 
34* ID ALIA. 
 
 rapid inference he acted. In answer to the Superior's 
 questions he told his life frankly ; changing in it little, 
 save that they deemed his travel had been the travel of a 
 restless bohemian a man poor enough to have been glad 
 at times to serve before the mast. 
 
 Though he was averse to many words usually, he could 
 speak with a vivid and impressive eloquence when the fire 
 of it was struck alight in him. He forced himself to speak 
 so here. He answered, as one who would tell his adven- 
 tures, without pressure or concealment ; and after the 
 brevity of his previous curt replies, the monks heard the 
 picturesque flow of his swift Italian with the same amaze with 
 which they regarded the stature, the strength, the sinewy 
 limbs, the sweeping beard, and the careless royalty of bear- 
 ing of this athlete, who came among them as though to 
 show them all that his manhood, which they had crucified 
 and buried in their own lives as an unholy and accursed 
 thing, might be and might enjoy. His past had been full 
 of ever-changing scenes and experiences ; hair-breadth 
 escapes, desperate dangers, wild adventure, and keen perils 
 had been continually his portion in the distant and intri- 
 cate missions on which he was sent. A struggle of life 
 and death in the heart of Persia had been followed by 
 dreamy barbaric luxury and magnificence in the midst of 
 Mexican palaces ; a death-ride through Eussian snow- 
 storms, with the baying pack of starving wolves on his 
 track through the whole of a bitter icy night, had been 
 succeeded by months of gaiety in the capitals of Europe ; 
 a shipwreck in the midst of the Indian Ocean, with a 
 Malay crew ripe for murder, and an open boat living for 
 :!ays on tempestuous seas in the glare of a tropic sun, 
 with men around him dying like dogs for water, had been 
 effaced almost as soon as endured by the brilliant fiery 
 pleasures of a volunteer service with the French cavalry 
 in a campaign against the Arabs, or a desert quest for 
 desert game over the wild Libyan tracks in the sultry 
 glories of autumn days and nights, by a season's sojourn 
 in some friend's summer-palace among the roses of Damas- 
 cus, or in the ruby glow of the Nile suns; painting, shoot- 
 ing, swimming, boating ; finding ever and everywhere the 
 happiness of fearless, fetterless, vivid sense of life, often- 
 times nomadic and glad in the mere gladness of strength 
 in the desert chief's mere liberty, with 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 343 
 
 'the rich dates yellow' d over with, gold-dust divine, 
 And the locust's flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine, 
 And the sleep in the dried river channel, where bulrushes tell 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.' 
 
 The memories even of a single year supplied him with a 
 thousand sources from, which to draw pictures of varied 
 scenes, whose recital entranced imperceptibly and uncon- 
 sciously first one and then another of his au'ditors, till the 
 whole circle of the monks stood around, as men in the East 
 will stand around the narrator who tells of far countries and 
 of strange fortunes, while the narghile vapours out, and the 
 coffee steams fragrantly in the open divan, and the grave 
 Mussulmans stroke their beards in silent wonder. 
 
 It entranced them, these recitals of worlds unknown and 
 joys as of dangers undreamed of. When he paused, the 
 Father Superior pressed him eagerly for more ; those bold, 
 terse, picturesque words that drew them sketches of different 
 lands and unirnagined pleasures with the same rich vigorous 
 sweep as that with which his hand would paint tropic foliage 
 and mountain outline, the stretch of seas and the burning 
 warmth of sun-tanned prairie, held the priestly circle spell- 
 bound. Those who had known no existence save that of the 
 cloister from their youth up, heard with an entranced stupe- 
 fied amaze, as children hear tales of genii ; those who had 
 come to the cloister only when every hope of life had been 
 bruised and wrung, and Idlled, heard with a terrible pained 
 look of hunger on their faces, as exiles hear a strain of melody 
 which brings them back the songs of the land they have lost 
 lor ever. Both alike hung on the swift flow of the descrip- 
 tive words, only more warmly coloured by the Neapolitan 
 idiom he still employed, as on some tale of paradise ; the 
 worn sallow cheeks flushed, the deadened lustreless eyes 
 flashed, the dropped, veiled glance was lifted eagerly, the thin 
 and silent lips were parted with rapid breaths, and once a 
 sigh broke from a monk still in the years of youth a sigh 
 so bitter, so intense in its anguish of vain lament, that a 
 whole broken wasted life seemed spent in it. 
 
 Never again would they be as they had been ere this 
 wanderer had come amid them ; through him they saw all 
 that they had lost for ever. 
 
 He had conquered them. "When they parted, and he 
 trent on his way to his cell, there was not a doubt of lim 
 
344 IDALIA. 
 
 lingering in any heart, there was not a man who had one 
 thought left with him save of that glory of manhood, that 
 splendour of liberty, that beauty of unknown worlds which 
 they had voluntarily surrendered and buried from them- 
 selves till the death of the grave should release them from 
 the death of the monastery. 
 
 1 Come,' he whispered, as he passed the TTmbrian, ' and 
 if you can bring lemons, sugar, and spices with you, you 
 shall dream yourself in paradise to-night/ 
 
 1 Hush, my dear son ; do not be so profane ; ' murmured 
 the other, while his eyes danced in expectant ecstacy. * I 
 will come, and bring the things, if I can, from the buttery. 
 Tour tales were beautiful, but I thought the Superior would 
 never have let you go ! ' 
 
 6 Great heaven ! to save my own life I would not stoop 
 to dupe and bribe these brutes as I do for hers ! ' thought 
 Erceldoune, where he leaned on the stone ledge of his cell- 
 window awaiting the monk. It was very bitter to him, this 
 truce with her enemies, this false play with these ecclesias- 
 tics. The soldier-like frankness and the proud honesty of 
 his nature rebelled irrepressibly at the dissimulation he was 
 driven to match them with thus. To lead a charge through 
 the heat of battle, as he had done in Mexico and Algeria 
 more than once, when the chiefs had been shot down, or to 
 imperil his life against all odds in a deadly contest with over- 
 powering numbers, as had chanced to him in Persian denies 
 and Argentine revolutions, was fa,r more suited to his tem- 
 per and his instincts than the part that, for her sake, fell 
 to him in these cloisters of Taverna. Yet played out the 
 part must be, or she would be beyond rescue, beyond 
 hope. 
 
 It was not long before the Umbrian made his stealthy 
 entrance, with the treasures of the buttery hidden under 
 his frock. 
 
 Erceldoune in silence took the things from him. His own 
 flask was large and full of brandy, strong as fire and mellow 
 as oil ; he emptied out half the water of his pitcher, tossed 
 the whole of the cognac in instead, and with the spices, 
 lemons, and sugar, made a fragrant and intoxicating drink. 
 The Umbrian, squatted on the dry grasses of the bed, watched 
 its preparation with thirsty devouring eyes. 
 
 ' He will be dead drunk before this is half empty/ 
 thought Erceldoune. 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 345 
 
 * There, tell me if that is not better than sour wines and 
 rancid goat's rnilk ? ' he asked, as he poured some into the 
 little drinking horn the monk had brought. It was swal- 
 lowed in an ecstasy ; the TJinbrian had no need to dream ol 
 paradise; he was in it the moment the strong odorous 
 drought touched his lips. As fast as he stretched the horn 
 out, so fast his host filled it ; the pitcher held more than a 
 quart, and Erceldoune scarcely drank himself, though he 
 made a feint of so doing ; he did not yet know how much or 
 how little would be needed to steep the Italian in the slum- 
 berous intoxication he required to produce. As he had 
 imagined, the first few draughts rose straight to the braiu 
 of the recluse, who, well as he loved it, had not tasted 
 any alcohol for years ; the luscious, fiery, highly-spiced 
 liquid quickly flushed his face, and whirled his thoughts, 
 and loosened his always loquacious tongue ; he sat with the 
 jovial content of a Sancho Panza, laughing, chattering, 
 heeding very little what replies he had, and very rapidly 
 forgetting all things except the tender of his horn for its 
 replenishing. Erceldoune sought first to make him garru- 
 lous, so that he might glean intelligence from his drunken 
 verbiage. The Umbrian's idle tergiversation of speech 
 soon wandered off to the captive of their clerical bondage 
 wandered to such ardent maudlin ecstasies on the subject 
 of her beauty, that his hearer suffered tortures as he listened 
 perforce to the profanation. Erceldoune flung himself 
 down on the flag floor, resting on his elbow, in such en- 
 forced stillness ns he could command, while the rambling 
 fervour of the gluttonous Brother desecrated her name and 
 catalogued her charms ; happily the drinker was too giddy 
 with his potations to notice the shudder that every now 
 and then at his hottest epithets of descriptive admiration 
 shook his listener's limbs, or the flash that darted over him 
 from his hearer's eagle eyes when he betrayed, in his uncon- 
 scious loquacity, the purpose of her imprisonment in the 
 Cistercian sanctuary. 
 
 It needed no questions to elicit all he knew ; the brandy 
 fumes rising over his brain undid all caution it had ever 
 been taught, and spread out its shreds of knowledge as a 
 pedlar spreads his wares. Erceldoune heard enough to 
 convulse him with horror as he was stretched there on the 
 naked stone, with the lustre of the Italian night finding 
 
34$ ID ALIA. 
 
 its way dimly through the aperture above ; enough to know 
 that he must rescue her to-night, or never. 
 
 ' And I will tell you more,' hiccoughed the monk, laugh- 
 ing low and cunningly, too blind with drink to have much 
 knowledge left of whom he spoke to or of where he was. 
 ' Monsignore comes to-night he often visits us, you know ; 
 we are his special children, and it has a fair odour for so 
 great a man to leave the world for such holy rigorous re- 
 tirement ! ' 
 1 To-night ! ' 
 
 Erceldonne sprang to his feet as a lion springs from its 
 lair ; the priest's villanous chuckle rang like a rattlesnake 
 in his ear ; in his cups the Umbrian was but an animal a 
 very low one to boot and the better instincts which had 
 moved him when the lash had dropped from his hand were 
 drowned and dead. 
 
 * Ay, to-night ! ' laughed the monk, while his head hung 
 on one side, and his eyes closed with the fatuous cunning 
 of intoxication ; ' he comes for the last time do you mark 
 me ? for the last time ! ' 
 
 The oath that shook the stone walls thrilled even through 
 the mists of drink and the imbecility of his dulled brain, as 
 it was hurled from his hearer's lips ; an agony was in it such 
 as mere grief never spoke yet. The Umbrian, sobered by it 
 for the moment, shuddered and strove to rise, looking about 
 him with blind terrified eyes. 
 
 ' What have I said ? What have I done ? ' he muttered 
 piteously. ' Ah, Jesu ! Monsignore Monsignore ! ' 
 
 And with that last dread name on his lips he fell back 
 stupefied, rocking himself to and fro, and sobbing like a 
 child. 
 
 Erceldoune neither saw nor heard him ; he stood like a 
 statue, his hands clenched, his face dyed crimson, the black 
 reins swollen on his forehead and his throat, his breath 
 caught in savage stifled gasps, his bared chest heaving like 
 the flanks of a snared animal. 
 ' To-night ! to-night ! ' 
 
 The words rattled in his chest with a curse that would have 
 chilled even the bold blood of his mighty rival. 
 
 The Umbrian sat motionless, staring at him with dis- 
 tended senseless eyes ; he was filled with a great terror, but 
 the terror was vague, and his mind seemed to swim in va- 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 347 
 
 pour. Erceldoune cast one glance at him, and by sheer 
 instinct forced the vessel, still half filled with the liquid, into 
 his hands. 
 
 1 Drink ! ' he said fiercely ; ' drink, and be a beast at 
 once.' 
 
 The monk, with whom there was but one sense left, that 
 of desire for the alcohol that destroyed him, seized it thirstily, 
 and drank drank drank till the fiery stream flowed down 
 his throat like water. Erceldoune watched him with eager 
 aching eyes ; every moment seemed an eternity, every 
 thought maddened him till he felt like a desert brute ; he 
 could not stir till this priest lay senseless before him. 
 
 He paced the narrow limits of his cell like a caged lion, 
 his face dark as night, his heart panting till its throbs 
 sounded through the stillness, his breast heaving till the 
 loose light folds of the fishing-shirt felt like a case of iron, 
 bis gaze never leaving the obese wavering figure of the stu- 
 pefied Italian, who followed his movement with a dizzy 
 blinded sight that grew dimmer and dimmer with every 
 moment that the brandy rose over his brain like waves 
 that washed all lingering sense away. 
 
 At last the pitcher dropped with a crash from hands that 
 lost all power -, a vacuous laugh sounded a moment in the 
 Umbrian's throat ; his eyes stared senselessly at the slender 
 silver cimeter of the young moon that shone through the slit 
 of the casement, then their lids closed, his head fell back, 
 he lay like a log of wood on the pallet unconscious, sight- 
 less, dead drunk. 
 
 Erceldoune stooped over him, and forced his eylids up ; 
 by the look of the eyeballs beneath he saw that this was no 
 feint, but the deep-drugged sleep of intoxication that would 
 be unbroken for a score of hours, whose stupor made the 
 man it had enchained powerless as a stone, brainless as a 
 hog, deaf to all sound, insensible of all existence ; he wanted 
 110 more. 
 
 With his knife he slashed noiselessly the band of the 
 great keys that swung at the monk's girdle, and fastened 
 them on his own, so muffled that they would make no 
 sound as he moved. He looked at his pistols, and put them 
 back in his sash ready sprung ; they were double-barrelled 
 revolvers, that carried sure death in their tubes. Then he 
 laid his hand on the hounds collar, led him without, closed 
 the door, and drew its bolts, locking in the Umbrian. 
 
ID ALIA. 
 
 The domitory was quite dark ; not even the moon's rays 
 strayed into its narrow black aisle of stone, with the double 
 line of cells flanking its length ; a single footfall overheard, 
 a single echo sounding down the silence, and the sleeping 
 monks would pour out of their lairs upon him. While wait- 
 ing, he had bound his feet with withes of hay, so that they 
 fell noiselessly on the pavement ; and the hound stole softly 
 on, as he had been bred to steal on a roebuck's slot or a 
 brigand's track. The first thing Erceldoune sought was to 
 make the road free to leave the building ; he found his way, 
 that he had carefully noted as he came, back to the great 
 entrance. The whole place was still ; there was not a sound ; 
 he passed uninterruptedly to the vaulted grtte-passage. 
 Here a single oil-lamp burned, its light duly shed on the 
 broad low oak door, with its iron cramps and fastenings, 
 He drew back the bolts gently, and turned the keys in the 
 two ponderous locks ; the door would open now at a touch. 
 He motioned to the hound to wait and guard it ; the dog 
 understood the trust, and couched motionless as though 
 cast in bronze : a truer or a bolder sentinel could not be 
 placed there, and it was not for the first time that the brave 
 sagacious Servian monarch had been trusted in a crisis of 
 life or death. Then rapidly, and with the light swift 
 tread of a deer, Erceldoune retraced his steps ; he had but 
 the shadowy rambling information of the monk to guide 
 him to where Idaliawas, but he knew, by that, that she was 
 in the westward wing of the monastery, and he made his way 
 there through the thick darkness about him, and down the 
 stone passages winding one in another. It was all so still ; 
 he thought the story of the drunken Italian must have been 
 a drink inspired-dream. 
 
 And yet men who came for shame would come in silence 
 and in secret ; his hand was on his pistols as he went, his 
 limbs shook as he traversed the interminable gloom ; a hot 
 joy, a terrible torture, were on him ; he went to save her 
 and he might be too late. 
 
 He had found his way into what, as far as he could judge, 
 was the western part, close on the chapel which the Urnbrian 
 had spoken of as the place of her fresh lodgment. Here, 
 also, the darkness was unbroken ; he could not pierce it to 
 eee a yard in advance ; he felt the rough cold stone of the 
 wall against his baud ; he felt by the greater dullness of the 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 349 
 
 air that no ray of daylight ever penetrated'; he paused a 
 moment, tempted at all risk of discovery to return and fetch 
 the dog to track her. At that instant his eyes caught a 
 faint narrow thread of light, pale and close to the floor 
 the light, doubtless, of a chamber within glimmering above 
 the door sill ; he made his way toward it, careless what hand 
 might be stretched out to arrest his course ; before he 
 reached it, the sweet imperial tones of a voice that thrilled 
 him like an electric touch rang through the solitude. 
 
 ' Back ! or your life or mine ends. It matters little 
 which ! ' 
 
 The voice was clear as a bell and rich as music, but ifc 
 vibrated with a meaning that struck like steel to the heart 
 of the man who loved her; it told him all. 
 
 "With the force of a giant he threw himself against the 
 door, guided to it by the light that gleamed beneath against 
 the stones. Passion lent him herculean strength ; the bar 
 within was drawn, but the weight of his pressure suddenly 
 flung on the panels sent both bolts and sockets back, 
 wrenched from their fastenings, while the wood was shivered 
 beneath the crash, and a dusky yellow light flared in his 
 eyes from the cell within. 
 
 Across the broken half of the door, still jammed by its 
 staples to the floor, he saw Idalia ; such light as there was 
 on her where she stood close pressed to the bare stone 
 wall, an agony upon her face, but an agony that had in it 
 loathing and scorn unutterable, and had even now no touch 
 of fear; the rich-hued draperies of her mask-dress were 
 torn, as though she had just wrenched herself free from 
 some polluting grasp ; her hair was loosened, and against 
 the fairness of her bosom she held clenched the slender 
 blade of the Venetian stiletto, its point turned inward 
 against her heart. Above her stood the magnificence of 
 her great tyrant's lofty form. 
 
 As the bolts broke. <tiid the splintered beechwood flew in 
 fragments, Griulio Villailor swept round, his forehead red, 
 his eyes alight with a Borgia's fury of baffled and licentious 
 love an amazed rage on him at the stranger who dared 
 stand between him and his captive, between him. and his 
 will. "With one glance, in which his gaze met hers with 
 a lion's spring, Erceldoune was on the mighty prelate, hid 
 hana at the other's throat, as a forest hound's fangs fasten 
 
350 ID ALT A. 
 
 ,in a wolfs ; the shock of the sudden collision dragged the 
 (Italian back staggering and breathless; ere he heard or 
 j saw his antagonist, the sinewy arms crushed him, and the 
 j reckless violence tore him away. Then that sheer blood- 
 instinct woke in Villaflor which wakes with the first seuse 
 of conflict in all men not cowards from their birth ; he 
 closed with his unknown foe, whose gripe was at his throat, 
 holding him powerless. 
 
 Not a word was breathed, yet both knew strangers 
 though they were that they met thus but for her sake. 
 It was the work of an instant, yet to the Neapolitan it 
 eeenied long as half a life, that struggle in which the light- 
 ning swoop of his unseen enemy swept him from his prey, 
 and bore down on him with the might of vengeance, in the 
 silence of the night which he had thought had veiled his 
 tyranny and his crime from all eyes. ]S r o living man had 
 ever crossed the will or the passions of the great prelate 
 until now that he was seized as lions seize in the death- 
 grapple. 
 
 They were almost perfectly matched ; equal in strength 
 as in stature, though in one a life of adventure and hardi- 
 hood had braced all that in the other a life of effeminate 
 indulgence had enervated. Giulio Yillaflor beneath his 
 sacerdotal robes had a warrior's frame and a warrior's soul ; 
 many a time, hearing of battle-fields and soldier's perils, he 
 had longed to gird a sword on his loins and go down in the 
 van to the slaughter ; and as the gripe of Erceldoune's 
 hand fastened on his throat, and the gleam of his enemy's 
 eyes flashed suddenly into his, the desert rage, the desert 
 courage, roused in the silken soft-footed panther of the 
 Church. In the lamp-lit cell, under the black-vaulted roof, 
 in the hush of the midnight-silenced monastery, they 
 wrestled together in that wild-beast conflict, which makes 
 the men who are maddened by it savage and blood-thirsty 
 as the beasts whose ferocity they share. 
 
 Such feeble flickering light as there was in the dungeon 
 shone on the majestic figure of the priest, clothed in the 
 dark floating robes of the Church, and the athletic form of 
 his foe, in the white loose linen dress of the Capriote 
 sailors, as breast to breast, face to face, with their lofty 
 limbs twined like gladiators, and their hands at each other's 
 throats, they swayed, and reeled, and rocked to and fro, in 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 351 
 
 that deadly embrace. It was the work of scarce twenty 
 seconds ; yet in it they rent and tore at each other as lion 
 and leopard may do in the yellow dust of a tropic dawn, 
 when long famine has made both ravenous for blood, and 
 each beast knows that he must conquer and kill, or feel the 
 fangs plough down into heart and flanks, and his own life 
 pour out for ever. The prelate, who, ere now, had never 
 even known a hand too roughly brush his sacred person, 
 sought only to fling off the grasp that strangled, and the 
 arms that crushed him ; his foe, rife with revenge and 
 burning with a rival's hate against the spoiler who would 
 have left him nothing of his love save a vain unending 
 agony, could have torn his heart out where they wrestled 
 in as deadly a combat as ever was that with which retiarius 
 and secutor reddened the white sand of Augustan amphi- 
 theatres. 
 
 A moment, and the hardier strength, the leonine force, 
 of Erceldoune, so often tested in victory under the red 
 foliage of Canadian forests and the scorching suns of 
 African skies, conquered ; he crushed the priest in his 
 sinewy arms till the chest-bones bent, and the breath wna 
 stifled, as in the gripe of the Arctic bear ; then, with 
 one last effort, he swung the Italian off, and raising him by 
 the waist, flung him with all his might downward on to the 
 stone floor, the limbs falling with a dull, crushing, breaking 
 sound as they were dashed against the granite. 
 
 Thrown so that his head smote the flags with a shock like 
 iron meeting iron, Yillaflor fell insensible, the force with 
 which he was tossed outward stunning his senses, and 
 throwing him a bruised, motionless, huddled mass in the 
 gloom of the dusky cell. The proud and princely eccle- 
 siastic lay powerless, silenced, broken, helpless, like a dead 
 cur, in the heart of the monastery where his word was law, 
 and his will absolute as any sovereign's. 
 
 His foe stood above him, his foot on the prostrate throat, 
 that swelled and grew purple with the suffocated breath, the 
 stifled blood. He had lost all memory save the sheer 
 animal impulse to slaughter and avenge; and his heel 
 ground down on to the Neapolitan's neck, treading out life 
 till the rich lips of the Roman gasped in unconscious tor- 
 ture, and the olive tint of his bold smooth brow grew black 
 as the full veins throbbed and started beneath the skin. 
 
352 ID ALIA. 
 
 One pressure more, and the last pulse of existence would 
 have been crushed out where he lay, with his teeth clenched 
 and his senseless eyes staring upward the touch that could 
 lead him where it would, as a child, fell lightly on her 
 avenger's arm. Idalia's voice thrilled him with its sweet 
 brief words : 
 
 ' Wait ! You are too brave for that. He is fallen ; let 
 him lie. 5 
 
 Her gaze dwelt on him, full, humid, eloquent, speaking 
 her gratitude far more deeply than by words. Breathless, 
 victorious, with the war-lust in his eyes, and his heart pant- 
 ing under the bruised muscles and the aching sinews of the 
 chest to which his enemy had been strained in so deadly 
 an embrace, Erceldoune turned and looked at the woman 
 for whose sake he had fought, as a hound, called off from 
 the throat of the thief he has pulled down, looks at the 
 master he obeys, 'even while he longs to serve him, and 
 revenge him, with the death-gripe. 
 
 He took his heel off the neck of Griulio Yillaflor. 
 
 ' As you will.' 
 
 His voice shook over the simple words ; his face flushed 
 hotly to the very temples as, for the first time, he met her 
 gaze ; his eyes searched hers, thirstily wistful, wildly eager. 
 
 ' Come, for the love of Grod ! You trust me ? ' 
 
 ; As I never trusted any.' 
 
 She stretched out to him, as she spoke, her fettered hands 
 that, even chained, had found strength in them to hold the 
 slender blade that would have sheathed itself in her heart or 
 hertvrant's. There was that in the action which, even in 
 such a moment, made him feel faint and blind with hope. 
 It repaid him all would have repaid him his death-stroke, 
 had he laid dying at her feet. 
 
 For all answer he crushed the steel links that hung, hold- 
 ing her wrists powerless, in the grasp which had stifled 
 Griulio Yillaflor, and bent and wrenched and twisted them 
 with the same force as that by which he had once torn off 
 an Indian boar from its writhing human prey; the chain 
 broke and fell asunder. 
 
 His eyes, as they looked up to hers, spoke a meaning to 
 which her own heart answered as flame leaps to the touch 
 of a torch. 
 
 1 We will have one freedom. the freedom of death, if not 
 of life ! ' 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 353 
 
 She knew all that the whisper meant; knew that he 
 might be powerless to give her the liberty of existence, but 
 that he would give her the liberty of the grave and share 
 it. 
 
 As the links of her fetters broke, a rush, an alarm, a 
 tumult, were borne down the silence from the distant cor- 
 ridors ; the monks had awakened, and found either their 
 stranger guest absent or their bolted gates unloosed. Those 
 doors once freshly closed, those sleepers once aroused from 
 their countless cells, and every avenue of escape would be 
 sealed, every chance of flight ended for ever. 
 
 "Without a pause for breath, without a glance at the 
 fallen form of the great churchman, without sense or 
 memory of the aching sinews and the bruised nerves that 
 throbbed in heavy pain across his own breast, where the 
 strength of his foe had dealt him blows that had rained 
 down like an iron hammer on an iron plate, he drew his 
 pistol with one hand, while with the other he held her close 
 against him. 
 
 ' We will beat them yet ! ' he said in his teeth, that were 
 clenched like the strong fangs of a mastiff ; there was the 
 glow of fiery passion on his face, and his heart, as his arm 
 touched her, beat as it had never beaten even in the close- 
 locked struggle with the man who had sought to deal her 
 dishonour. He was a soldier at the core ; all a soldier's 
 daring, all a soldier's war-fire, rose in him, as with him alone 
 lay her defence, her liberty, her life. 
 
 With the swiftness of a moorland deer he plunged out 
 into the gloom of the passage beyond, and dashed down 
 the windings of the narrow vaulted ways. The darkness 
 was like the depth of midnight, and the first false step 
 might fling them like broken birds upon the stone of the 
 wall that towered on either side, or down the sheer descent 
 of the granite stairs that ever and again at intervals led 
 into the unknown horrors of the underground crypt and 
 vaults. Yet, as he bore her onward through the rayless 
 treacherous blackness, a sweet fierce joy was on him ; for 
 her pleasures, and her riches, and her brilliance, half the 
 world might be her comrades and her candidates, but he 
 alone shared her danger. In her prosperity so many had 
 been round her ; in her extremity he had no rival. 
 
 The rush of feet, the clamour of voices, the tremulous 
 
354 ID ALIA. 
 
 utterance of vague alarm pierced shrilly and incessantly 
 from the farther end of the building the dead silence of the 
 night. From the broken cries which reached him, he could 
 tell that the priests knew nothing as yet of the fall of their 
 great leader, but had been awakened by the noise of the 
 far-off conflict, and had discovered his absence and the 
 Umbrian's drunken sleep. But one chance remained the 
 single chance of reaching the entrance-hall before they 
 searched there for him. 
 
 * Can you lire ? ' he whispered, as he bore her onward and 
 outward to where the feeble lamp-light gleamed yellow and 
 faint in the passages he had traversed. 
 
 In answer, her hand glided over the barrel of his weapon, 
 and closed on the butt firmly. 
 
 ' My life has hung on my own shot before now.' 
 
 There was no tremor in her own tones as she replied to 
 him. ; there was only the calm valour that thrilled him as a 
 clarion thrills the soldier who hears its silvery melody com- 
 mand him to face death and to deal it. 
 
 1 Promise me one thing ? ' she murmured. 
 
 There was light enough now, gray and dusky as it was, 
 for him to see her eyes as they looked up to his, the gold 
 gleam of her hair against his breast, the glisten of the steel 
 blade against her bosom. 
 
 4 All things.' 
 
 ' Then, if we are outnumbered, keep the last shot for me, 
 and take sure aim.' 
 
 A mortal anguish quivered through him ; he knew it 
 might well prove that this boon, and this only, would be all 
 that he could do to rescue or obey her. 
 
 e The last but one,' he answered. ' The last shall bring 
 me to you.' 
 
 The words were brief, and had the noble simplicity of his 
 own nature in them, blent with a high devotion that held 
 her honour dearer yet than all her beauty, and would obey her 
 will even unto this last thing of death. He had loved her 
 ere now as dogs love, as slaves love, as men love, whose pas- 
 sions can make them madmen, dotards, fools ; but with that 
 hour he loved her more grandly, more deeply, with a passion 
 that sank into her heart, and stirred it as the storm winds 
 stir the sea ; that, for the first time in all the years in which 
 this insanity had been roused by her and lavished on her, 
 
LION AMD LEOPARD. 355 
 
 moved her to reverence what she ruled, to feel the strength, 
 the depth, the force of this life that she, and she alone, 
 could break as a child breaks reeds. She was* silent ; she let 
 nerself be borne by him through the twilight ; she, too, felt 
 a lulling sweetness, a subtle charm, in that breathless pas- 
 sage through the gloom, whose only goal might be the grave. 
 She, too, felt something of that dreamy sorcery which lies 
 in the one word c together.' 
 
 Nearing them came the clamour of the shrill Italian 
 voices ; behind them, from the cell where Griulio Villaflor 
 was stretched senseless, the shouts of those who found their 
 lord lie dying as they deemed rang the alarm through the 
 whole monastery, till the stones echoed with the outcry. 
 From the stillness of slumber and the drowsy monotone of 
 prayer, the whole silence teemed with noise and tumult ; 
 the whole building was alive with men, who started from 
 their first stupor of sleep in vague terror and senseless 
 excitation, while above all thundered the roll of the hound's 
 bay, attacked at his post and giving challenge to his menacers. 
 
 6 If he can guard the gates, you are free ! ' 
 
 The cry broke from Erceldoune with the agony of a prayer 
 as he pressed on into the great hall, where the single swing- 
 ing entrance-lamp burned dully through night and day. 
 Hope almost died in him as he saw the crowd of monks that 
 filled it ; while before the unbarred door the dog couched 
 like a lion ready to spring, with his mane erect, and his 
 eyeballs red with fire, and his mighty teeth gleaming white 
 under his black-bearded muzzle, holding them so at bay that 
 none dared be the first to pass him and swing to afresh the 
 unloosed bolts and chains. They forgot the hound as thej 
 saw the prisoner of their Church, and rushed on to her with 
 a shrill yell. There were men among them who had flung 
 the priestly robes over lives of foul crimes and unsuccessful 
 villainies ; and men who had hated her for that mere feminine 
 forbidden loveliness that here, in their stone-locked den, 
 they never looked on ; and men who would have killed her, 
 were it only that such service might find them fair favour 
 in the eyes of the great dignitary who held their fates in 
 the hollow of his hand. These turned from the dog, and 
 threw themselves headlong towards Erceldoune as he came 
 out of the darkness of the corridor into the entrance square, 
 low-roofed and broad j with the arch pf tte door filling ita 
 farther end. 2 A 2 
 
JDALIA. 
 
 He paused, and levelled his pistol full in the eyes of the 
 foremost. 
 
 * Let me pass, or you are dead men ! ' 
 
 The flash of the ^eel tube in their sight, the pressure of 
 its cold circle on the forehead of the nearest, staggered them 
 a moment : they recoiled slightly one on another. They 
 had measured the height and the girth of this stranger's 
 limbs as they had sat with him at their meal, and they 
 dreaded the tempest of his \vrath. He, holding her to him 
 still with one arm, and covering the foremost with his aim, 
 thrust himself against the mass of the monks half-clothed 
 as they started from their first heavy slumbers and strove 
 to pierce his way through them to the gates. A voice from 
 behind cut the silence like a bullet's hiss. 
 
 ' Cowards ! bolt the doors and trap them ; we can pinion 
 them then at our leisure ! ' 
 
 The speaker, as his figure towered in the shadow, was a 
 gaunt Abruzzian giant, fierce-eyed, hollow-cheeked, eager 
 and lustful for slaughter. In a long dead time he had been 
 a chief among ferocious soldiery, who had brued his hands 
 deep in blood ; and the old savage instincts flared alight, and 
 the old brute greeds breathed free again, as for once, after 
 long captivity, they broke the bondage of the priesthood. 
 He took the leadership among the herd of half-awakenec 1 
 and bewildered monks, as the long-stifled impulses of war 
 and murder rose in him, and glared wolf-like from his eyes, 
 reddened with a light that was well-nigh insanity. The 
 Abruzzian lived once more in a thousand dead days of battle, 
 of rapine, and of cruelty, as he strode downward into the 
 hall, heaving aloft a great iron bar with which he had armed 
 himself, in default of other weapon. 
 
 Erceldoune, as he turned his head, and saw the lamplight 
 glow on the lean ravenous face, knew that here lay his worst 
 foe ; the rest might be driven like a flock of sheep if once 
 terror fairly mastered them ; but in this man he read the 
 bloodthirst of the tiger, the fiercer and the more ruthless 
 for its long repression. With the keen glance of a soldier, 
 the warrior-monk sprang forward to secure the doorway ; 
 once netted, he knew that the prisoners could be dealt with 
 at pleasure. The weight of the iron bar was lifted, to be 
 curled on to the hound's head, where Sulla was planted at 
 his guard, and no more to be moved in fear or in wra/to 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 337 
 
 than the sentinel, who perishes at his post for sake of honour 
 and obedience might be slain so with ease, though not 
 passed or approached except at cost of life. The iron swung 
 above the Abruzzian's head, swaying lightly as a flail, to 
 descend with another instant on to the dog's bold brow. 
 As it was raised, his arm fell paralysed : Erceldoune's first 
 shot broke the bone above the wrist. Maddened with the 
 pain, the monk shifted the bar to his left hand, and, forget- 
 ful of the hound, rushed on to his antagonist, head down- 
 ward, with the blind infuriated onslaught of a wounded boar. 
 Erceldoune, watching him with quick unerring surety, was 
 ready for the shock, and, sparing his fire, for he knew not 
 how much more yet he might need it, caught him with a 
 blow on the temple, as he rushed on, which sent him stagger- 
 ing down like a felled ox. As he dropped, his brethren, 
 catching that contagion of conflict which few men, priests or 
 laymen, can resist when once launched into it, threw 
 themselves forward to revenge his fall, rough-armed with 
 the hatchets, the clubs, the pickaxes, used in out-door toil, 
 which hung or leaned against the wall. 
 
 Brigands of Calabria, tigers of the Deccan, would not 
 have been wilder in their rage than these sons of peace, 
 whose passions were for the first time loosened from control, 
 and took in one brief hour payment for all that had been 
 silenced, and iced, and fettered under the weight of the 
 Church's rule. The sight of a woman's loveliness lashed 
 like a scourge the bitter, longing, futile envy roused before- 
 hand in them by the stranger who had broken their bread, 
 and showed them all that they had lost in losing for ever 
 their freedom of will and act. The eyes of Idalia, as they 
 flashed over them, stung to fever heat the vain regret, the 
 hate of their own bonds, the acrid jealousy of all liberty lost 
 to them and still sweet in others' lives, which had woke in 
 them with the first ring of their guest's firm footfall and 
 fearless tone*. What was at riot in them was not a jailer's 
 rage or a hireling's terror of chastisement ; it was their 
 own heart-sickness, their own years of passionate pain, their 
 own rebellion, and their own despair which made them 
 savage as murderers. 
 
 Eor the only time in all his life a deadly fear came on 
 Erceldoune fear for her. He glanced down once on her, 
 and her eyes gave him back a smile, proud, serene, resolute, 
 
358 IDALIA. 
 
 sweet beyond all tenderness ; a smile that said, as though 
 her lips spoke it, ' Eemember ! ' It nerved him afresh, as 
 though the courage of Arthur, the power of Samson, poured 
 by it into his veins and limbs. He had sworn to give her 
 the freedom of death, if that of life were beyond his reach ; 
 the memory of his promise made him mad with that desperate 
 strength whereby men in their agony reach that which, told 
 or heard in the coolness of calm reason, seems a dream of 
 impossibilities, wild as those of the deeds of the Red Cross. 
 
 ' Fire with me ! ' he said in his teeth. ' Our lives hang 
 on it ! ' 
 
 She heard, and raised her weapon steadily as the priests 
 rushed at them, while the great gaunt body of the Abruzzian 
 lay like a mass of timber at their feet. The two shots echoed 
 together, aimed at the mass of stretching hands, of brawny 
 arms, of gleaming hatchets, of lifted clubs, that was within 
 a hand's breadth of them in the twilight of the lamp-lit hall. 
 The mass wavered, quivered, staggered back ; in that one 
 breathless pause Erceldoune, with his arms round her so 
 that she was held close against his breast, dashed forward with 
 a rush, as a lion will dash through the cordon of hunters 
 who have fenced him in for the slaughter, hurling them back 
 and front, left and right, by the impetus that bore him 
 through them as swiftly, as resistlessly, as a scythe clears 
 its way through the grasses. 
 
 One monk, more rapid than the rest, swerved aside from 
 that terrific charge, which carried all before it like the sweep 
 of cavalry, and threw himself against the door to swing the 
 oak close ere the fugitives could reach it. 
 
 4 Seize him ! ' shouted Erceldoune. 
 
 The hound had waited, panting and agonised, for the 
 command ; he sprang on the monk's breast, and threw him 
 prostrate, his fangs clenched in the man's throat almost ere 
 the words that loosed him from his guard were fairly uttered. 
 The fair, still, lustrous night gleamed soft and starlit through 
 the narrow space of the opened portals ; the world and a'll 
 its liberty lay beyond. Blows were rained on him, yells 
 hooted in his ear, hands clutched his clothes, his limbs, his 
 sash, to wrench him back ; an axe hurled at him struck him, 
 burying its blade an inch deep in his shoulder; a herd of 
 devils shrieked, cursed, wrestled, and pursued behind him. 
 He heeded nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing ; he only 
 
LION AND LEOPARD. 359 
 
 guarded her from the weapons that were flung in his rear, 
 so that none should touch her save such as struck first at 
 him, and bore her like the wind through the half-opened 
 door out into the night-air and down the flight of rock-hewn 
 stairs ; the hound coursing before him down the slope of 
 the black, rugged, precipitous steps, slippery with moss, and 
 worn uneven by the treading steps of many centuries. 
 One step unsure, and they would be hurled head downward 
 on to the stones below. There was no moonlight on the 
 depth of intense shadow that shelved straight into fathom- 
 less darkness 5 behind, the rush of the priests followed, and 
 the clamour of their shouts shook the night silence ; yet on 
 he went, fearless, reckless, impervious to pain, and feeling 
 drunk with the sweet freedom of the fresh night wind, with 
 the beating of her heart upon his own. To have held her 
 thus one instant, he would have given his life up the next. 
 
 Of that downward passage he had no knowledge, no 
 memory in after-time ; he followed it as men in a nightmare 
 follow some hideous path that ends in chaos. He touched 
 the earth at last, clearing the three last granite rungs of 
 the rock ladder with a leap that landed him in the moon- 
 lighted breadth of turf that stretched beneath. He rushed 
 across it at the speed of a wild deer, making straight for the 
 cypress knot where he bad bidden the horses be waiting. 
 A monk held him close in chase so close, that the priest 
 reached the ground well-nigh with him. He did not see or 
 dream his danger ; Sulla did, and, with one mighty bound, 
 was on the Italian's naked chest, rending and tearing and 
 crushing him, as he had dealt with wolf and with bear in his 
 own woods. The monk fell well-nigh senseless, and the dog 
 tore onward through the moonlight with a loud bay of joy, 
 of challenge, and of freedom. 
 
 They were alone ; the pursuit could not reach them for 
 seconds at least seconds precious in that extremity as years. 
 The clamour and tumult of the monastery pealed from the 
 height above ; but few of the brethren would dare to risk 
 the peril of descent in the blackness of midnight, the few 
 that would must be some moments yet before they could 
 be on him. In the shadow of the cypresses stood the horses, 
 held by a German lad, and eased by rest till they were fresh 
 as though they had not left their stalls. 
 
 "Without words, she threw herself in the saddle ; she had 
 
360 IDAUA. 
 
 ridden stirrupless ere then across the brown, dark desolation 
 of the Carapagna, in an autumn night, with the Papal troops 
 out against her. In all her sovereignty, he had never seen 
 her beautiful as she was now in the white flood of starlight 
 that fell through the cypress-boughs. Idalia was of that 
 nature to which danger is as strong wine. Her face was 
 pale to the lips, but resolute as any soldier's on the eve of 
 victory ; her hair shaken down rested in great masses that 
 gleamed golden in the flickering light, her right hand still 
 held the pistol as though it were some ]ove-gage that she 
 treasured close, and the fairness of her face was set calm as 
 death, resolute as steel, even while her eyes burned, and 
 glowed, and dilated with the ardent fire of war, and with a 
 look sweeter than that which swept over him like a sorcery. 
 
 * Off ! ' she said low and eagerly. ' Every second is life ! ' 
 
 While she spoke he was in the saddle ; the horses, young 
 and wild, broke away at a touch in a stretching gallop, with 
 the brave hound coursing beside them mad with the joy of 
 his liberty. The hoofs were noiseless on the moss that was 
 damp and yielding by the moisture from the swamps, and 
 the belt of the cypress screened their flight from the 
 monastery ; the monks would search for hours till their 
 torches flared out in every nook and cleft of the rocks 
 around, ere ever they would dream that that midnight ride 
 had borne away their prisoner. 
 
 Out of the cypress grove and beyond the beetling wall of 
 the crags the moonlight lay in a broad white sheet, clear 
 and soft as dawn, across the open country ; mirrored in the 
 surface of the still lagoons, and scarcely broken by a tree or 
 hut. Afar the still green fields of rye and maize were scarce 
 stirred by a breath, and the twisted boughs of the olives, 
 with their gray silver foliage, were veiled with a soft mist, 
 the steam of the marshes and the plains. Through the 
 sweet, luminous half light, while the water-threaded earth 
 trembled beneath them, and the rank grasses were crushed 
 under their fleet hoofs, they rode as those alone ride behind 
 whom pursues Death, and before whom lies Freedom. 
 
 Through the shallow pools, with the water splashed to 
 their girths, and circling away in eddying rings as they broke 
 its slumbering quiet ; through the vaporous haze that hung 
 over the black expanse of the morass and the plain till they 
 seemed to hunt down the white wraiths of its smoke that 
 
'STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME: 361 
 
 curled and uncurled before them ; through the tall, reedy 
 grasses that broke as they crushed them, and sent a fresh, 
 dreamy odour out on the air as they bowed their broad rib- 
 bons and their feathery clusters ; through the deep, intense 
 silence, till the water-hen flew with a scream from her rest, 
 and the downy owl brushed by with a startled rush, and 
 the landrail woke with his shrill cry from his sleep in the 
 midst of the millet-stalks ; through the balmy southern 
 night they rode as those can only ride behind whom yawn 
 a prison and a grave, before whom smile the world and all 
 its liberty. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXV. 
 
 c STOOP DOWtf AND SEEM TO KISS ME EEE I DIE.' 
 
 ALL through the night they rode on, till the slender arc 
 of the young moon was sinking toward the west, and all 
 the countless stars were shining larger and clearer toward 
 the dawn, burning through the blue-black darkness of the 
 sky, veiled ever and again by sweeping trails of mist. 
 
 Under the gray dim colossal arches of the Ferratino gates 
 fresh horses waited ; the tired beasts were changed in haste 
 and without question, and the young unworn ones raced on 
 through the gloom as fleetly as wild horses sweep over prairie 
 plains. Behind them hunted Death ; with the morning light 
 the whole land would be as one host risen against them, as 
 one snare spread to trap them ; the bloodhounds of a Church 
 were on their track, and the hate of a king and a priest ran 
 them down ; yet scarce a touch of fear, scarce a breath of the 
 dullness of terror were on them ; they had drunk deep of 
 the rich hot wine of danger, and one at least was blind with 
 the blindness of passion. 
 
 The world was still about them ; all things slept. The 
 earth was hushed and without sound, as though the deep 
 tranquillity of death had fallen everywhere. Only through 
 the calmness came the low sigh of the air through the 
 grasses, and the liquid murmur of unseen waters foaming 
 down from height to height, or stealing under the broad 
 leafage of arum-shadowed channels. Nothing awakened 
 
562 1DALIA. 
 
 around them, save the downy- winged aziola, or the changeful 
 bands of the fireflies gleaming like gold among the gray 
 plumes of olives, or above the tender green seas of ripening 
 millet. The summer was still young, and the night was 
 divine, as the nights of the south alone are ; the barren 
 plains and the vaporous pools were passed with the swift- 
 ness of a dream, and beyond the olive belts and the outer 
 woods of cypress lay the richness and riot of Italy, all 
 shadowed and softened, and steeped in the moonbeams. 
 Vineyards where the budding grapes were thrusting their 
 first life through the leaves ; great chestnut woods, where 
 no ray pierced the massive fans of foliage, and the ground 
 was white as though from snow with the heavy fall of the 
 dropped flowers ; fields where melon and gourd, and the 
 fantastic shapes of the wild fig-tree coiled one in another, 
 fragrant as gods' nectar, when the hoofs trod out the fruit 
 and bruised the amber skins, and broke through the filmy, 
 silvery webs of weaving insects, all glittering with the dew ; 
 black, silent groves, noiseless and cavernous, with the 
 hollow moan of earth-imprisoned torrents, and lofty aisles of 
 cedars shutting in the broken ivy-covered ruins of the de- 
 serted altars of dead gods ; vast piles of rocks, and dim, soft 
 stretching plains and hills covered with ancient strongholds 
 mouldering to dust, and sweet nestling dells where sheeted 
 water mirrored in the starlight the slender sterns of sea- 
 pines and the marble shafts of classic temples. Through 
 them they rode, never drawing rein, with the hound cour- 
 sing beside them, through the changeful light of the calm 
 late hours, guiding their flight by the stars, and holding ever 
 straight for the sea. With sunrise the soldiers of the king, 
 the mercenaries of Church and of State, would be out over 
 the land ; the night alone was liberty. Liberty, for the 
 breath of the wind on their brows, for the splash of river- 
 spray on their lips, for the wild joy of fearless speed, for the 
 fragrance of trampled flowers, for the limitless glory of sight 
 free to range over the width of the earth, for the nameless 
 rapture of living when every sense and pulse of life is hot as 
 with wine, yet is lulled as with sleep, and holds the pain of 
 the world well endured for the sake of one hour of joy. 
 Liberty, in whose sweetness lies all the ecstacy of life, and 
 in whose loss lies all its anguish. 
 
 Through the shallow foam of half-dry water-courses. 
 
'STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME. 1 363 
 
 through the long sear grasses where the cattle couched, 
 through the odorous thickets of wild myrtle, through t he 
 withes of osiers where the bittern, wakened, rose with his 
 sullen booming cry, they rode on towards the sea. Down 
 the perilous slopes of ravines, where the loosened shingles 
 shook in showers into yawning depths ; down naked breadths 
 of stone where no mosses broke the polished incline, and one 
 uncertain step was death ; across bridges high in air, 
 spanning the white smoke of boiling torrents, while the 
 timbers shook and bent beneath them ; under mighty aisles 
 of oak and cypress, where no path led save such as the rush 
 of their gallop forced between the breaking boughs, they 
 held their way by the light of the planets, through the 
 twilight haze that deepened to blackest gloom where the 
 woods closed above, and lightened to silvery lustre where 
 the plains stretched out unbroken. All memory of danger, 
 all sense of danger had fallen from them ; on her the 
 dreamy night silence and the passionate sweetness of 
 freedom rested ; with him there was no thought remaining 
 save that he alone held his place by her bridle-rein, that he 
 alone had delivered her out of her bondage. 
 
 In the vast calm around them, all was at rest save then 
 own hearts, save their own flight that held on for the same 
 goal; all human life except their own seemed banished from 
 the world, and the slumber-hushed earth left only to them ; 
 through ravine and woodland, through vineyard and valley, 
 under the overhanging brow of lonely cliffs, and across the 
 swaying bridge of giddy heights they rode together ; and 
 while the flickering light flashed down through parted leaves 
 upon her beauty, and ever and again as he swept on beside 
 her he met the gleam of her eyes through the shadows, he 
 who loved her felt drunk with his joy. "What cared he 
 though he should fall dead at her feet when that midnight 
 ride should have reached its end ? He should have passed 
 to his grave with her. 
 
 Where the jagged iron had been hurled against him, the 
 rent nerves throbbed, and the linen was stained with blood ; 
 where his rival had strained him in that deadly embrace, the 
 breadth of his chest was bruised as though weightily struck 
 by a mace, and compressed as though tight-bound in bands 
 of steel ; but he felt none of its pain, he knew none of its 
 suffering : he only knew that she rode beside him, that 
 
364 IDALIA. 
 
 through him she was saved, that once his arms had held her, 
 that still in all the width of the world there was none with 
 her in her extremity save himself whose love she had for- 
 bidden, yet whose love, she had seen, outlasted all, and only 
 asked of her place with her in her danger a place near her 
 in her death. 
 
 JSTo words passed between them ; the breathless passage 
 of their flight left no space for speech, and the soft hush 
 of the darkened world was too solemn to be broken. There 
 was no sound, except the throbbing of the hoofs' beat scour- 
 ing fast as the wind the seaward way to the shore. They 
 had broken away from the beaten track, lest any should see 
 and mark their course, and had borne straight across the 
 country westward to where the bay lay breaking through 
 the blossomed vines, the sheets of maize, the nets outspread 
 for birds in southern mode, the deep-grown screens of 
 myrtles fencing villa lands, and the wild growth of rocky 
 channels, where hidden streams ran below earth, and made 
 the vegetation riot rank and thick, where the snake found 
 its lair, and the mosquito swarmed in hundreds, and the hot 
 heavy vapour uprose like clouds of steam. Now and then 
 her eyes turned on him in the darkness of cypress shadows, 
 or where some yawning river-bed, yellow and reed-choked, 
 and unfathomed in the gloom, was crossed with a measure- 
 less leap, their horses close abreast, For all else, except the 
 echo of the ringing hoofs trampling through ripening corn, 
 or sounding loud on rocky pathways, there was utter silence 
 between them as they swept onward to the sea, as swiftly 
 and as surely, by unreasoned instinct, as hunted deer make 
 for it, when before them lie the waves,, and behind them 
 the hounds hold chase. 
 
 The night was fast waning, the stars growing larger, till 
 the whole skies seemed on fire with their brilliance ; the 
 hours were passing swiftly the hours which alone were 
 safety. Here and there, from lonely marshes, the bittern's 
 booming call sounded, desolate and mournful ; or, as the 
 trodden millet-stalks muffled the noise of their gallop, the 
 cry of the cicada could be heard from under the maize. The 
 world went by them vague as a dream, mist-like as a cloud ; 
 ruined temples, shadowy landscapes, waters glistening white, 
 monastic piles darkly looming down from rocky heights, 
 sulien depths malarious, impenetrable, death-laden ; divine 
 
' STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME: 36$ 
 
 beauty gleaming vine-crowned under southern moonbeams- 
 all passed b"y them like the fleeting changeful phantoms oi 
 a feverish sleep. They rode on and on, without thought, 
 without refuge, with one impulse only to leave league on 
 league between them and the abhorrent dens of the Church ; 
 the burning breath of the past agony was on them, driving 
 them forward as the curling prairie flames drive the lives 
 they course after ; and the riot of liberty was in them both, 
 with every breath of wind that tossed the foliage from their 
 path, with every current of air that drove sweet, and wild, 
 and warm against their faces, as they dashed down by the 
 pole star's guide straight to the sea, yet northward first, era 
 they bent round to the shore, since Naples, where she lay 
 amid her loveliness, was the tiger's lair of priest and king 
 was death and worse than death. 
 
 The horses coursed like greyhounds ; their feet scarcely 
 touched the earth ; the shallow brooks, the parched soil, the 
 reddening osiers were scattered as they went; neck and 
 neck, their heads stretched like racers, their flanks heaving, 
 their bits foam-covered, they held on at that mad pace, 
 without pause, without stint, now forced through screens of 
 netted boughs, while the great chestnut fans blinded their 
 eyes, and the branches snapped with a crash, and the vipers 
 ttlid from under their feet now scouring swamps where the 
 earth quaked beneath them, and the heron's wings, start- 
 ling, brushed them, as the brooding birds rose with a rush 
 now keeping footing, as best they could, down narrow ledges 
 of slippery rock, where the mosses glided and the stone 
 crumbled under the crush of their thundering gallop. Mile 
 on mile, league on league, were covered with that breath- 
 less racing speed, that reckless course on giddy heights, that 
 headlong plunge through tawny waters ; when any risk, 
 darker than the rest, was in their way, his hand closed on 
 her bridle-rein, so that the peril which might menace her 
 should by no chance swerve by from him ; and in these mo- 
 menta her eyes met his, and dwelt on him with a look that 
 made him blind with the sickness of hope. She was his in 
 these hours at least his in her need, in her solitude, in 
 her jeopardy, in her flight ; his now, for this one night, so 
 far as bonds of mutual danger could so render her, so far as 
 his arm alone to shield her, his heart alone to beat for her, 
 his strength alone to stand between her and h foes, could 
 
366 IDALIA. 
 
 lend him right to hold her so ; his, while the net and the 
 withes were about her, and the sleuth-hounds ware tracking 
 her down, even though if she ever again reached her 
 freedom and her sovereignty once morL --she should forget 
 that he once had served her thus, and "bid him go and see 
 her face no more. He loved her with an exceeding love ; 
 not less would he have brought her from her misery, or less 
 have laid down his life to save hers, though he had known 
 that dying thus he should never have seen even one look 
 that thanked him. 
 
 Passion was stronger than pain, and gave him uncon- 
 sciousness of it, as it had given him the thews and the sinews 
 of giants in the contest whereby he had freed her ; though 
 the monk's blows had been rained on him like a smith's 
 blows on his anvil, and his breast had been bruised, and 
 dinted, and swollen by the grip of his priestly foe when 
 they had strained and stifled each other like wrestlers in 
 the deathfling, he had no feeling of suffering, no feeling of 
 exhaustion. The reckless glow of triumph was on him ; the 
 fragrance of the sultry night seemed to steep his senses in 
 voluptuous delight ; the fierceness of contest and slaughter 
 were still hot in his veins, and the lulling charm of a dream 
 fell upon him while the world lay sleeping in silence and 
 darkness, and to his hand alone was delivered the defence 
 of Idalia's liberty. He would have reeled out of his saddle 
 before he would have been conscious that illness was on 
 him ; to have force still to ride on thus, he would have 
 pressed into his side a dagger that had dealt him his death- 
 wound, though he had known that, to purchase life so 
 for an hour, was to lose life for ever when the hour should 
 be passed. 
 
 At every leap their hunters rose to, the wound that the 
 iron had slashed quivered and opened as though the rusted 
 axe afresh was hurled at it ; at every convulsive bound with 
 which the beasts cleared some riven chasm of stone or some 
 high aloe fence that lifted its sharp foliage right in their 
 course, the weight on his chest caught his breath, and the 
 bruised muscles ached to bursting ; often the stars grew 
 giddy above him, and the lucciole glittering among the leaves 
 looked a confused heap of sparkling fire, till he could scarce 
 tell which was earth beneath and which was sky above him ; 
 often faintness came over him from the loss of the blood 
 
'STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME. 9 367 
 
 that had soaked his fishing shirt through, and the weight of 
 the blows dealt upon him which at the time of contest he 
 had felt no more than he felt now the gentle rain of the 
 syringa flowers as they were showered from the boughs they 
 broke asunder. Yet he had barely any knowledge of this; 
 he flung it off him, and was strong as lie rode strong to 
 watch every danger that threatened her in their passage- 
 strong to lead their flight with a mountaineer's keenness of 
 vision, a desert-hunter's instinct of guidance strong to let 
 her see no paleness on his face save the pallor of moonlight, 
 no look in his eyes save the love that had dared all things 
 for her, and would do so unflinchingly on to the end, what- 
 soever that end might still be. A wild senseless, fiery in- 
 toxication of joy was upon him ; he knew no pain, he knew 
 no weakness he fled with her alone through the sweet 
 southern night. Come what future there would, no fate 
 could wash this out, no fate could steal this from him ; 
 that once his arm had thrust dishonour and deatli back from 
 her, that once his heart alone had been her shield against 
 her foes. 
 
 The first gray gleam of dawn was breaking where the 
 morning star hung in the deep mystical blue of night, when 
 their horses, panting, worn, steaming, covered with foam, and 
 staggering in their gallop, tore down through forest glades of 
 oak and bark into the heart of woods where once the altars 
 of Dionysius had arisen, and the print upon the thyme where 
 the wald goat had wandered had been kissed by shepherds' 
 lips as sacred ground touched by the hallowing hoof of Pan. 
 The wood stretched up a hillside's slope dark even by day, 
 so thickly woven were the old gnarled boughs, so heavy was 
 the foliage even in summer drought, from the hidden streams 
 that ran beneath its soil, sun sheltered and making cool 
 liquid music through the gloom, rising none knew whence, 
 flowing none knew whither, but telling to all who chose to 
 hear of the dead days when their song had mingled with the 
 vine-feast chants to Bacchus, and had borne their cadence 
 in companionship with the thoughts of Yirgil or of Martial. 
 No heat could reach, no season parch, those subterranean 
 waters that here and there broke up to sight, rushing brown 
 and bright under the moon, but soon were lost again in the 
 recesses of the earth, and only traced by the rich herbage 
 that grew wherever they wound, or when the stillness was 
 
368 ID ALIA. 
 
 hushed into a silence intense as Alpine solitudes by the 
 murmuring hollow ripple that told where they threaded their 
 way through secret channels to the sea. Here the sun-rays 
 could not touch to burn the grasses black ; here the twisted 
 leafage was fresh and dew-laden, as though a northern cool- 
 ness fanned them ; here the silvery arum uncurled above the 
 screened channels of the brooks ; here the white hellebore 
 thrust its delicate head through mosses green and curling, 
 as though they grew under English elni-woods. 
 
 And here in the deep loneliness, sunk over their hocks in 
 the water-fed reeds and grasses, the worn-out horses 
 slackened speed, and strained to reach a freshet that brimmed 
 and bubbled under an aisle of oaks ; and as the headlong 
 gallop paused, and the swift rush of the air ceased as they 
 entered those dim aisles, that had the twilight gloom and 
 calm of some mighty temple to forgotten gods, a sudden 
 blindness veiled all things even her face from his sight, 
 Erceldoune swayed heavily forward on his saddle, the 
 faintness of mortal pain vanquished him at last. 
 
 "With sheer instinct he threw himself from his stirrups 
 and staggered toward her ; all was dark and sickly to his 
 senses, and the iron bands seemed to crush tighter and 
 harder round his chest, straining out the very life ; but his 
 thought was still for her, and he smiled in her eyes, though 
 he could no longer see, but only felt that they were on 
 him. 
 
 f Have no fear ; it is nothing !' 
 
 But even as the words left his lips his strength at length 
 was conquered ; and senseless from the loss of blood, he 
 reeled slightly and fell, head backward, on the earth. 
 
 Almost ere he had fallen Idaiia was beside him ; she had 
 not dreamed that he was wounded or even in suffering, till 
 with those few gentle words he had staggered and swayed 
 downward like a dying man. Then, where the moonlight 
 strayed in through a parting in the branches above, she saw 
 that his face was as white as the arum lilies among which he 
 fell, and that the snowy crowns of the flowers and their broad 
 and pointed leaves were darkened with the stain of blood, 
 soaking through the linen of his barcarolo's dress. He was 
 stretched there as when first she had found him under the 
 (Carpathian pine-woods, where he lay struck down by the 
 bullets of his Greek assassin, with the vultures waiting above 
 
'STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME. 1 369 
 
 to swoop to their feast. For many moments she knelt bj 
 him, in the set mute apathy of anguish ; no tears rose before 
 her sight, and her proud lips were pressed close without 
 sound, almost without a breath, but as she gazed an agony 
 came in her eyes greater than any that the uplifted scourge 
 or the locked fetters of her prison had wrung from her. 
 
 6 O God ! not his life, too !' 
 
 The prayer broke stifled and heartbroken from her very 
 soul ; she had seen so many perish for her, perish through 
 her ; she had seen the brave lives at Antina fall like the ears 
 of wheat, ripe to the reaping ; she had known that east and 
 west, far and near, in the wide wastes of the Magyarland as 
 in the silent streets of Venice, in the snow plains of the 
 Muscovite empire as in the laughing loveliness of Lombard 
 meadows, men had poured out their blood like water at her 
 bidding, under her will, only for sake of that fatal beauty 
 which many with their last wrath in the battle-field or on 
 the scaffold had cursed with bitter reproach, which some 
 and not so few had to the last still blessed. So many had 
 died for her ! and now he who had found at her hands but 
 coldness and suffering, and gone without reward for a loyalty 
 passing all that even she had ever found, lay to all seeming 
 dead or dying at her feet ! as a noble hound dies for its 
 mistress's sake, dies faithful to the last, though never may 
 her hand have given him one caress, though never may her 
 lips have spoken more than careless command or chill 
 dismissal. 
 
 She knew then that she loved him ; loved him not with 
 pity, nor with disdain for love as weakness, nor with mere 
 warmth to one who had risked all things in her cause, but 
 loved him with a passion answering his own, with a passion 
 holding the world worthless if he no more were numbered 
 with the living. To-night, when his heart had throbbed 
 against hers ; to-night, when his strength had stood between 
 her and her destroyer ; to-night, when his promise had been 
 given her to save her with death, if no other freedom were 
 left him wherewith to rescue her ; to-night, she had known 
 that she had loved him with the love she had deemed dead 
 in her heart, impossible to her nature ; she, with whom love 
 had been but the sceptre with which to sway slaves, the 
 mandragora with which to blind madmen, the supreme folly 
 with which women, otherwise powerless, reach a power that 
 
 2 B 
 
370 IDALIA. 
 
 mocks at kings and creeds, and reign over the broadest em- 
 pire of earth. 
 
 She knelt by him, mute, motionless, with a terrible long- 
 ing in the haughty eyes that had never quailed under Griulio 
 Villaflor's, and had made the Umbrian priest let fall the lash. 
 In that moment in the silence and the loneliness of the 
 forest, where the shadows closed above them, and in all the 
 width of the land there was not one whom she could sum- 
 mon to his aid, one whom she dared trust with tfheir lives 
 the anguish she had oftentimes too mercilessly dealt, too 
 lightly counted, recoiled back on her. She learned what it 
 could be to bear this thing, that men call love, this deadly 
 gambling of heart, and thought, and sense, which casts all 
 stakes in fate upon the venture of another's life ; she, who 
 had watched that madness so often and so long, with calm 
 contemptuous gaze, and tempted youth and manhood and 
 age into it with a sorcerer's smile, heeding the wreck she 
 made no more than Circe heeded those who went down 
 beneath the waves because her white arms waved them to 
 that fatal sea. She loved him now with a great love ; pas- 
 sionate, with the fire that slept in her, yet pure so far as 
 remorse could burn it pure, and harrowed deep with a con- 
 trition that would have purchased freedom, and peace, and 
 joy for him had it been possible, at any cost, at every 
 sacrifice. 
 
 The stillness was intense ; the solitude absolute as in a 
 desert, no living thing was near, and had a peopled city been 
 around, in place of that profound impenetrable desolation, 
 none could have been summoned to them ! she had become 
 as one plague stricken, she was hunted down by Church and 
 King, she could not ask a draught of water from a peasant, 
 or bid his help to bear her lover under a shealing's shelter ; 
 the very reeds and grasses trodden in their flight might tell 
 their course and betray their resting-place, the very moments 
 might be numbered in which she could even watch beside 
 him here unpursued, unarrested. Though he perished 
 before her sight, she could not reach for him even the succour 
 of a beggar's wallet, or a charcoal-burner's roof. 
 
 The linen of the fishing-shirt had fallen open on hia 
 breast, and by the flickering light shed downward through 
 the leaves she saw where the blows had fallen fast as hail 
 upon his chest, that was strong as any corslet of steel, but 
 
'STOOP DOWN AND SEEM TO KISS ME. 9 371 
 
 blackened and beaten by them like the steel after a long 
 close battle; his head had sunk back, he had reeled down 
 senseless from exhaustion ; through the crushed arums the 
 slender stream of the blood still flowed till the snowy cups 
 were filled with it as though they were purpled by wine ; she 
 had looked many a time on death, and death seemed to her 
 on his face now, as it had done when beneath the mountain 
 pines she had first seen the carrion-birds waiting and hover- 
 ing above his sightless eyes. 
 
 Eor the moment she had no strength, no consciousness to 
 seek to save him ; she knelt beside him, knowing nothing save 
 that through her he too must be sacrificed ; that for her this 
 life also had been laid down, uncounting its own loss, yield- 
 ing up its breath without reproach, forced nobly on to perish 
 in her defence as the bold fealty of a dog forces itself to share 
 the blow aimed at its lord, and falls by it, content if so its 
 lord be saved. She stooped over him with that look in her 
 eyes with which she had gazed down on the lifeless frame of 
 Carlo of Viana, only that now, beside remorse, there was a 
 grief and a passion deeper yet, even while softer, than 
 remorse alone. That gaze, though he lay senseless under 
 it, seemed to have power upon him still, as when first under 
 the Danubian sea-pines it had been bent on him in the glow 
 and fulness of the noon never again to be forgotten. His 
 eyes, blind, and seeing nothing but the dark swaying motion 
 of the leaves and the stars that burned down through the* 
 vault of gloom above, still instinctively looked upward 
 seeking hers. A heavy sigh heaved his breast ; a sigh in 
 which words brokenly rose to his lips and died. 
 
 ' Leave me, I entreat you ; save yourself.' 
 
 His one thought was still of her ; his one instinct still was 
 for her. A quiver shook her from head to foot, as fear and 
 danger and the pressure of the poisoned steel against her 
 bosom had had no strength to shake her grand and fearless 
 courage. He was faithful to her thus to the last ; and sher 
 had given him no recompense save this to die for her. 
 
 Her head bowed its haughty royalty downward and down- 
 ward until her brow rested on his breast, and her hands drew 
 his within them against the beating of her heart. 
 
 ' O, truest, noblest ! ' she murmured, ' I know it now ; I 
 love you, if love be any worth.' 
 
 Through the sickening delirium in which his mind was 
 
 2*2 
 
ID ALT A. 
 
 floating, through the darkness that closed on sight and sense, 
 and seemed to him, as to her, the presaging shadows of disso- 
 lution, the words reached, the touch thrilled him, with an 
 electric shock, a sweetness of hope so wild, so rich, so breath- 
 less that it called him back to consciousness, as in the priestly 
 legends the touch of the anointing chrism has summoned the 
 soul to earth. 
 
 He raised himself slightly with convulsive strength, a 
 living warmth flushed the bloodless weariness of his features, 
 his eyes strained through the dimness that swam before them 
 with eager effort to regain their sight. 
 
 ' Say it again,' he whispered, with that terrible doubt still 
 in his look of one who fears the joy he touches will vanish 
 mocking him ; ' say it once more once more.' 
 
 Through the mist before his vision, through the blackness 
 of the forest shades, through the haze of nickering foliage 
 and watery moonlight and stars that seemed to stoop and 
 touch the earth, he saw the divine eyes bending over him 
 grow humid, lustrous, gentle with an infinite gentleness. 
 
 1 Say that I love you ? Yes ; I say it now.' 
 
 The words were low, soft, slowly uttered, proud still for 
 in them she yielded far but tender with a tenderness the 
 deeper for that pride which stooped, not without lingering 
 reluctance still, to own itself disarmed. The glory that 
 shone one moment on his face she had never seen save in 
 her youth's earliest dreams of the glory on the faces of the 
 gods ; for, let the world lie of her as it would, to none had 
 she ever spoken as she spoke now to him, while her voice 
 was sweet as sorcery, and filled with unshed tears that 
 would not gather in her eyes, but were driven back to her 
 heart in bitter aching grief that mingled with the poignancy 
 of softer thoughts and tenderness unloosed at last. 
 
 ' Yes ; I love you. Know it now ; it is a poor reward, and 
 comes too late for both.' 
 
 Then, at last, the passion of its ecstasy reached him, and 
 he knew that it was truth ; truth that rushed through him 
 like the wild potence of some eastern drug, burning, blinding, 
 lulling every sense like opium-mingled wine. He lifted him- 
 self from where he lay, he stretched his arms out to her, he 
 strove with futile agonised effort to strain his gaze through 
 the mists of pain, to free his strength from the bonds of 
 exhaustion; and once more it was in vain -, once more he 
 
* WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON? 1 tf$ 
 
 fell back, powerless, senseless, yet with his thoughts keeping 
 their hold on their own memory of her, and still with that 
 glow as of light upon his face. His lips moved faintly in 
 words that scarcely stirred the grave-like silence of the deep 
 oak-woods : 
 
 ' O God ! if it be love, not pity, stoop down and kiss me 
 once.' 
 
 She was silent a while, looking motionless upon him in 
 the gray, fitful, shadowy haze, that was dusky and darkened 
 by the massive canopy of foliage above ; then, with a faint 
 flush rising over the weary fairness of her face, lower and 
 lower she drooped her noble imperial head, and let the 
 warmth and fragrance of her lips rest in the answer that he 
 prayed for on his own. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXVI. 
 
 'WHY MUST i, 'KEATH THE LEAVES OF CORONAL, PEESS ANY 
 
 KISS OF PAEDOX ON THY BEOW?' 
 
 THE earliest dawn had broken eastward, where the moun- 
 tains 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 Latin 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. ]N~ot 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 the memories of the dead 
 deserted gods still haunted in the places of their lost 
 temples, whose columns were now the sea-pines' steins, 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 
 
374 IDALIA. 
 
 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 had a dream-like unreal 
 cadence ; in the deep shade, in the warm fragrance and the 
 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, save by his eyes ; he had no 
 consciousness, save the one sense of a joy that in its intensity 
 was half delirium ; he had no memory, save that he held him- 
 self dying, and felt death glorious, divine, welcome as the 
 richest life that ever poured its golden wine out in the sun- 
 light 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 ordain' d to be so sweet, and best 
 Comes now, beneath, thine eyes and on thy breast, 
 Still kiss me ! Care not fo/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 the 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. Por a while Idalia 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, 
 their unutterable passion; 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 aud immovable, 
 
WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON? 1 375 
 
 letting the momenta 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 
 and the jeopardy that was still of the future. On the daunt- 
 less Greek 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. 
 
 6 Love ! love ! "What have I to do with love ? ' she mur- 
 mured wearily, bitterly, 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 sever- 
 ance 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 ancient Syracuse 
 tamed or enraged the desert beasts 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, bad 
 
IDALIA. 
 
 fteemed 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 vibra- 
 tions 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 merited the tender- 
 ness she had yielded to him by chivalrous 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 ; she knew that 
 the more truly, the more deeply he was loved by her, the 
 more inevitably would the price of her love be to him 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 passion, 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 pro- 
 mise 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 among them had touched her 
 w the giugleuesa and the self-sacrifice of Erceldoune'e devo* 
 
' WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON? 1 377 
 
 tion 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 
 magnificence of manhood ; there was a lofty, fearless, superb 
 reading of honour and its bonds ; there was a noble sim- 
 plicity and an antique grandeur in the cast of his nature, 
 that had won from her what she had never felt to those 
 among 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 tiger? 
 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 dis- 
 honour 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 reverence than the imperial temper 
 of Idalia had ever yielded to any. 
 
 He had so far won his way to her at last ; severance 
 would have scarce been more misery to him than to her 
 now, and the proud sorceress of the Silver Ivy would have 
 been content that wealth, and power, and sovereignty, and 
 all the changeful triumphs of her career, should drift from 
 her, so that only his gaze should look ever with that loyal 
 worship into hers ; so that only her past could be so pure 
 arid cloudless in her own sight and his that no poison-mists 
 should ever rise from it before him ; so that only she were 
 free to bid him, without any hidden thing between them, 
 look in her inmost heart and see his empire there un- 
 shadowed and unshared. 
 
 ' 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 wholo 
 frame sink with that fettered, worn-out fatigue and deao- 
 
378 ID ALIA. 
 
 lation 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 
 was ever to be for him the shame of falsehood or the dis- 
 grace of subterfuge. When once she had answered him 
 with that caress he prayed, 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, with- 
 holding 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 sha- 
 dows of the oak-glades, with the faint gray 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, un- 
 grudgingly, 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 
 
1 WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?' 379 
 
 anguish in the knowledge that she had loved him so well 
 that she had slandered her own fame to give herself to his 
 scorn, and spare him one pang at least, if it were possible ; 
 yet 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 downwards, 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 awhile, 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 un- 
 conscious 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 in- 
 credulous, 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 in its torture as he gazed 
 down on her face ; but with a cry from his very heart a 
 cry of the sheer agony of joy 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 his 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 banish- 
 ment of every bitter thing, she at least could give him, and 
 he had earned his right to it. Tor the moment, also, she 
 
380 IDALIA. 
 
 too sbared it ; she felt nothing but the softness, the silence, 
 the voluptuous abandonment of the emotion so long con- 
 temptuously discredited and unswervingly repressed as 
 owning any power to sway or move her heart. 
 
 Then slowly, and with her old proud reluctance to yield 
 to so much weakness, blent with a deeper and a keener 
 pain, she drew herself gently from him, yet still let her 
 head, that never had bent before the savage lust of Giulio 
 Villaflor's .tiger glance, or at the uplifted scourge of his 
 ecclesiastics, droop on his hand with a gesture that was 
 little less than humiliation, than remorse. 
 
 1 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 upwards 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 that the burning of his kisses on her hands could not 
 warm. 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 7 say so ? ' 
 
 He smiled the same smile which she had seen upon his 
 fnce when he had first looked up at her under the pines of 
 the Carpathian pass. 
 
 6 1 have answered. Do what you will, since you have 
 blessed me thus.' 
 
 4 Blessed you ? God knows \ * 
 
 Slow tears welled into her eyes ns she saw his own so full 
 of longing lustrous 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 so 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 
 
s WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON ?' 381 
 
 passed her hand softly over his forehead with a gesture 
 that from her had deeper tenderness than far more passion- 
 ate demonstration from natures more yielding and less 
 proud. 
 
 ' "What you have suffered for me ! ' she murmured. ' What 
 you have done and dared ! You merit my whole life's dedi- 
 cation for such love, such service. And that life is so little 
 worthy you.' 
 
 The woman who so late had fronted Griulio Yillaflor 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 con- 
 tempt ; the woman who had been tranquil before death, 
 pitiless in power, victorious against outrage, and without 
 mercy in fascinatioD, 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 most 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 confi- 
 dence; steeled to venom, careless of censure, and contemp- 
 tuous of rebuke it will bend, contrite and self-accusing, 
 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 thing 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 ex- 
 haustion, 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. * 0, 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. 
 
 1 You would make rue 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 
 returned to her something of that negligence of hau- 
 
38* IDALIA. 
 
 teur something of that royalty of challenge which were 
 as inherent in her as though she had worn the crowns of 
 empires. 
 
 ' I would ? 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 mean to 
 dare to offer you ? ' 
 
 * None.' 
 
 She looked at him full in the eyes, with a tenderness in- 
 finitely melancholy a gaze intense in its calm unspoken 
 thought. The single word spoke better than whole phrases 
 could have done, alike her knowledge that no insult could 
 have been tendered to herself, and that none would ever 
 have been possible from him. 
 
 ' Then why, in God's name, such a doubt ? ' 
 
 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, 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 toward 
 her ; he felt that he had no comprehension, but he was con- 
 tent 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. O, 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 
 
WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON ? 383 
 
 prayer, to which the tremor in his voice gave a yet deeper 
 pathos a yet more imploring eagerness. She grew paler 
 still as she heard ; her lips quivered, 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 toward 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, 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 among them. Who can know me as 
 I know myself? Eelieve 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 
 niin leave her and condemn her the last night they had stood 
 together above the sea at Capri. He knew now that she 
 ioved him ; knowing that, he refused to take a decree of 
 oivorce between them, even from her lips ; he claimed a title 
 that he would never surrender, though through years he 
 
384 IDALIA. 
 
 should vainly assert his right to it. The strong passion and 
 the stanch patience of his nature were welded together, per.- 
 sistent 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 of it ; and I I have thought of late, that if 
 those tyrants yonder had knelled 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 iinseen waters that wound their way beneath the her- 
 bage and the lilies at his feet, whether downward to nether- 
 most depths of gloom, or outward to the fair freedom of the 
 sea none had told, or ever would tell. 
 
 * "What is it ? ' she 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 ? ' 
 
 She gave a gesture of dissent, while the smile that had 
 in it more sadness than tears, though it had also her old care- 
 less 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 have 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 impo- 
 tent impatience. 
 
 * O God ! do not trifle with philosophies now I Answer 
 me straightly, for the pity of heaven ; what is your life thru 
 you repent it thus ? ' 
 
1 WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON? 385 
 
 ' 1 cannot tell you wholly. It is enough that it has for- 
 feited 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 caro es would never change 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 close once again on his, so that only the gift of her 
 loveliness was yielded to him one hour. 
 
 She rose, and looked him once more in the eyes, with a 
 serene fathomless gaze of that pity and that reverence which 
 blent strangely and intricately in the feeling she bore toward 
 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,' he said hoarsely ; ' 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 life that forbids you to hold and keep a husband's 
 honour ? ' 
 
 The last words sunk so low that they scarcely stirred the 
 silence as they stole to her ; for the moment she was silent ; 
 her head drooped on his bosom, her lips were breathless, 
 voiceless ; she longed for his sake to sever him from all com- 
 munion with her, she desired for his sake to bid him leave 
 for ever one who must withhold from him all he had the just 
 right to seek in the records of her past ; she hesitated one 
 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. 
 
 20 
 
386 IDALIA. 
 
 Almost she chose the sacrifice ; she had strength far passing 
 that of women, and she had the generous self-abandonment 
 of a nature which scorned 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 proud regal temper of her race arose 
 and refused to bear falsely the yoke of shame even to save 
 him, even to do toward 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. 
 
 1 Nothing in your sense. But in mine much.' 
 
 * Thank God! thank Grod ! 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 strike 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, and a grave 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 
 
' WHY MUST I PRESS ANY KISS OF PARDON?' 387 
 
 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 storni 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 venture 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-condemna- 
 tion ? you who are noblest among women who chose death 
 rather than that villain's touch ? ' 
 
 ' Hush ! that was nothing. 1 should have been false in- 
 deed to all the traditions of my race if I had had fear of that 
 moment's pang which the Pagan world held the signal of 
 release which Christian's alone have raised into a gigantic 
 nameless terror. But ' she drew herself from his arms as 
 she spoke, and stood with the dignity that had awed even 
 her Roman captor, blent with an infinitely gentler saduesfc 
 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 
 
 Bol 
 
388 IDALIA. 
 
 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 attributed 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 raised 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 re- 
 pent of; few women have such sorcery as yours, and use it 
 wholly blamelessly ; but what I trust is, not your past but 
 your future, 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 
 my love, my queen, my idol ! do you not think that I 
 have tenderness enough in me to pardon much, if there be 
 aught 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 has no glory, and had never 
 fallen in any path because it followed coldly the straight 
 one of self-interest ? O, Idalia 1 I can bring nothing worthy 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 389 
 
 your genius and your loveliness, save a straight stroke to free 
 you and a whole strength to love you ; but since you have 
 no scorn for those, take niy future now and for ever I trust 
 you as no man ever trusted woman.' 
 
 He spoke from his inmost soul spoke with that vivia 
 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 faith, his absolute refusal of the ignoble 
 shame 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 present But since you will it so, be it so. 
 I will break my chains for you, and lay down my evil sway 
 for ever. Call me your wife if you will ; no wife shall dare 
 for any what I will dare for your sake ! ' 
 
 Then she let her head droop once more on his bosom, and 
 wound her arms about him, and listened to the loud raptur- 
 ous beating of his heart against her own, where they stood 
 alone in the hushed twilight of the awakening day. And 
 he only thought that the horrors of the past night were 
 still upon her, and stronger even than her heroic strength, 
 when a dreamy Imperial smile passed one instant on her 
 face, and her lip murmured with half disdain, with infinite 
 tenderness, 
 
 * Let them kill me if they will. I will be yours ere I 
 die.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE STORY OP THE PAST, 
 
 the morning rose higher, and its light shone full 
 on both their faces, his was warm, brilliant, eager with pas- 
 sionate delight ; hers was grave, weary, very colourless. To 
 him a very Eden opened ; on her a thousand memories 
 weighed. The one saw but the future; the other was pur- 
 sued with the past. He knew that he had gained the only 
 
390 2DAL1A. 
 
 life tLat made his worth the living ; she knew that she had 
 drawn in with her own the only one that she had ever cared 
 to save. 
 
 ' Ah, God ! I bring you already only ill/ she murmured, 
 as the rays of the risen day, half shadowed still beneath the 
 oak leafage, recalled to them that they were fugitives 
 fugitives from pursuers never yet known to spare. ' You 
 are wounded you suffer now ! ' 
 
 He looked at her with the smile whose sweetness had 
 more tenderness than lies in any words. 
 
 ' If I do, I have no knowledge of it. A bruise ! a 
 hatchet-stroke ! ' Do you think I could remember those ? ' 
 
 'I do, at least. They were enough to stretch you as one 
 dead but very lately ' 
 
 ' A passing faintness, nothing more. Believe me, a thou- 
 sand wounds like these would never harm me. I have been 
 half a soldier all my days.' 
 
 ' So have I.' 
 
 And as she spoke she rent off some of the delicate white 
 laces of her mask dress, and steeped them in the little spring 
 that bubbled under the oak stems till they were cool and 
 soft as lint, and tore asunder a broad strip of the scarlet 
 silk of her Venetian domino and laid the wet laces on it. 
 
 ' Stoop down/ she said softly to him a singular softness, 
 so gentle that in itself it was a caress, had come upon her 
 toward him. 
 
 He stooped to her as she bade him, but his hands drew 
 the broidered ribbons away. 
 
 * Not so. You shall not serve me.' 
 
 6 Why not ? You have earned your right to service, if 
 man ever earned it.' 
 
 The breath of her lips was on his brow, her eyes looked 
 into his with a love the deeper for the dew of unshed tears 
 that glistened heavily in them, her hands touched him, mak- 
 ing the pulses of his heart throb faster and the current of 
 the blood glow in his veins, while, with a gentleness that 
 in itself seemed to him balm enough to heal mortal wounds 
 themselves, she wound the silken bands over the gash that 
 the blunted axe had hacked, and the width of his chest that 
 the rain of blows had covered with livid marks like the 
 marks where a scourge has fallen. 
 
 { Ah ! G-od grant that these be the last and the least 
 things you suffer through me.' 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 391 
 
 The words escaped her almost unconsciously, while, for 
 the first time since her eyes had gazed in their set anguish 
 on the dead men lying round her in the banqueting-hall of 
 Antina, the tears gathered in them like the gathering drops 
 of a storm, and fell one by one slowly on his hair and on his 
 breast. She had made many endure danger and wretched- 
 ness, risk, and despair, without pity ; it was but fitting 
 retribution that she had no power to ward them off from 
 the only life for which she had ever cared. 
 
 He held her hands close against his heart. 
 
 ' I can never suffer now ! ' 
 
 It seemed so to him. Keeping this, her love, he thought 
 that no vicissitude or bitterness of life could have an hour's 
 power to move him ; that no fate could approach him which 
 had any shadow on it ; that nothing men or fortune could 
 deal unto him could ever move him to an instant's pang. 
 He did not dream that there are gifts, breathlessly, burn- 
 ingly coveted, which are more disastrous reached than lost. 
 Like Faustus, he would have said to the future and its 
 fate: 
 
 'Take 
 
 My soul for ever to inherit, 
 To suffer punishment and pine, 
 So this woman may be mine I ' 
 
 And his noble reckless chivalry of belief in her had alike the 
 sublimity and the blindness which lie at the core of every 
 chivalrous idealism ; blent, too, with something grander and 
 something loftier still a love that cleaved to her through 
 all and in the teeth of all a love that could find her human 
 and darkened by human stains, yet never lose its worship, 
 but reach high, even high as pardon, if need there were of 
 any pardon's tenderness. 
 
 The day was waking ; the sun had risen ; even here, 
 through the darkness of the oak boughs, the radiance was 
 coming. He started to his feet, made as strong to save her 
 now as though the force of a score of lives was poured into 
 his own; of pain, of weakness, of the aching fever that 
 thrilled through his bruised limbs, he knew nothing. He 
 seemed to have the strength of Titans, to have lost every 
 sense of existence save those of its deep delight, its wild 
 joys, its dreamy ecstasy. 
 
392 IDALIA. 
 
 'My love, my love, forgive me,' he murmured. 'In the 
 heaven you have brought me I forgot your danger. 
 
 * Was it not best forgot ? ' she asked, with that careless- 
 ness and that sadness which mingled intricately in her na- 
 ture. * In a race for life and death, few would pause to 
 speak as we have done ; but it is the surest wisdom to defy 
 fate while we can.' 
 
 'Fate? There is no fate, save such as a strong hand 
 carves, or a weak hand spoils, in Life.' 
 
 ' Nay, am 7 not yours ? ' 
 
 She stooped to him with her old half-mocking sorcery, 
 her loosened hair brushing his breast, her rich lips near his 
 own, her eyes, deep with thought, humid with tears, yet 
 luminous with that victorious challenge which was without 
 pity, and which had so often defied men to have strength or 
 power to deny her as their destiny. The old evil passed 
 over her for the moment the old evil of triumph in the un- 
 merciful, unsparing knowledge that a human life was hers 
 to do with as she would, as a crown of roses lies in a child's 
 wanton hands to be treasured or trodden down at will. 
 
 He looked at her with a long wistful gaze, earnest as an 
 unspoken prayer, and once more the darker and the more 
 callous tyranny that had for one instant returned on her 
 was softened and banished and driven back by the pure 
 strength of an undivided loyalty, by the undivided trust of 
 a brave man's heart. 
 
 ' You know it,' he answered her. * Why play with me in 
 speech when you hold ray life in your power ? ' 
 
 The patience and gentleness of the rebuke touched her 
 as had never done those florid vows, those ornate protesta- 
 tions, such as she had heard so often until she was as wearied 
 by them as eyes that dwell long on the dazzling hues of 
 jewels ache with their glitter and their profusion. Others 
 had loved her as well as he, even with this depth, this might, 
 this absolute submission of all existence to her, yet in him 
 these had a dignity and a simplicity that claimed a rever- 
 ence no other had done these in him made her worthless 
 of them in her own sight. 
 
 ' Ah, forgive me ! ' she said, with that contrition which in 
 
 a woman thus proud, and of old thus unyielding as she was, 
 
 had at once so much of poignancy, so much of self-reproach. 
 
 I wish only it were otherwise 1 I wish only that your fate 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 393 
 
 were safely anchored in some pure and peaceful life mine 
 could not touch. "Why will men ever love where love is 
 fatal?' 
 
 He looked at her with earnest thought, grave and infi- 
 nitely tender. 
 
 ' Fatal ? What is it that you fear for me ? ' 
 
 ' All things/ 
 
 * All ! That is to place but little trust in my strength to 
 endure or to resist. What is it you dread most ? ' 
 
 6 Myself.' 
 
 She gave him back his look, intent as his own, fathom- 
 less, and filled with a pain that was half remorse, half pre- 
 science. 
 
 His face grew very pale. 
 
 ' Tou mean you will desert me ? ' 
 
 < No. Not that.' 
 
 She spoke slowly, as if each word were a pang, then 
 leaned toward him once more with the light of the risen day 
 full on her face, and the splendour of her eyes troubled be- 
 yond grief. 
 
 ' No ; I never broke a trust ; and yours is the noblest 
 ever placed in me. But cleaving to me you will have 
 bitter trials for your faith ; you will have, most likely, cruel 
 suffering, that I shall be powerless to spare you ; you will 
 lose me, perhaps, by captivity, by shot, or by steel ; you will 
 pay for me, it may be, if ever I am yours, no less price your- 
 self than death. Now do you not know why, though it rent 
 my heart intwaro, I would surrender you up, and never look 
 upon your face again, my love my love ! would you but 
 take my warning.' 
 
 The first words had been almost cold from their enforced 
 control; with the last a yearning, aching desire trembled in 
 her voice, which would have told him, had no other moment 
 told him, that what she felt for him was not pity, nor grati- 
 tude, but passion itself. He heard in silence to the end, as 
 one who has his own resolve set immutably, and listens to 
 the utterance of counsel that has no more likelihood to 
 make him swerve from it than the beating of the winds to 
 move the rocks that they pass over. Not that he heard her 
 lightly, or belieTed that undue fear made her count the 
 peril for him with needless exaggeration ; he knew this was 
 not in her nature, but he was wholly careless of what price 
 
394 IDALIA. 
 
 might be exacted from him for allegiance to her, and he was 
 as firm to cleave to it, whatever that price might be, as 
 a soldier to cleave to his standard while there is sight 
 enough left in his dying eyes to watch one gleam of the 
 silken folds above his head that shall never droop through 
 him till men have killed, not conquered, him. Then, hold- 
 ing her hands against his heart, he looked down on her 
 with that graver and more chastened tenderness which, 
 mingled with the vivid ardour of his love, born from the 
 darkness of danger that was still around them, and from the 
 defence that through it she, so brilliant, so fearless, and so 
 negligent, had come to need from his strength and from his 
 fealty. In her intellect, in her ambitions, in her careless- 
 ness and magnificence of sovereignty, he was content that 
 she should reign far beyond him, content to know that she 
 reached many realms which he had barely dreamed of ; but 
 in her necessity, in her peril, in her desolation, he took up 
 his title as a man to guard her, his right as a man to shield 
 her, and to save her, if it should need be, even from her- 
 self. 
 
 * We will speak no more of that ; our fates, whatever they 
 be, will be the same,' he answered her. ' It may be that I 
 shall suffer through you, as you say ; if so, it will be with- 
 out complaint, while I can still be dear to you. If death 
 come well ; it had little terror for us last night it will 
 have none for me, if it be only merciful enough to spare me 
 life without you. As for faith O God ! believe enough in 
 roe to know that no trial will exhaust it. If silence be 
 bound on you, I will wait till you can break it with honour. 
 I have no fear of what it guards from me. Love were of 
 little worth that could not yield so slight a thing as 
 trust.' 
 
 * A slight thing ? It is a greater gift than the gift of 
 crowns or kingdoms and far more rare.' 
 
 She had heard him, moved deeply by the brave simplicity 
 of the generous words ; her face was very pale, her head 
 bowed ; in her own sight she was unworthy of this sublime 
 unquestioning belief, aud the knowledge entered like iron 
 into her soul. 
 
 1 Is it ? ' he answered her. ' Then all love is a lie. How- 
 ever that be, take it as my gift to you, then ; I have nothing 
 else in the world to bring/ 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 395 
 
 She looked at him with that long, grave, weary, look of 
 which he could not wholly read the meaning. 
 
 ' You could bring me none I could prize more, or could 
 deserve less.' 
 
 4 That cannot be. If you did not merit it, you would see 
 no treasure in it. It is not those who value trust that 
 betray it.' 
 
 ' Betray it ! No ; I never betrayed yet.' 
 
 Her face wore for a moment the prouder and fearless look 
 of royal courage and strength than had ever been most 
 natural to it ; then, swifty, it changed, and a darkness fell 
 over it the darkness of remorse. 
 
 " That it not true,' she said bitterly. ' Betrayal in 
 men's sense of betrayal of comrade to comrade, of friend 
 to friend, of honour to honour never yet did touch me. 
 But I betrayed as women always do all those who loved 
 me.' 
 
 He watched her wistfully but silently ; his heart ached 
 that there should be this shadow of unrevealed remorse be- 
 tween them ; his knowledge of her told him that Idalia was 
 not a woman to let slight regrets weigh on her, or slight 
 errors stir her conscience into pain ; he knew that among 
 the wild-olive crown of her genius and her power some 
 poisoned leaf of the belladonna must be wound, brilliant 
 but life-destroying. It was acute suffering to him ; she was 
 to him as luminous, glorious, divine, and far above him as 
 the sun itself; that across this sun of his life there should 
 lie these black and marring shadows, gave him pain deep as 
 his love. But loyalty was with him before all ; and beyond 
 the reckless resolve of a blood passion, that would pos- 
 sess what it adored, though the possession should be 
 accursed, was the noble fealty he had sworn to her the brave, 
 patient, chivalous trust which left unasked whatever she 
 wished untold, and was contented to believe and wait. 
 
 He stooped to her, tenderly passing over her latest 
 words. 
 
 c Weary yourself no more with the past,' he said gently ; 
 a gentleness that was sweet to her, like the lulling murmur 
 of calm waters after the blaze and riot of the voluptuous 
 colour or tropic forests. ' "We have to think of the present 
 and the future. Every movement is precious ; I have been 
 too forgetful of your safety. You know better than I where 
 
396 IDALIA. 
 
 your enemies lie, and how best they may be baffled. There 
 is one who will not spare ' 
 
 6 There are hundreds who will not. The land is as a 
 net for me.' 
 
 'Then we must leave it* 
 
 4 Is it so easy to leave such close-woven meshes ? ' 
 
 ' Easy, no. Possible, yes.' 
 
 ' And how ? ' 
 
 ' That we will speak of later ; for the present moment you 
 must have food and rest. There will surely be some char- 
 coal-burners or contadina's hut here somewhere ; there is 
 nothing hardly to fear from the peasantry in the forests or 
 open country, and we must wait till nightfall for farther 
 flight. Stay an instant while I look around us ' 
 
 1 But you are not fit for any exertion ! Tour wound, 
 your faiutness ' 
 
 He smiled on her; and the light of the smile had a 
 strange, sad beauty, that touched her with a pang keen in 
 pain and yet not without its sweetness. 
 
 ' Those were nothing. Such as they were, you cure them. 
 I have the strength of lions now.' 
 
 He left her, and, going up where the earth rose precipi- 
 tously, looked down the great dim aisles of forest that 
 stretched away on every side, with the far unerring sight of 
 a man who had known what it was to go. through the heart 
 of Persia with his life hanging on the sureness of his eye and 
 aim, and who had ridden over the grass seas of Mexico and 
 steered down the lonely windings of the Amazons, when 
 with every moment- a spear thrown from behind him, or an 
 arrow launched from the dense screen of foliage, might end 
 his years there and then for ever. He stood motionless 
 some instants, not a sign of bird, or beast, or vegetable life 
 in the woodlands round escaping him ; he had learned all 
 such forest lore of Indians and Gauchos, and he had a 
 traveller's swift sweep of vision, with a soldier's rapid tactic 
 and decision ; the horses were grazing quietly near, to* 
 tired to stray, and watched, moreover, by Sulla, who had, 
 unbidden, taken their guardianship. In a few moments 
 longer he returned to her. 
 
 ' There is some one living a score yards onward, or I am 
 much mistaken ; wait here while I reconnoitre, and if you 
 need me, fire ; I will be with you at the first echo of the 
 shot-' 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 397 
 
 He loaded the pistol that had fallen on the grass by her, 
 and put it back into her hand, then thrust the boughs 
 aside, and made his way to where, at some slight distance^ 
 the hut of some woodland dweller stood ; a faint low flickei 
 of smoke, curling among the thickness of the leaves, had 
 told him rightly there was some human habitation, and, 
 though it was but a poor cabin, rudely built of loose stones 
 and woven branches, it was more welcome to him than 
 ftpalace would have been. He knew the Italian people as well 
 as he knew the Border peasantry at home, and knew that 
 they were gentle, kindly, and generous in the main. The 
 hut stood in a very wilderness of beauty, wild vine, and the 
 sweet fig beloved of Horace, gigantic pines, and the wood- 
 strawberry that nestled in the grass, in their profuse and 
 vivid contrast making a paradise around it, while in its rear 
 the high slope of pine-covered hills rose dark and massive, 
 with falling waters tumbling down their steep incline into 
 a broad still pool beneath, that was never stirred unless by 
 the plunge of some diving water-bird. A young female 
 child, with a rich Guid'j face and the step of a princess in 
 her rags, was the only living thing found there; she answered 
 him readily, balancing her water-jar as she came from the 
 torrent like some Pompeian Naiad; her father had gone to his 
 work at dawn ; he was a charcoal-burner, and he would not 
 return till evening ; the stranger was welcome to shelter ; 
 and food well, there was no food except some millet-cakes, 
 and a bit of dried fish from the fresh water ; he could have 
 that, if he wanted. Any one near ? O no, there was no 
 one for ten miles or more round, except one or two huts 
 like hers. She was a picturesque, handsome little forester, 
 bare-legged and scarce clothed, yet with a wild freedom of 
 movement, and a certain pensive*grace thoroughly national ; 
 very like the beautiful mournful models, Canipagna-born, 
 of Home, who look like living poems, and who have but 
 one thought bajocchi. 
 
 ' It is a miserable place for you, yet it will give us some 
 Bort of harbour/ he said, as he brought Idalia to the car- 
 bonaro's cabin. 
 
 She looked across a moment at the luxuriance of vine 
 and blossom, and backward at the black pine-mass, through 
 which the falling waters glared like light, and smiled half 
 wistfully as she looked. 
 
IDALIA. 
 
 'I think it is a -paradise! To forget the world amid 
 such loveliness as this what do you say ? "Would it be 
 wise ? And yet power is a dangerous thing ; once 
 having drunk of it, one has lost taste for every purer 
 flavour. You do not know what that is ? You do not 
 know what ambition is, then ? I can tell you ; it is satiety 
 with desire. 
 
 ' A bitter thing then?' 
 
 ' Yes. But not so bitter that it is not sweeter than all 
 sweetness only the sweetness so soon goes, and the dregs 
 are so soon all we hold ! ' 
 
 He did not answer ; his heart ached that he was not 
 able to bring dominion to this woman, who was so born 
 for it ; that he had no diadem such as that of her forgone 
 Byzantine sires to crown her with ; that he had nothing 
 wherewith to achieve greatness nothing wherewith to 
 content that desire, half disdainful yet undying, which 
 was in her for the sceptre and the sword, for all they 
 ruled and all they gained. 
 
 He left her in the inner chamber of the hut, that was 
 roughly partitioned in two by a wall of stakes and woven 
 rushes, and brought the horses under the shelter of a 
 great cedar that shut out every ray of the sun ; he could 
 use his left arm but little, owing to the shoulder-wound, 
 but he loosened their girths, watered them, gave them a 
 feed of rye from some corn that the cotters kept for 
 bread, then bathed, and shook his barcarole dress into the 
 best order that it would assume, and thought what food in 
 this wild waste he could find for her. That he was an 
 hungered and athirst himself, that there was fever on him 
 still from his injuries, and that, despite the plunge into 
 the waters' refreshing coldness, his bruised frame ached 
 and his breath was hard to draw, he scarcely felt ; Idalia 
 was his only memory. For her, he could have not alone 
 the lion's strength that he had said, but a woman's gentle- 
 ness, an Indian's patience, an Arab's keenness ; and nothing 
 was too slight for him to heed, as nothing too great for him 
 to brave, that could be offered in her service and her cause. 
 That he had had no sleep, no rest, no food, weighed Jnothing 
 with him ; in the heat of the early day he sought with 
 unwearying diligence for such things as he thought could 
 tempt her. "Wild strawberries on their own mosses j bee* 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 399 
 
 eaflcos that haunted the place, and that he slew with a 
 sling and baked in clay ; dainty fish that he speared with 
 the knife from his sash, wading waist-deep in the pool 
 these were all the woods would yield him. But love for 
 her had made him an artist and a poet ; he served them in 
 such graceful fashion, covering the rude table of the 
 cabin with a cloth of greenest moss, and screening the 
 coarse-hewn wooden trenchers with vine-leaves and 
 flowers, that it was rather like such a forest banquet as 
 Theocritus or Ben Jonson loved to cast in verse than like 
 the meal in a wretched refuge of fugitives, for l ^whom 
 Every moment might bring the worst terrors of captivity 
 And death. 
 
 When it was done that travail of willing, tender ser- 
 vice he could have swept it down again with a stroke of 
 his hand. 
 
 * I am a fool,' he thought, with a smile that had a sigh 
 in it. * A child might thank me for those trifles ; but she 
 wild strawberry-leaves for one who wants the laurels of 
 fame, the gold foliage of a diadem. 
 
 Yet he stooped down again, and changed the garniture 
 a little, so that the snow-white arums might lie nearer the 
 scarlet of the fruit. He had a painter's heart, and in- 
 stinct told him that beauty in the lowliest things has ever 
 a sweet psalm of consolation in it ; he loved, and his love 
 unconsciously told him that a coil of forest flowers is a 
 better utterance of it than all the gold of Ophir. 
 
 It was not wasted on her,- this which he deemed so idle 
 a trifle that she would not even note it. As her glance 
 fell on the woodland treasures that the hands, which a 
 few hours before had been clenched in a mortal gripe at 
 her foe's throat, had gathered to cover the poverty of 
 their refuge, Idalia's eyes filled with soft sudden tears ; 
 eyes that had so often looked down with cold, amused, 
 careless scorn on those who wooed her with every courtly 
 subtlety, with every potent magnificence of bribe. 
 
 ' What depths of exhaustless tenderness there are in his 
 heart ! ' she thought. ' I might gaze there for ever and 
 find no base thing. O Grod! if he could say that of 
 mine ! ' 
 
 The day went on its way deepening to the full heat of 
 noon,, cloudless, sultry, lustrous, as such days of summer 
 
400 ID ALT A. 
 
 length in southern lands alone can be. To him it was 
 like one long unbroken dream, divine, voluptuous, intense 
 as the radiance around them. They were safe here in the 
 heart of the untrodden forest ; safe, until with the fall of 
 night their flight could be resumed. "Within the darkness 
 of the hut the moss and foliage he had strewn everywhere 
 made couches yielding as velvet, and filled the air with 
 their fresh fragrance, with the gleam of the white flowers 
 flashing in the gloom ; without stretched the vivid light 
 and endless growth of the woodland, the glow of colour, 
 the foam of water, the play of sun-rays upon a thousand 
 hills, and, above all, the deep blue of an Italian sky. Be- 
 yond, under the great cedar, the horses browsed and 
 rested, with broad shadows flung upon them cool and 
 dark ; all the fantastic foliage ran riot like a forest of the 
 tropics ; here and there an oriole flashed like gold in the 
 sun ; here and there the rich green of a lizard glanced 
 among the grasses; all else was still and motionless, 
 steeped in the sensuous lull of southern heat. 
 
 In such a day, in such a scene, danger and pain were 
 forgot, as though they had no place on earth. They were 
 alone; the young peasant-child went hillward after her 
 single goat ; there was not a sound or a sign of other life 
 than theirs, and the oblivion of passion was upon them 
 both; they ceased to remember that they were fugitives; 
 they only knew that they were together. 
 
 They spoke very rarely ; she let the past, with all its 
 mystery and all its bitterness, drift away forgotten. To . 
 the future neither looked ; it might lead to the dungeon 
 or the scaffold. They lived in the present hour alone, as 
 those who love do ever live, in the first abandonment and 
 usurpation of their passion. 
 
 Once she looked down at him where he lay at her feet, 
 and passed her hand among the richness of his hair. 
 
 ' Does the earth hold another man capable of such sub- 
 lime folly as yours ? You give me your life, yet never ask 
 me once of mine.' 
 
 * What marvel in that ? You have said you wish silence 
 on it.' 
 
 ' And how many would heed such a wish ? ' 
 
 ' I know not how many would ; but it is law to me.' 
 
 1 Ah, you are rash as Tannhauser. I told you so long 
 ago, 1 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 401 
 
 1 And I said then, as now, Tannhauser was a cur. She 
 was his. Knowing that, what wanted he ? If he had 
 had faith aright, and love enough, he would have wrested 
 her out from the powers of darkness. He would not 
 have yielded her up not even to herself. Evil is black in 
 us all ; love that is love in my reading does not sur- 
 render us to it, or for it.' 
 
 The deep glow of his eyes gazed into hers, speaking a 
 thousandfold more than his words. He knew that the 
 chains of some remorse bound her ; to fear this for him- 
 self never dawned on the careless courage of that which 
 she had well termed his ' sublime folly ;' but to free her 
 from its dominion was a resolve with him not less resolute 
 than had been his resolve to deliver her beauty from her 
 captor's fetters. 
 
 Her face was softened to a marvellous richness, sadness, 
 and pathos as he looked up at her, the gloom of the low- 
 shelving roof above and behind them, the light of the day 
 falling on her and about her, through the hanging leaves, 
 from the burning sun without. 
 
 1 You like better the passion of the " G-ott und die 
 Bajadere " poem ? "Well, so do I. It is nobler far. The 
 god had faith in her, and became he believed in her, saved 
 her. Brave natures, defying scorn, may grow to merit 
 scorn ; but no brave nature ever yet was steeled and false 
 to trust.' 
 
 * And yours is brave to the death; wherefore, till death 
 I trust it.' 
 
 His words were low and sweet and earnest ; grave with 
 that depth of meaning and of feeling which made rever- 
 ence, not less than pity, move her towards the only man 
 who had ever stirred her either to compassion or to vene- 
 ration, and which gave grandeur, force, and nobility to 
 the love which, without it, might have been but a madness 
 of the heart and a desire of the senses. 
 
 ' False women- vow as well as true ; I vow you nothing/ 
 she murmured to him ; ' but 1 thank you beyond all words.' 
 
 She did so thank him from her soul ; she to whom this 
 faith was precious as no other thing could have been, 
 since she knew at once that she had forfeited all title to 
 claim, all likelihood to gain it, yet knew that very often 
 calumny had wronged and envy stained her with many a 
 
 2 D 
 
402 ID ALT A. 
 
 charge of which she had been as guiltless as the white 
 arums that lay unsullied at her feet. That strong, un- 
 /loubting, imperishable trust was the one jewel of life that 
 she had of her own will renounced her title to, yet which 
 she could value as no other, perhaps, who had not lost it, 
 ever could have done so well. 
 
 1 Listen,' she said, stooping over him where he was 
 stretched on the foliage at her feet, while her hand 
 strayed still with a caress among his hair and over his 
 lips. ' So much of my life as I can tell you I will ; it 
 is not a thousandth part ; still it may make some things 
 clearer to you. I am of Greek birth, as you know ; and I 
 doubt if there be in the world a descent that can claim 
 greater names than mine. My race nay, both races that 
 were blent in me stretched far back into the earliest 
 Athenian times on one hand, and to the records of Byzan- 
 tium on the other. I was the last to represent the pure 
 Greek stock, and it was the one of which I was the 
 prouder, though it had fallen into evil fortunes and much 
 poverty. Of the Byzantine, there was but one besides 
 myself, the brother of my dead mother, a strange man ; a 
 rich, wayward, luxurious recluse ; a feudal prince where 
 he held his chieftainship in E/oumelia ; leading an existence 
 more like an eastern story than aught else ; magnificent, 
 voluptuous, barbaric, solitary, with all the glitter of 
 Oriental pomp and all the loneliness of a mountain fief. 
 A terrible tragedy that had occurred in his youth I can 
 tell it to you some other time begot his love of solitude ; 
 his passions and his tastes led him to make that solitude 
 at once a palace and a prison, a harem and a fortress. 
 I have little doubt that his life was evil enough ; but I 
 did not know it, and he loved me with a lavish tender- 
 ness that left me fearless of him, though he had a great 
 terror for all others. So the life I led from my birth to 
 my sixteenth year was this : sometimes I passed long 
 months in Greece in a great, desolate, poverty-stricken 
 palace, with vast deserted gardens, in which I wandered 
 looking at the bright ^Egean, while dreaming of the dead 
 glories of my people, with an Armenian monk, old and 
 stern and learned, for my only guide, who taught me all I 
 would more, perhaps, of abstruse lore and strange scenes 
 and deep knowledge than was well for me while so young. 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 403 
 
 Ere I had seen the world I was steeped in it, from the 
 telling of Eoman cynics, and Athenian sages, and Persian 
 rnagi, and Byzantine wits. I believed with all the credulous 
 innocence of my own childhood, and I disbelieved with 
 all the scornful scepticism of my dead masters. I had 
 studied more deeply while I was yet a child than many 
 men do in their whole lifetime. From that lonely medita- 
 tive life in Greece, I was often changed, as by magic, to 
 the unbridled luxury and indulgence of the Eoumelian 
 castle. Slaves forestalled my every wish ; splendour, the 
 most enervating that could be dreamt of, surrounded me 
 within, while the grandest natural beauty was everywhere 
 without ; if vice there were I never saw it ; but the most 
 gorgeous pleasures amused me, and my bidding was done 
 like the commands of an empress ; for I was the adopted 
 heir of the great Julian, Count Vassalis. Now can you 
 not imagine how two such phases of life, alternating in 
 their broadest and most dangerous contrasts from my 
 earliest memory upward, made me fatal indeed to others, 
 but to none so fatal as to myself ? ' 
 
 She laid her hands on his lips to arrest the words he 
 would have spoken, and passed on in her narrative. 
 
 * JSTo ; no denial. God grant I be not fatal at the last 
 to you ! Well, it was these two dissimilar lives that made 
 me what I am. I was happy then in both : happy dream- 
 ing in poverty in Greece ; happy dreaming in magnificence 
 in Eoumelia ; ambitious already, ambitious as any Caesar 
 in both. In Athens I had the poetry and the purity of 
 glory in me ; in Turkey its power and its pomp allured 
 me ; both, combined with the knowledge of my past 
 heritage in Hellenic fame, and of my future heritage in 
 the Vassalis dominion, gave me the pride of an emperor 
 and the vision of an empire wide as the world. Ah, 
 heaven ! yet the dreams were pure, too purer and loftier 
 than anything that life can realise ; for I did not dream 
 for myself alone. I dreamed of peoples liberated, of 
 dynasties bound together by love of the common good, of 
 the free republics revived by my hand, and shedding light 
 in all dark places where creeds reigned and superstitious 
 crouched, of misery banished, of age revered, of every 
 slavery of custom broken, of every nobler instinct f ollowed, 
 of men made brethren and not beasts of prey, who hunt 
 
 2D2 
 
404 IDAL1A. 
 
 down and devour the young, the weak, the guiltless. Ah, 
 heaven, what dreams they were ! ' 
 
 Her head sank, her eyes were fixed on the flood of light 
 without ; her thoughts were far from him, far beyond 
 him, in that moment, as the thoughts of genius ever are 
 far from those who love the thinker best, and are best 
 . loved in answer. 
 
 \ They were with the dreams of her youth ; such dreams 
 as lighted the youth of Vergniaud and found their fruition 
 on the scaffold. t 
 
 ' Well, with you they never perished.' 
 
 4 No ; not utterly. But they were tainted how deeply 
 tainted ! "Well, thus I lived, a fairy story and a pageantry 
 filling one-half my years, monastic seclusion and heroic 
 memories holding the rest. As I grew older, Julian 
 Yassalis often spoke with me of many things ; he was a 
 bold, magnificent, kingly, reckless man, a chief who answered 
 to none, a voluptuary who laughed at the world he had 
 quitted, a genius who might have ruled widely and wisely 
 with a Sulla's iron hand, a Sulla's careless laughter. He 
 found me like him, and he made me yet more like. It 
 might be but it is not for my lips to blame him he 
 loved me well in life, and strove, so far as prescience 
 could, to guard me when his life ended. That was in my 
 sixteenth year. He bequeathed me all his vast properties, 
 with the fief in E/oumelia and other estates, requiring only 
 that I took his name, and, wherever I wedded, never 
 changed it. It is through him that I became one of the 
 richest women in Europe. Much is gone, but great wealth 
 still remains with me. Can you not fancy what I was 
 eight years ago, with the world before me, untried, un- 
 known, with passion untouched, with ambition still but in 
 its sweet vague ideals, with innocence as soilless as those 
 lilies, and courage fearless as the courage of the young 
 eagles ? Can you marvel that I believed I should have 
 the sovereignty of Semiramis ? Can you not understand 
 how easily I credited those who for their own ends deluded 
 me to the belief ? ' 
 
 Her face darkened as she spoke, and her voice sank 
 with a thrill of hate in it. He caught it, and his own voice 
 took her tone. 
 
 ' Tell me who they were, If they be living ' 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 405 
 
 The menace recalled her from the past to the present. 
 
 ' No. That is one of many things I cannot tell you yet, 
 if ever. Prom no love of mystery I abhor it but from 
 a brutal inexorable necessity, as little to be escaped from 
 as the destiny of the ancients. W& know that there is no 
 such thing as destiny ; but we make as hard a task-master 
 for ourselves out of our own deeds. Of my childhood I 
 can speak freely ; but from Julian Yassalis's death dates 
 the time that I must in so much leave a blank to you. 
 Those were with me who knew how to touch every chord 
 in my nature; and they used their power ably. I was 
 ambitious ; they tempted my ambition. I loved sovereignty ; 
 they pointed to such realms as might have dazzled wiser 
 heads than mine when I first stood on that giddy eminence 
 of command and riches and splendour, and was told that I 
 had the beauty of a Helen, while I knew that I had the 
 courage of men, and felt even stir in me men's genius and 
 men's force. Do not deem me vain that I say this. G-od 
 knows all vanity is dead in me, if I ever had it ; and I 
 think that I was at all times too proud to be guilty of that 
 foible. And it was by higher things than such frailty that 
 they lured me. I loved freedom ; I loved the peoples ; I 
 rebelled against the despotism of mediocrities, the narrow 
 bonds of priesthoods ; I had the old liberties of Greece in 
 my veins ; and I had the passionate longing for an immortal 
 fame that all youth, which has any ideal desires at all, 
 longs for with the longing "of the moth for the star" 
 "Well, through these, by these, I fell into the snares of 
 those who draped their own selfish greeds and intrigues in 
 the colours of the freedom that I adored ; who knew how 
 to tempt me with the pure laurels of a liberator, while in 
 truth they bound me with the fetters of a slave.' 
 
 He did not speak, but looked at her, with his lips breath- 
 less, with his eyes passionate as fire, through the mist that 
 dimmed them as he heard. Hearing no more than this, 
 her life seemed known in its every hour to him ; he under- 
 stood her more nearly, more deeply, than any man had 
 ever done ; more truly far than those whose genius and 
 whose aspirations had far more closely been akin with 
 hers. 
 
 She looked at him and sighed. 
 
 1 Wait. Do not think me blameless because in the out- 
 
406 IDALIA. 
 
 set I was wronged. I tell you that I have great sins at 
 iny score. True, at the time I speak of now, I was sinned 
 against, not sinning. I was led to ally myself in earliest 
 youth with those whom later years have shown me were 
 desperate, insatiate, unscrupulous, guilt-stained gamesters, 
 who staked a nation's peace to win a gambler's throw, and 
 played at patriotism as keenly and as greedily as men play 
 for gold. I was dazzled, intoxicated, beguiled, misled at 
 once by all that was best and all that was worst in me ; 
 and, too late, I found the truth ; found every avenue of 
 retreat closed found myself bound beyond escape ; found 
 that' 
 
 She paused abruptly, shutting in the words ; but the 
 hand that lay in his contracted as though it grasped a 
 weapon wherewith to requite a deadly, endless wrong. 
 
 * So far I was sinned against,' she went on with effort, as 
 though the memories which arose stifled her with poisonous 
 fumes. 'But in all else the evil is mine. The sway was 
 guilty that had been put into my hands ; but I grew to 
 love it, as we grow to love the opium that we hate at first. 
 All power had irresistible fascination for me, and I learned 
 to use mine pitilessly ; and I should use it to-morrow to 
 all save you. The political career into which I had been 
 plunged had its sorcery for me ; I delighted in it even 
 while I abhorred it. I soon learnt how to play on men's 
 passions until from them I gained what I would. If my 
 instruments were broken under my hands, I never heeded 
 it; they had served my end, and the end was great still, 
 though its means were accursed; the end was still the 
 liberties of the nations. The truth did not come to me till 
 I had gone too far to draw back, too far not to be enamoured 
 of the merciless dominion that I found I could command. 
 When I knew it, I grew wholly reckless. I had been 
 foully, basely wronged, and all that was dangerous in me 
 rose and hardened. I had been stabbed in the dark by 
 hands that were sworn to shield me. I cared little what I 
 did, nothing for what was said of me, after that. I am not 
 justifying myself; I merely show what fires they were 
 which burned me heartless. I have been associated with 
 every movement of the advanced parties of Europe through 
 the years that have gone by since I first became the 
 Countess Vassalis; I have been the ipsjrirer of more efforts^ 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 407 
 
 the guide of more intrigues, than I could tell you in a 
 score of hours, even were 1 free to tell you them ; I have 
 held in my time, indirectly, more power than many a 
 minister whose name is among the rulers ; the world does 
 not know how it is governed, and it does not dream how 
 kings have dreaded and statesmen sought to bribe me* 
 One thing alone I remained true to, heart and soul my 
 cause. For the freedom of the peoples, for the breaking 
 of their chains, I have laboured with all such strength and 
 brain and force as nature gave me. In that I have been 
 true, and without taint of selfish desires. G-od knows that 
 to raise my own land among the nations, and to gain Italy 
 for the Italians, and to do were it ever so little to crush 
 the tyrannies of creeds, to bring nearer the daylight of fear- 
 less and unfettered truth, I would let Griulio Villaflor and 
 his creatures kill me as they would. In that I have been 
 loyal to the core, but in all else I have been very guilty. 
 I have tempted, blinded, seduced men into the love that 
 gave them as wax into my hands. I have roused their 
 darkest passions, that of those passions I might make the 
 firebrands or the swords my purpose needed. I have taken 
 their peace and crushed it to powder ; I have taken their 
 hearts and broken them without a pause of pity; I have 
 sent them out to the slaughter careless how they fell, so 
 that my will was done ; I have sent them out to perish, 
 far and wide, north and south, east and west, and never 
 asked the cost of all that gold of human life wherewith I 
 played my pitiless gambling. I smiled at those for whom I 
 cared no more than for the stones of that torrent ; I let 
 them hope I loved them, so long as that hope was needed to 
 make them ready instruments to my using ; I was stirred 
 no more by despair than I was for compassion. So long as 
 I had my slaves, I heeded nothing what they suffered, how 
 they were captured. I only smiled at the fools who thought 
 women had no share in the making of history, no power to 
 penetrate the arcana of life. That was all.' 
 
 He listened, and with a heavy sigh answered her as she 
 paused ; it was involuntary, unconscious. He had believed 
 in Idalia, as with a woman's absolute unquestionable belief; 
 it struck him. hardly, deeply, to know by her own telling 
 that she had these ruined broken lives, these Circean 
 cruelties iu her past ; that the witching splendour of her 
 
405 IDAL1A. 
 
 sorcery Lad been thus steeped in tears of blood, thus bar- 
 tered for the gain of triumph and dominion. ]N"o fear for 
 himself even now crossed him ; his courage was too bold, his 
 passion too ardent. It was the knowledge that she should 
 thus have stained the beauty and the genius of her life which 
 came on him, not unlocked for, since he had ere this known 
 that there were error and remorse upon her ; yet bitter as 
 the fall of what is treasured and is reverenced must ever 
 be, however love remain faithful and unshaken to that 
 fall's lowest depth. 
 
 * One question only,' he said to her, while his voice wag 
 low and tremulous. ' Through this, was there never one 
 whom you loved ?' 
 
 She met his gaze fully, thoughtfully, truly he could 
 have sworn, or never eyes spoke truth. 
 'Not one.' 
 c Is it possible ?' 
 She smiled a little, with her old weary irony. 
 
 * Very possible. Poets have written much about the love 
 of women ; I do not think it a tithe so warm and strong as 
 the love of men. Many women are cold sensualists, many 
 are inordinately vain ; sensualism and vanity make up nine- 
 tenths of my sex's passions, though sentimentality has so 
 long refused to think so.' 
 
 1 But you must have been surrounded by so many by 
 all that was most brilliant and most seductive.' 
 
 ' Yes ; yet a tinsel brilliancy, for the most part. Besides, 
 I did not come into the world ignorant of it, as most 
 youth comes. Julian Yassalis, and my own tastes, and 
 others who influenced me then, had given me the surest 
 shield against the follies of love in studies deeper far than 
 most women, if they had driven away my faith in life too 
 early, with the sneers of Persius, with the scourge of 
 Juvenal, with their own cynic wit and their own manifold 
 knowledge. Ambition was infinitely more the passion to 
 tempt me than love ever was. I luxuriated in the sense 
 of my own power, in the exercise of my own fatal gifts ; 
 but I scorned from the bottom of my heart the men who 
 were fooled by such idle things as a girl's glance, as a 
 woman's smile. If the gold gleam of my hair ensnared 
 them, I could not but disdain what was so easily bound; 
 if they were spaniels at ray word, I knew they had been, or 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 49 
 
 they would be, as weakly slaves of any other wno succeeded 
 me, and as easily subjugated by a courtesan as they were 
 by me, when I chose to use the power. I thought very 
 scornfully of love. I saw its baser side, and I held it a 
 madness of men by which women could revenge a thousand- 
 fold the penalties of sex that shut us out from pubJic share 
 in the world's government. A statesman is great, a woman 
 can make him a wittol ; a diief is mighty, a woman can 
 make him a by-word of shame and reproach ; a soldier has 
 honour firm as steel, a woman can make him break ifc like 
 a stalk of green flax ; a poet has genius to gain him immor- 
 tality, a woman can make him curse the world and its fame 
 for her sake, and die like a dog, raving mad for the loss of 
 scarlet lips that were false, of eyes divine that were lies. 
 No power ! "We have the widest of all. WeH, I but knew 
 that better than most, and used it yet more unmercifully 
 than most. And I think what gave that power tenfold into 
 my hands was that one fact that the weakness of love 
 never for one instant touched me myself; that the tempta- 
 tions of love never tempted me for an instant; that my in- 
 tellect alone dealt with them and my heart remained ever 
 cold.' 
 
 * And, G-od, it has wakened for me ! How is it possi- 
 ble ? What have I that those had not ? I have nothing 
 on earth whereby to be worthy of you whereby to have 
 won you.' 
 
 His life was so sweet with its rapture, his passion was 
 so blind with its victory, he scarce remembered those who 
 had so vainly suffered before him. Every happiness is 
 selfish more or less ; and his was so in that moment. She 
 half smiled, and let her head droop over him, till her lips 
 touched his again. 
 
 4 Who can answer for love? Others have done as much 
 for me as you ; others have loved me, even as well as you : 
 but' 
 
 ' None had yours in answer ?' 
 
 He asked it eagerly, breathlessly still ; this was all that 
 fie doubted in her past that some other life had reigned 
 before him in that heart which beat so near to his. 
 
 * No ! A thousand times no, if you care for the denial. 
 Love was my tool ; he was never my master.' 
 
 She wpoke with her old imperial dignity of disdain for 
 
4io ID ALIA. 
 
 those follies of feeling and of the senses which sway man- 
 kind so widely and so idly. Then the scorn faded from her 
 eyes, a weariness stole there instead ; her voice sank, and 
 lost its pride in the contrition of self-accusing memories, of 
 heart-sick confession.- 
 
 ' But do not honour me for that. It made my crime, I 
 think, the deeper. Those senseless women, whom I have 
 so often contemned with all the contempt that was in me, 
 for their maudlin romances, their emotional sentiment, 
 which made them see a god in every commonplace mortal, 
 and give them idols as many as the roses in summer, are 
 after all, perhaps, truer and better fools though they be 
 than I. Their emotions, at least, are real, however fleeting, 
 vain, and shallow. But I leave me when you know it, if 
 you will ; but know it you shall never felt one faintest 
 touch of tenderness for any one of those who loved me ; 
 yet I was merciless enough, sinful enough, shameful enough, 
 if you will, never to let one among them know that, until 
 he was deep enough in my toils to have no power to loose 
 himself from them. I let them hope, I let them believe, I 
 let them think their reward sure, until such time as they 
 were mine courage and honour and body and soul all 
 mine to use as I would, for the ends and in the cause of 
 my ambitions. I let them think I loved them, and then 
 I used their minds or their hands, their names or their 
 strength, whichever I needed to take ; and I never asked 
 once, I never once pitied, when I knew that their hearts 
 were broken. Gro ; you must think me guilty enough now. 
 Go ; for if your trust be dead, rend me out of your life, 
 once and for ever, at a blow, rather than pass your years 
 with what you doubt.' 
 
 She put him from her as she spoke, and rose. Her face 
 was very pale, grave with a profound sadness, with a set 
 resolution ; the words cost her more than it would have cost 
 her to have thrust the Venetian dagger into her bosom to 
 escape the pursuit of Giulio Villaflor ; but they were spoken 
 without a pause to spare herself. She loved him better than 
 herself, and she knew that unless this man's faith were per- 
 fect in her, the lives of both would be a hell. And Idalia 
 was too proud a woman to allow such faith to be given in 
 error and in ignorance, unmerited. 
 
 His breath was sharply drawn, as under a keen physical 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 411 
 
 pain. He stood and looked at her, with a look that was re- 
 venge enough for all the nnpitying cruelties of her past ; it 
 was so unconsciously a rebuke, so silently and terribly in 
 its pain a condemnation passing words. 
 
 For the first time under his gaze her proud head drooped, 
 her eyes filled with tears of shame, the paleness of her face 
 flushed ; before the noble truth of his every act and word, 
 the bold simplicity of his creeds of honour, her own life .j 
 looked to her very guilty, very far from the fair light of 
 justice and of loyalty. 
 
 ' Leave nie/ she said to him briefly, though her voice was 
 very low. ' But do not you reproach me.' 
 
 In answer his arms were stretched to her, and drew her 
 to his breast ; in that moment he had command ov r er her, in 
 that moment he was not her slave, but her judge. His face 
 was grave and almost stern, for he sufiered keenly, but his 
 voice and his touch were infinitely gentle. 
 
 c Leave you ? You think I know so little how to value 
 a woman who has the noblest virtue on earth truth ? ' 
 
 ' Truth ! when I have told you my whole life was, in one 
 sense, a lie ? ' 
 
 * Truth became you have so told me. O, my beloved ! 
 know me better than this. Can I not condemn your errors, 
 and yet cherish you but the more because you need some 
 pity and some pardon ? ' 
 
 She lay silent in his arms, deeper smitten than by any 
 rebuke or execration by the unutterable tenderness of this 
 love that was too true to truth to hold her guiltless, and too 
 true to itself to forsake her because it condemned her. In 
 that moment she knew how much greatness there was in 
 this man's nature, how much dignity in his passion. 
 
 1 But your trust, your faith? ' she said at last, as she looked 
 up at him. 
 
 i "Will be with you ever, as my love will be.' 
 
 He stooped and leant his cheek on hers, while low in her 
 ear a few words stole j he could not keep them back from 
 the aching and the longing of his heart. 
 
 * Tell me but one thing. You say you wore the mask of 
 passion to fool them did you ever let another before me 
 tell you of his passion thus ? ' 
 
 His own lips lingered in their kisses upon hers ; she drew 
 herself from his embrace with something of her old sroile, 
 of her old scorn. 
 
412 ID All A. 
 
 ' No. Or no prayer of yours should make me your 
 wife.' 
 
 ' And then you ask me if my faith be perfect still ? There 
 are scores of women women who would censure you 
 who think it no shame to bring tainted lips to their hus- 
 bands/ 
 
 ' "Well,' she said wearily, " give me not too much praise 
 for being prouder, and it may be colder, than many women 
 are ! If I never bent to the follies of love, I was but 
 the more blamable, perhaps, for using them without mercy 
 to my own ends. I tell you I never spared, it' any ever 
 doubted or resisted me, he had a terrible chastisement ; he 
 soon gave his very soul and conscience up into my hands. 
 Sometimes I think that Mephistopheles himself never 
 tempted more deftly and more brutally than I have done. 
 That dead Viana ! He would be living now were it not for 
 me. He was half a Bourbon in his creeds ; he worshipped 
 pleasure, and pleasure alone ; revolutions might have reeled 
 around him, and Carlo would never have laid down the 
 wine-cup, never asked with what side the day went or the 
 battle turned. But I brought him to give his very life to 
 my moulding ; I moved him to his own ruin by those very 
 qualities of fearless chivalry and generous passion that 
 should have been his shield from me. And O G-od ! if 
 you had seen him lying dead there as I saw him, with his 
 brave face turned upward, that he might smile in my eyes 
 to the last ! ' 
 
 Her head sunk, there was the set rnute anguish on her 
 of remorse that would never fade out while life remained. 
 He stood beside her silent also : he knew that there were no 
 words that could assuage this bitterness, he knew that to 
 vhis self-condemnation justice forbade any consolation 
 that must have been at its best but a deceiving soph- 
 istry. 
 
 * Yet you say your cause was noble ? ' he asked her gently, 
 at the last. * It was not to gain the cruel empty triumph 
 of a woman's vanity that you beguiled them ? ' 
 
 * Grod knows ! There was guilty triumph enough in me 
 at times. ' In the main yes it was for the cause of free- 
 dom that I won them. That had been harmless ; but my 
 sin was that I made them stake their lives on me, yield their 
 souls to me, surrender their consciences to me because I 
 
THE STORY OF THE PAST. 413 
 
 taught them love, and then, when they were my slaves, I 
 used them to their own destruction, as these charcoal-makers 
 thrust the fresh wood in to burn and feed their fires. 
 
 ' Still, you believed that those fires were the sacrifice-fires 
 of the people's altars of liberty ? ' 
 
 She shivered slightly in the ardent heat of the broad 
 noonday. 
 
 ' At first, with all the youth and passion of faith that 
 were in me, I did believe it. And I clung to the belief long 
 long after I knew it had its roots in quicksands. Bub 
 after I had learned how hopeless the struggle for pure free- 
 dom is, after I had learned that the absolutism of thrones 
 and churches are masked batteries of iron and granite on to 
 which the thinker and the poet and the patriot fiing them- 
 selves in combat only to be crushed and perish ; after I had 
 learned that only one among ten thousand of those who had 
 the welfare of the peoples on their lips had it also in their 
 hearts, and that fraud, knavery, selfish greed, impatient dis- 
 content, corrupt ambitions, were the natures of the liberators 
 not less than of the tyrants after I had read the bare truth 
 to its last letter I lured them still. Partly because I was 
 irrevocably bound to the work, partly because all my old 
 belief would not die ; chiefly of all, because I had grown to 
 love the power possessed, and could not bring myself to lay 
 it down and own my whole life a defeat. Nor was it 
 one ' 
 
 The warmth flushed her face again, her eyes lit with the 
 light of victory, something of the haughty defiance with 
 which she had challenged Giulio Villaflor returned then as 
 she challenged the memories of her past. 
 
 f It has been a crime, it may be but not a failure. No 
 Vassalis ever failed. I have fed hope into action, when 
 without me it would have died out in darkness. I have 
 armed hands that but for my weapons could never have 
 struck their oppressors down. I have breathed liberty into 
 a thousand lives that but for me might never have drawn in 
 its mountain air. I have loosened the bonds of many 
 martyrs ; I have broken the chains of many captives men 
 who suffered agonies, herein this Italy, simply because they 
 dared to cling to her, and seek vengeance for her violation. 
 No. It has been no failure. Are we not victorious at the 
 last, if the least thing for freedom have been wrought by 
 us? ' 
 
4H IDALIA. 
 
 She spoke not to him but to her Past, as though its re- 
 morse arraigned while yet its conquest crowned her. She 
 pleaded with her own conscience ; she raised her cause in 
 justification against the witness of the years that were gone ; 
 she had been true true to the death to the peoples 
 )f the earth and to their liberties, true to truth through 
 all. 
 
 It is a noble loyalty, one very rare amid mankind one 
 that surely may avail to atone for much. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 1 ET MORNING TOUCHED WITH AUHEOLE LIGHT ; BY 
 SUNSET STEANDED.' 
 
 THOSE words were the last on her lips for many 
 moments. Prom the gloom and stillness of the hut, 
 where there was a depth of shadow only broken by the 
 green mosses that strewed the floor and the gray flash of 
 a tame pigeon's wing guarding its brood in the farthest 
 nook, she looked out at the luxuriance of colour and 
 the blaze of sun, while her thoughts were sunk into the 
 past. 
 
 He did not break her musings ; his own thoughts were 
 filled with her history, of which he still knew, in truth, 
 but so little, yet which seemed to him told wholly in those 
 few brief sentences. Memories also came to him, revived 
 by her relation memories vague and fugitive, as of things 
 scarcely heard before, because without interest at the time 
 of their hearing, of stories that had floated to him in 
 clubs and cafes in the cities of Europe, long ere he had 
 met Idalia, of some beautiful Greek or Eoumelian, of 
 whom men told marvels, and about whose reputation had 
 gathered many splendid idle romances, fabulous as they 
 were contradictory romances that gave a thousand mag- 
 nificent impossible legends to the records of her life, but 
 stole from her, as such romances ever will, all ' the white 
 flower of a blameless life,' and made her pleasures as 
 guilty and her charms as resistless as those of Lucrezia or 
 Theodora. He had never heeded them in their telling ; lie 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 415 
 
 had cared little for women, still less for the babble of 
 slanders, and they had passed him without interest enough 
 to linger on his remembrance an hour. But now, with the 
 words of her story, they recurred to him as such forgotten 
 things will. Not to sting him with doubts of her, with 
 fear for himself suspicion of her was a thing impossible 
 to him but to madden him with impatient longing to 
 reach her calumniators and strike them down. His nature 
 was too bold for slander to do more than rouse his passion 
 against the slanderer, his chivalry for the slandered. 
 
 'They were all lies! ' he muttered in his beard, his face 
 flushing as those distant memories stole on him. ' All lies! 
 where are the tellers of them ? ' 
 
 She started slightly, and her eyes came back from their 
 dreaming speculation and dwelt on his. 
 1 What were the lies ? ' 
 
 ' Things that I heard of you once. I remember now ' 
 ' Ah ! ' A quick sigh escaped her she would so gladly 
 have kept her life fair and unshadowed in this man's sight 
 at least. ' "Well, do not blame the tellers of them ; my 
 life laid me open to misconstruction; no one can complain, 
 if their lives do so, of any calumny that may befall 
 them.' 
 
 Her voice was cold and careless ; the evil of calumny 
 had not power to wound, but it had had power to chill 
 and harden her, and the venom had left its trail thus for 
 ever. 
 
 < But why ' 
 
 He paused, not willing even by a syllable to risk trench- 
 ing on that silence which she thought it fittest to keep un- 
 broken. 
 
 ' Why did I so leave it open ? For many things. First, 
 ere I knew what calumny meant when I was so young to 
 the world that I yet believed I and Truth could avail to 
 convince and to conquer it ! my name was stained too 
 deeply, all undreamt of by me, for any future career, had 
 it been pure as a child's, to wash the stain away. I was 
 slandered unjustly. Slandered, I say ! It was a thousand 
 times worse than that. A traitor took the blank page of 
 nay youth and wrote it over behind my back with infa- 
 mous, indelible falsehood ' 
 
 A heavy curse broke asunder her words. 
 
41 6 ID ALT A. 
 
 ' Tell me who lie was, and vengeance shall find him.' 
 
 She passed her hand over his brow with a gentle caress. 
 
 * "No. You shall have no darkness on you from my past 
 of my bringing. But you do not fear to take to your 
 heart a woman whom the world has called evil thus ? ' 
 
 1 The world ! What terrors do you think that liar has 
 for me ? ' 
 
 She smiled a smile in which there was as much of 
 weariness as of sweetness. 
 
 1 It is not always a liar ; it was not so always in what 
 it said of me. But we will leave that ! To-day is our 
 own ; we will not poison it. You think we may make our 
 way to the sea to -night ? ' 
 
 ' I do. There is little to be feared in the open country 
 almost nothing from the peasantry. The horses will be 
 fresh, and if we can reach the little fishing village nearest 
 to Antina, I could send some barcarolo to bring in my 
 yacht. No suspicion falls on the vessel; the soldiers I 
 saw at your villa did not know me, and no one will hear 
 anything from Nicolo. We have only to fear the sbirri ' 
 
 ' Wait ; tell me all. How was it you heard of my 
 arrest ? How was it you found me ? ' 
 
 He told her; and she listened in the soft lull of the 
 noon silence, in the leafy twilight of the forest hut, to the 
 story of his search for her listened with an exceeding 
 tenderness on the face, whose careless pride so often had 
 smiled contemptuously on all love and all despair. He 
 told it in very few words, lessening as much as was pos- 
 sible all pain he had endured, all difficulty he had con- 
 quered, lest he should seem to press a debt upon her in 
 the recital. But the very brevity, the very generosity, 
 touched her as no eloquence would have done. By the 
 very omissions she knew how stanch had been this en- 
 durance, how devoted this fidelit^y, which through good and 
 evil report had cleaved to her, and fought their way to her. 
 1 My love, my love," she murmured as she stooped to 
 him, staying Ms last words. ' O, that I might repay you 
 in the future. If I were only sure that I should br.ng 
 you no misery if I could only know that no evil from me 
 would fall on you if I could only feel there were nothing 
 untold between us, and that my life were worthier of your 
 noble loyalty I would lose every coin and rood of my 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 417 
 
 inheritance, and come to you beggared of everything, yet 
 rich, my G-od ! how richer far than now ! ' 
 
 He had never seen her dignity so utterly abased, her 
 pride so utterly swept away as now, when those broken 
 and longing utterances escaped her; he saw that memo- 
 ries, which were in that moment an agony, shook down all 
 the strength and all the calmness of her nature. 
 
 1 Listen,' he said softly and gravely, while he drew her 
 hands in his. * Beggared or crowned, you would alike be 
 my mistress, my empress, my idol. Slandered or honoured, 
 you will alike be the one glory of my life, the one thought 
 in my death. Why let us speak as if we should ever 
 }*art ? You must slay me, or forsake me, ere ever we 
 shall be divided now.' 
 
 Her mouth quivered, her eyes filled as she heard him; 
 slowly, and in silence, she stooped and let her lips rest on 
 his. 
 
 For some moments she answered him in no other way 
 than by that one touch of her caress ; then, with one of 
 the swift transitions of her changeful temperament, she 
 looked down on him with a smile in which all her most 
 seductive sweetness gleamed, as the gold rays of the 
 southern day flashed in the dark lustrous languor of her 
 regard. 
 
 ' Anima tnia] she murmured caressingly, ' we will bo 
 lieve so, at least while we can, even even if you should 
 live to curse me, and I should live for Monsignore Yilla- 
 flor's vengeance ! Let us dream of a future, then. I 
 have so long thought of the world's future only, and so 
 long not dared to give a glance at my own. Let us dream 
 while we can. Tell me of your old Border castle. "We 
 will raise it from its ashes once more if you will. And 
 you shall come and be lord of my great E/oumelian fief, all 
 its hills, and its plains, and its rivers, and its vast solitudes 
 with their terrible beauty, and its fortress that is a palace, 
 like some Persian vision of the night that we see when we 
 Vave fallen asleep in reading Eirdursi. Ah, there is a life 
 there possible, if we could but reach it a life fit for your 
 oold chieftainship, a life that might redeem my past ! 
 We both know the world to weariness. There, eastward, 
 you and I we might find something at least of the old 
 ideals of my early fancies ; there are a people sunk ill 
 
418 IDALIA. 
 
 sloth and barbarism, there are the domains of a prince, 
 there are grand woods and waters, and mountains to be 
 piled between us and the world, there is human soil barren 
 of every good thing, uncultured, useless, needing the 
 commonest tillage. I should be free there, and you would 
 be a king in your own right. It needs just such a sove- 
 reign as you would be, my brave, dauntless, lion-hearted 
 wanderer ! "We might be happy ? "We might reach stiD 
 more yet than merely happiness ? ' 
 
 And they dreamed of the future, while the brilliant day 
 stole onward, and the stillness of intense heat brooded 
 t/ver the sun-lighted earth ; the future that to him was a 
 treasury of joys so passionate, so measureless, so incre- 
 dible, that they seemed passing all hope, escaping all 
 reach ; the future that to her was in its fairest vision but 
 as a vision of that lost land of peace and liberty which 
 her own act had forfeited for ever. 
 
 The day declined from its noon height, and neither 
 knew nor asked how the hours were numbered. 
 
 "When the sun was touching the lowest cloud, and the 
 amber glow was burning into scarlet, he started to his 
 feet ; he remembered that the forester would be coming 
 homeward, and that with evening their flight must begin. 
 As they left the cabin, Idalia looked round it with a long 
 and wistful glance ; the day would be dear in her memory 
 beyond all others, and in her own heart she believed that 
 it was the last they should ever pass together. Then she 
 lifted one of the rude wooden bowls to him with her old 
 half -tender, half-coquette smile. 
 
 ' The child is not here ; put some coins in for us both. 
 You must give me your gold to-day ; if ever we are free, 
 you shall be lord of all I own. Ah ! you only care to be 
 lord of myself ? Do you think that I do not know that ? 
 But / shall care to crown you and give you such purples 
 as I have. You are royal to the very core of your fear- 
 less, kingly heart ; and you shall reign over my kingdom, 
 such as it is, if ever we can reach it.' 
 
 They went out into the stillness of the forest, so still 
 that they might have been alone in an unpeopled world. 
 Here and there through the network of branches the 
 flushed sky glowed, vivid as fire ; darkness already had 
 fallen on the slopes *** ^e hills, behind which the sun had 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 419 
 
 sunk down ; on the foam of the waters opposite gleams 
 and breadths of prismatic colour still sparkled ; the even- 
 ing air was heavy with fragrance, and under the foliage 
 the luciole began to glimmer. Erceldoune went toward 
 the grazing horses, tethered in camp-fashion by a long 
 heel-rope, beneath the cedars ; she followed him, stroking 
 the neck of the brave sorrel that had borne her with 
 such unflagging speed through the whole of the past 
 night. 
 
 ' Carry me as bravely again, caro,' she murmured him, 
 drawing the silken mane through her hand. ' Take me to 
 freedom, and you shall have such pathless meadows of 
 wild grass to wander in, eastward, at your will ; no curb 
 shall ever touch you, no spur shall ever gall you ! ' 
 
 As she caressed the hunter, the hound at her side 
 dropped his muzzle earthward with a low smothered 
 growl, then lifted his head, and looked at her with anxious, 
 eager questions in his imploring eyes. 
 
 ' The dog scents some danger. What is it, Sulla ? ' she 
 asked, giving him that sign of silence which the animal 
 had learned so well. 
 
 'A wolf, maybe. "We will unearth him if he be any- 
 thing worse,' said Erceldoune, as he swept back with one 
 arm the heavy boughs, while with his right hand he 
 loosened the pistol from his sash. The rocks sloped 
 sharply down ; the sunset light shone on the dell beneath 
 as he leant forward. 
 
 A cry broke from him loud, wild, exultant as the cry of 
 the eagle swooping to its prey. With one hand still hold- 
 ing upward the matted veil of foliage, he stood rooted 
 there, all the worst passions of his nature roused in an in- 
 stant into deadliest strength. 
 
 There, almost at his feet, far beneath in the curved 
 hollow of a moss-grown, cup-shaped dell, sleeping as he 
 himself had slept on the Capriote shore at his foe's mercy, 
 with one arm beneath his head and the other flung idly 
 outward, in the loose linen dress of an Italian melon- 
 jseller, lay the G-reek, Conrad Phaulcon. 
 
 He motioned her to him with a gesture that let the 
 leaves fall for an instant back into their places ; his teeth 
 were clenched, his words hissed broken through them, his 
 eyes were alight with the blood-thirst of desert animals. 
 
 2E2 
 
420 IDALIA. 
 
 ' Look, look ! ' he gasped. ' There at last there in my 
 power the brute who shot me down ;' 
 
 He swept the boughs backward and upward once more 
 with the dash of his arm, and she bent to look through the 
 twilight of the leaves ; her face changed to the whiteness 
 of death as her eyes fell on the upturned face of the 
 sleeping man, her lips drew their breath gaspingly ; a 
 shiver of unutterable horror ran through her. 
 
 'He! he!' 
 
 That one word seemed all her voice could whisper, and 
 in it a whole world of agony, loathing, remorse, hatred, 
 and shame unbearable seemed told. 
 
 Erceldoune, with the lifted boughs still held above their 
 heads, stood and gazed at her in a horror scarce less than 
 that with which the sight of the slumbering Grreek had 
 stirred her. 
 
 1 You, know him ! ' 
 
 She seized his wrist, and, with the convulsive force that 
 comes to the most delicate women in their hours of ex- 
 tremity, shook his grasp from the arm of the tree, whose 
 foliage fell once more between them and the sight of that 
 bright Athenian beauty that there lay in the careless rest 
 of some sculpture of Lykegenes. 
 
 c Know him ! O, my Grod ! Do I know him ? ' 
 
 * Ay ! Do you know the man who sought to murder 
 me? ' 
 
 There was the first sternness of waking fury, the first 
 unconscious violence of stealing doubt, in the question as 
 it broke from him, while he vainly sought to wrench his 
 wrists from the close grasp she held them in, and be free 
 to fall upon his enemy as lions fall on their foes. With 
 them her courage returned, her self-command came back 
 to her, though her face was bloodless still, and a terrible 
 anguish was set on 'it ; she looked him full in the eyes 
 eyes for the first time bent on her with the searching- 
 severity of an accuser. 
 
 ' Yes ; I know him. I did not know that he was your 
 assassin, though though I grant I feared it.' 
 
 ' Eeared it ! What is he to you ? ' 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 What is he to you this brigand, this brute, this vilest 
 of the vile scum of Europe ?' 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. *f2l 
 
 He spoke with tlie imperious veliemence of the intoler- 
 able horror that possessed him. She was silent still ; over 
 her face a hot flush came and went, the flush of an intense 
 humiliation. 
 
 4 "What do you know of him ? Answer me, before I 
 wring it out of his throat.' 
 
 She shuddered where she stood ; but, with a strength 
 scarce less than his own, she held him from the place 
 where the G-reek slept, and drew him by sheer force farther 
 and farther outward. 
 
 ' Let him be. He has been the curse or my fate ; he 
 will be the curse of yours.' 
 
 ' By heaven, never ! I will stamp his life out where he 
 lies. Let me go let me go ! ' 
 
 ' Go for what ? ' 
 
 ' To deal with him justly.' 
 
 'Justly!' 
 
 ' Yes. Men kill murderers ; and it was through no 
 lack of will in him he was not one. I will not kill him 
 sleeping, but I will wash my wrongs out once for all. 
 Let me go ! ' 
 
 She flung her arms close around him, so that he must 
 have wrenched her beautiful limbs asunder before he could 
 have left her ; she drew him backward and backward, her 
 breath against his cheek, her hair showered on his breast, 
 her dignity broken, her self-control forgot, vivid emotion, 
 agonised abandonment, making her a hundredfold more 
 resistless in that hour than she had ever been in her 
 proudest moments of supremacy. She knew her power ; 
 under that embrace he stood subdued, irresolute, remem- 
 bering nothing except the loveliness he looked on. 
 
 ' Is that your love ? Is that your trust ? ' 
 
 She felt a tremor run through all his frame the tremor 
 of the blind rage against his foe, of the blind idolatry of 
 her, that warred within him. 
 
 ' I break neither, because I will deal with my assassin ! 
 What i? he to you that you should shield him ? ' 
 
 The i:rst taint of jealousy ran through the words. Tlu 
 tremor of shame that he had seen when her glance first 
 fell upon the Greek passed over her ; yet her gaze met 
 his, and never sank beneath it. 
 
 ' I cannot tell you.' 
 
422 ID ALIA. 
 
 There was an accent of hatred deep as his own in the 
 low words j he looked with a terrible eagerness into her 
 eyes. 
 
 6 Cannot f "Wait. You say you never loved ; were you 
 never wedded where you hate ? ' 
 
 'Never/ 
 
 6 Then what is this villain to you ? ' 
 
 She seemed to shrink and shiver where his arms held 
 her, as though his words stabbed her through and through. 
 She held silence still. 
 
 * Tell me,' he swore to her, * or, as he lives, that tiger 
 shall, with my shot through his brain to pay for the con- 
 fession ! ' 
 
 6 Hush, hush ! If he wakes, we are lost ! ' 
 
 ' I will wake him in such fashion that he never wakes 
 again. My assassin your care ? Let me go -let me go, I 
 tell you ! ' 
 
 He strove to put her arms from him, to fling off him 
 the coil of her hair, to break from the paralysing spell 
 of her beauty ; but she would not loosen him, she would 
 not be shaken off she drew him farther and farther 
 from the Greek, let him seek as he would to escape 
 from her. 
 
 1 0, my beloved, my beloved ! where is the faith you 
 promised me ? One trial and it breaks ! "With such a 
 life as mine, do you not know that- there must be far 
 darker things than this to try you ? Have you not said 
 that you will cleave to me through all ? Have you not 
 refused to believe even my own word against me ? ' 
 
 ' Grod knows it, yes ! But ' 
 
 4 Here is the first test, then ; were your oaths empty 
 words ? ' 
 
 He was silent ; he stood motionless and unnerved under 
 the brief touch of the rebuke. She knew that she had 
 bound him in those withes of honour that he would never 
 break; and she knew that she had touched him in the 
 *ne noble weakness that laid him utterly at her will and 
 mercy. She loosened her arms from him ; she stood apart 
 and left him free. 
 
 G-o, if you will. Doubt ims, if you -will. Avenge 
 your wrong, if you will. But, if you do, we never meet 
 again.' 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 4-3 
 
 His lips parted, without sound ; an anguish of appeal 
 looked at her from his eyes ; he stood consumed by the 
 passions of his hate and of his love, that strove with one 
 another in a deadly conflict. 
 
 6 Choose,' she said simply, and waited. 
 
 His chest heaved with a mighty sigh. 
 
 ' Great heaven, you ask me to spare him after such a 
 crime ! ' 
 
 ' I ask you nothing. Take your vengeance, it is your 
 right ; but you will never look upon my face again/ 
 
 6 Because I am his foe ? ' 
 
 6 No ; because you doubt me.' 
 
 "With that one word she pierced him to the quick. 
 
 He had no strength, no memory, no thought, save of 
 her and of her will. He looked back once to where his 
 slumbering traitor lay, with the mad longing of denied 
 vengeance in the look; then slowly, and with his head 
 bent, he turned away. 
 
 * Be it as you will. I yield you to-day more than my 
 life itself.' 
 
 And as she heard, all her coldness and her imperious 
 resolve died out, as though they had not been ; she sank 
 into his outstretched arms, and wept as she had never 
 done in all her haughty womanhood wept uncontrol- 
 lably, agonisedly, in such abandonment, in such weakness, 
 as the sovereign temper in her never, ere then, had 
 known. 
 
 At sight of that passionate grief, he forgot his own 
 wrong, his own doubt, his very vengeance ; he remembered 
 nothing, except that the woman for whom he would have 
 laid down his life, suffered thus, while to her suffering he 
 could bring no more consolation than though he stood a 
 stranger before her. It was not in him to have one 
 thought of his own cause of hatred in this man, when 
 once he saw that she endured this poignant and deadly 
 pain through his assassin, this unutterable misery at sight 
 of the sleeping Greek, whose face turned upwards, with 
 the sunset warmth and nickering shadow of the leaves 
 playing on it, thus had broken all their dreams of the 
 future, all the sweetness of their solitude. 
 
 She lay passive some moments in his arms, her whole 
 frame shaken by convulsive tearless sobs. 
 
424 IDALIA. 
 
 6 O Grod ! ' she moaned ; ' and I dreamt of a Future, 
 while Tie was living there ! ' 
 
 A darkness like night swept over her lover's face ; the 
 evil spirit was upon him, which in the midnight chase 
 through the moonlight of the Bosphorus shore had been 
 on him, thirsting for his enemy's blood. He stooped his 
 head over her, and his whisper was terribly brief : 
 
 t Let me go, and he will not be living long.' 
 
 He had surrendered to her ; he had yielded up to her 
 this vengeance, which had- been the one goal of such cease- 
 less search, such vain desire ; but though he bad let her 
 for a while hold his hands from it, his whole heart, and 
 soul, and passions were in tempestuous rebellion still ; his 
 blood was hot for war, his conscience was strangled by 
 hatred. 
 
 'Let me go,' he whispered thirstily. ' You shall see him 
 He dead at your feet dead, like the brave horse that rotted 
 to carrion through him.' 
 
 She shivered, as though an ice-cold wind had passed over 
 her ; but danger had been too long her atmosphere, and the 
 tempests of men's hearts too long the powers by which she 
 swayed them, not to nerve her force and calmness when 
 both were needed. She was deathly pale, except for those 
 flushes of shame that had made the blood rush backwards 
 to her veins ; but she spoke tranquilly, laying her hand 
 upon his mouth, and with that command which never, in 
 moments of need, deserted her. 
 
 ' Peace ! Those are not like yourself those tiger in- 
 stincts. Leave them to him ; they are beneath you.' 
 
 ' They are not they are my right ? ' 
 
 1 Is revenge ever a right ? ' 
 
 1 "We deemed it so in old Scotland a right divine ! ' 
 
 His face was stern and evil still, with the storm of his 
 longing wrath, with the pent tide of his loosening jealousy. 
 
 ' Divine ? Devilish ! Eight or wrong, lay it down for 
 my bidding.' 
 
 He was silent. Under her hands she felt the muscles 
 of his arm thrill and swell ; against her breast she felt the 
 stifled panting of his breath. To hold him back was like 
 holding in leash a gazehound when it sees the stag. 
 
 1 Lay it down, or you are man-sworn, and foresworn. 
 You talk of your ancient Scotland : how did she hold that 
 dishonour?' 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 4^5 
 
 She spoke with, a vivid intensity in the words, that left 
 her clenched teeth so low, so slowly ; she kne\v every 
 chord in the nature of this man, as fine artists know every 
 chord in the diapason of the instrument that echoes and 
 vibrates to their slightest touch. 
 
 He held his peace ; he would not break his word to her 
 break his word to a woman, and that woman defence- 
 less, and his mistress, and his life's pledged law ; but his 
 hunger of desire was terrible to fall on that sleeping 
 panther lying so near, and to deal on him ten thousand 
 blows blows for his own wrong at his assassin's score, 
 but blows a hundred times more strong because his foe 
 was known and shielded by Idalia. 
 
 She saw the struggle in him, and her heart went out to 
 him in it went out to the strength and the weakness that 
 were so blent in. it, the strength of honour and the 
 weakness of passion. How often she had seen these two 
 antagonists strive against each other to hold and to keep a 
 man's soul ! 
 
 ' O my love ! ' she murmured, as she drew him farther 
 and farther from the place where his foe slept. ' Give 
 me this one thing, and you shall have all my love. Let 
 him be let him be ! He took all ; he shall not take you. 
 Come, come, come ! ' 
 
 He held back still, while still her arms clung to him, and 
 drew him onward and onward to leave his murderer in 
 peace. 
 
 1 One word only,' he muttered, close in her ear, while 
 his lips, as they brushed her throat, scorched it like fire. 
 * You deny me my vengeance. Is it for love of me or 
 pity of him ? ' 
 
 The eyes that he could have sworn were true, as he 
 would have sworn that the stars shone above them, looked 
 up long into his ; there was a depth of anguish in them 
 that smote and stilled his passions as with a sudden 
 awe. 
 
 ' Both. I love you, as I never thought in me to love the 
 living or the dead ; and I pity him, as the longest, the 
 latest, the most wretched of all my enemies, though they 
 are many as the sands of the sea. Have I answered you 
 now ? Come ! ' 
 
 The intonation of the words, rather than their meaning, 
 
4R& ID ALIA. 
 
 laid their own solemnity on him ; he read that in her eyes, 
 before which his own wrongs seemed to dwarf, and pale, 
 and die out. 
 
 ' Do with me as you will,' he said to her, while his head 
 sank, and a great sigh escaped him. 'I cannot reach you, 
 in all things, but I will follow as best I may.' 
 
 She seemed to him so far above him with her royal past, 
 that had given her the sway as the woes of royalties, with 
 this lofty serene generosity from which she looked with 
 compassion on one whom she declared the greatest enemy 
 of her life. She started as if the homage stung her like 
 an adder as if the reverence of his words were some un- 
 bearable shame. 
 
 'Never say that! Never, never! Follow me in no- 
 thing. Teach me your own brave, straight, knightly 
 creeds. Let me see your noble honesty of thought and 
 purpose, and let me steep myself in truth, and have it 
 cleanse me, if I can ! Ah, once before we go, let me hear 
 you say that you forgive me ! Forgive me all you know 
 forgive me all that is hidden from you ! ' 
 
 The remorse with which, in the dawn of that day, she 
 had bidden him flee from her for ever the abasement 
 that had broken down her dignity, and laid her subject 
 before him, were tenfold intensified now intensified to a 
 burning misery of grief before him, to a humiliation that 
 crushed down like a bent reed the bold spirit that had 
 never quailed before the threats of the Roman tyrant, or 
 the uplifted rods of his scourgers. She seemed broken 
 by an unutterable contrition stricken before him by the 
 conscious guilt of a criminal before her judge; the prayer 
 for pardon seemed to pierce her lips before she knew that 
 she uttered it ; the thirst for his mercy seemed to be in- 
 tense as if the crime against his life had been woven by 
 her brain, and- instigated by her will, although the hand of 
 the Greek, sleeping unconscious in the hollowed cleft of 
 rock below, had been her tool and servant. 
 
 There was not one pause of doubt, one hesitation of 
 dread, in the answer that rose from the grandest genero- 
 sity in his nature, and came to her with a gentleness, 
 grave and infinitely sad, that seemed upon her ear like the 
 fall of some divine music. 
 
 * Forgive ! That is no word between you and me. Yet, 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 4 2 7 
 
 if there be anything of pardon needed from my life to 
 fours in past, or present, or future, I give the pardon 
 How, once and for ever ; you cannot stretch it farther than 
 my love will yield it.' 
 
 She heard, and her haughty head sank downward, till 
 her lips touched his hand in the sign of homage and alle- 
 giance that she had refused to the claim of monarchs. 
 Her eyes were blind with tears, her heart was filled with 
 a despair bitter as death, with a sweetness sweet as life ; 
 he was at once her slave and her ruler, her judge and her 
 saviour. 
 
 ' Ah, Grod ! ' she said in her soul ; * how vainly I sought 
 for a great nature where great things dwelt, and great 
 ambitions governed ! I never found it till now ; and now 
 how little it knows itself as great ! ' 
 
 "Without a word, he loosed her from his arms, as though 
 by that abstinence from any utterance or caress of passion 
 to show that no mere passion goaded him to the forgive- 
 ness which a higher and purer tenderness bestowed, and 
 would so bestow through the uttermost ordeal, and up to 
 the last hour. Silently he led the horses from the place, 
 their hoofs noiselessly sinking in the rank deep grass, 
 drew the girths closer, and made the few preparations 
 that were needed for their night-ride to the sea; and 
 below, far down under the cedar shelter, where the sun- 
 rays never strayed, the Athenian lay, sunk in the dream- 
 less sleep of a profound exhaustion a fatigue careless 
 where it dropped down to rest, so that it might lie on un- 
 awakened, undisturbed. 
 
 His foe was left in peace ; a heavier surrender to her 
 than any that had ever been made, many and wide and 
 weighty though they were, the sacrifices that she had 
 wooed, or commanded from those who had no law save 
 only the bidding of her lips. His heart was sick within 
 him ; every vein was on fire with the lion's longing for the 
 lion's spring. The old religion of revenge, which had 
 been sacred to his forefathers in the age when murderers 
 were proven by bier-right, and for wrong the flaming cross 
 of war was borne alight over moor and mountain, was in. 
 many a moment his religion still ; it was ' wild justice ' in 
 his eyes, and a justice best meted out from foe to foe 
 without the judgment of any alien voice. To turn away 
 
428 IDALIA. 
 
 and leave his enemy unaroused; to skulk and flee as 
 though he were the evil-doer; to let the murderer lie 
 there unawakened, unarraigned, instead of forcing him 
 from slumber to answer for his guilt with life a deadlier 
 thing she could not have demanded at his hands. 
 
 The sweetness of the day had died with the setting of 
 the sun, and the darkness of night had fallen on their lives 
 as on the earth where they dwelt. Silently they mounted, 
 silently they passed away, the tramping of feet lost on 
 the yielding moss, on the thick herbage; silently they 
 turned and looked backward with a long and lingering 
 gaze at the forest-roof which well might prove their last 
 refuge together, the last shelter in which they should ever 
 dream of freedom and of a future. Then through the 
 first shadows of evening, under the deep gloom of the 
 woods, beside the melancholy moaning of the hidden 
 river-channels, they went onward to their flight from 
 Church and King, onward to the sea, if they could ever 
 reach the sweet fresh liberty of its wide waters. 
 
 And as they went where the leafy depths enclosed, 
 and the forest twilight hid them the Greek rose slowly, 
 with the heavy lethargy of sleep, and the staggering 
 weakness of overwrought fatigue still on him, like some 
 fierce yet timorous panther that has been roused from 
 rest to a craven dread and a longing for slaughter both in 
 one. Through his sleep words had come to him, mingling 
 with his dreams ; instincts had stirred in him while yet the 
 weight of that death-like slumber had laid like lead oil 
 his eyelids ; a voice had raised the dormant images of 
 memory ; a sense of some presence, some peril, some rising 
 of hate and of fear, had come on him ere he had been 
 sensible; he had shaken the clinging stupor from him 
 with supreme effort ; he had glanced upward through the 
 boughs of cedar ; he had made one eager springing move- 
 ment like a panther, with the panther's lust in his eyes, 
 and a thousand warring passions at his heart. Then the 
 craft of his nature, the cowardice of his nation, conquered 
 the bolder and more ferocious impulse, as well as the jea- 
 lous, wayward, tyrannous affection that still, with all his 
 vice, lived in him ; the dread of his antagonist was blent 
 with the instinct of his blood towards treachery in the 
 place of defiance. He feigned sleep afresh, lying as though 
 
AT SUNSET STRANDED. 429 
 
 still in the profound peace of that dreaming rest ; lying so 
 with the soft brown lashes on his cheek, and his head idly 
 thrown back upon his arm, until the hoofs of the horses 
 had ceased to crush the cyclamen and hellebore, and the 
 screen of forest foliage had fallen between him and the 
 man he hated with the reckless bitterness of the injurer to 
 the injured the woman whom he loved despite all, though 
 he adored tyranny and evil, and gold and selfish gains, and 
 the brutal exercise of a pitiless jealousy, far more. 
 
 Then, as they passed away, he staggered to his feet and 
 stood a moment, in the red after-glow that streamed upon 
 him, erect, quivering, instinct with passion, like some lithe, 
 beautiful, murderous, forest beast, the hot and ruddy light 
 burning in the glow of his eyes, and cast luridly on the 
 spirited head and perfect form that were graceful and 
 splendid as the legendary beauty of Arinthoeus. 
 ' She can love ? The world should end to-night ! ' 
 The words broke from him where he stood alone. All 
 through the years since first he had won into his toils the 
 young sovereign of the Yassalis dominion, the heir of the 
 great dead Julian, the dreamer of dreams so grand, so pure, 
 so impossible in their sublime ambitions, that their very 
 greatness had been made the element of her own destruc- 
 tion, he had never known love in its faintest touch pass 
 over her proud heart ; merciless in awaking passion, no 
 stroke of it had ever recoiled upon her ; with the power of 
 the sorceress she had had also the sorceress's immunity from 
 the danger of the spells by which she wrought ; many had 
 thought that they had gained their entrance to her heart 
 many bad thought so when so she chose to dupe them 
 but all had found, too late, that there was no essay more 
 hopeless than to seek to stir to tenderness the haughty 
 coldness and carelessness of her strength, to seek to waken 
 one echo of fondness from the superb negligence and levity 
 of her ironic scorn. He had never known her love even 
 once roused ; he had sworn that, if ever that passion touched 
 her, he to whom it were given should yield up as his price 
 Uo less coin than life. 
 
430 1DALIA. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 BESIDE THE SEA. 
 
 BY. dawn they had reached the shore, having bent far 
 northward of where Naples lay, and so round to the sea. 
 
 Here the worn-out horses, fasting and drenched with 
 steam, and quivering with fatigue at the close of a second 
 night of that breathless race, staggered, trembling under 
 the great shadow of a mighty wall of cliff that rose sheer 
 upward from the* breadth of smooth and yellow sand, its 
 sides jagged and honeycombed, its crest overhung with fes- 
 toons' of wild vine, and crowned with the gray plumes of 
 olive, the waters idly lapping the amber beach below, and 
 stretching league on league outward till the dim sea-line 
 and the mist-laden skies of morning blent in one. Involun- 
 tarily she stretched her hands out to it in welcome and in 
 prayer, as though the Seaborn of her fathers lived and 
 heard. 
 
 1 waters, give me your liberty ! ' 
 
 They looked so wide, so cool, so deeply still, stretching 
 out in their measureless freedom to the infinite. 
 
 6 It is gentler than earth,' she muttered. * Men die hardly 
 on the bitterness of the land the land which devours them 
 that she may blossom and laugh with fruits born of corrup- 
 tion ! but the very death that the sea gives is dreamy and 
 tranquil. And the sea will not render its dead, but loves 
 them, and lulls them, and holds them ever with their 
 stories untold ! "Where is there any other thing so merciful 
 as that ? ' 
 
 There was the longing of a melancholy, weary to despair, 
 through the poet-like thought of the murmured words ; in 
 that moment she would gladly have sought the unbroken 
 rest that could alone be found in the deep sea-bed, beneath 
 those fathomless and changeless waves. 
 
 She sank down on a broken pile of rock, with the ribbed 
 sand at her feet, and the bulwark of the mighty cliff rising 
 above ; her face was colourless, haggard, almost stern, as 
 though there were set on it such hatred of herself that all 
 its youth and brilliancy changed to one bitter heart-sick 
 scorn ; her hair was thrust back off her brow ; her eyes 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 43 1 
 
 looked with a tearless, thirsty longing over the waters. 
 There had been silence between them well-nigh through all 
 the hours of that night-ride to the sea ; there was silence 
 still; he stood beside her with the darkness of her thoughts 
 flung back on his, with the tempestuous passions that he 
 had choked down at her will burning and aching in him 
 still. 
 
 ( You are certain ? ' she said suddenly at last. 
 
 A heavier darkness came upon his face. 
 
 e Do you think men forget their murderers ? ' 
 
 Her teeth clenched on one another, as though to grind 
 the starting words to silence ; she laughed lightly a laugh 
 that sent a shudder through his blood. 
 
 '"Well, your murderer was the man that had the hewing 
 and the shaping of my life. Do you wonder now that it was 
 evil ? ' 
 
 ' Of yours ? O God ! ' 
 
 She laughed still faintly ; that laugh that lias a misery 
 which never yet lay in tears. 
 
 6 A fair comrade ! a noble tutor ! "What think you ? A 
 lofty close for my imperial ambitions, is it not ? A priest's 
 cell my prison-house, a criminal's flight my safety, a thief 
 and an assassian my associate, my ' 
 
 Her teeth closed once more, shutting in the word that 
 would have escaped them ; a shiver of agony shook him as 
 he heard ; his breath came in slow stifled gasps ; he had 
 thought that he could never suffer, once knowing that her 
 love was his, once having felt her lips upon his own, yet 
 he suffered now as he had never done in all the years of 
 his life. 
 
 ' Twice you have checked my vengeance, and bidden rne 
 " spare ! " ' he muttered, in the fierceness of a torture that 
 made his words almost savage. 'If these brutes be your 
 foes, why call me off their throats ? ' 
 
 * A lion shall not choke snakes/ she said briefly. 
 The brevity gave the deeper meaning to the words. 
 ' Why speak in parables ? You must know ' 
 
 * That your faith is dying ? "Well, let it die : it has every 
 right : / will not reproach you ! ' 
 
 The bitter despairing hatred softened from her features, 
 and the sweeter sadness, that grieved less for herself than 
 him. followed it once more. His eyes turned on her, filled 
 with hot cruel tears. 
 
43 2 ID ALIA. 
 
 c It will never die. But why should you wring my heart 
 to test it P ' 
 
 1 Test it ? Ah, do not wrong me like that ! Do you 
 think I would cause you an instant's pain that was in my 
 power to spare ? Do you think I would spend a woman's 
 miserable chicaneries and heartless vanities on you, or 
 triumph in them at your cost ? ' 
 
 Pier voice had changed to intense appeal, to vivid emo- 
 tion, and she held his hands close against her heart, looking 
 upward at him with a longing that broke down all her 
 courage and her pride the longing that he, at least, should 
 know that she was true to him, though she must withhold 
 him from his justice, and deny him all he had a title to 
 hear. 
 
 c Answer me ! ' she pursued, while her eyes gazed into 
 his. ( Be my law, my conscience I have been steeped so 
 long in evil, I have lost all fitness to judge honour or dis- 
 honour aright ! To tell you all, to lay my life before you 
 as it should be laid, I must break my oath, I must belie 
 my word, I must be false to the chief thing that has ever 
 redeemed my past. Answer me shall I do it ? ' 
 
 She saw a tremor shake him as a great storm shakes the 
 rooted strength of cedars ; his head sank, his mouth qui- 
 vered ; a fierce and cruel conflict was waged in him. For 
 a while he hesitated ; torn by a deadly anguish of desire to 
 speak the word that should unloose the bonds of silence 
 between them. 
 
 Then a brave gentleman's inborn instincts conquered him 
 and spoke in his answer : 
 
 ' JSTo. Be true to yourself, and you will never be false to 
 me. For the rest, you know me. I can wait.' 
 
 And she who heard him knew that with that refusal he 
 had put from him what cost him more in the renunciation 
 than sceptres laid aside have cost to those who put them 
 by at the dictation of a pure and generous honour beyond 
 ail selfish sway, as his was now beyond it. 
 
 ' You are great beyond men's nobility,' she said briefly. 
 In that momentary weakness she had longed that he should 
 bid her sacrifice her word and her bond to him, but he was 
 far higher and dearer in her sight because he denied that 
 weakness its way ; she had much strength herself, and she 
 loved such strength in men. * But but have you no fear 
 when I toll you iny life has been tainted by such as he ? J 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 433 
 
 The red blood rushed over his forehead, his teeth crushed 
 in a mighty curse. 
 
 * I have but the fear that, if I look ever on his face again, 
 I shall turn murderer like him.' 
 
 A sickening shudder passed over her. 
 
 ' Nay, why not revenge yourself on me ? I was his asso- 
 ciate. How can you know I was not his accomplice ? ' 
 
 1 How ! Have I not looked into your eyes ? ' 
 
 The infinite trust and tenderness that the reply breathed 
 was rather in the tone than in the words. 
 
 1 My eyes ! What do a woman's eyes ever do but lie ? 
 And yet look, ]ook for ever, if you will, so that you learn 
 from them that my heart is truth, but that niy past is 
 shame ! ' 
 
 Her head sunk, her gaze was fastened on the ebbing sea 
 with an intense despair, her courage was broken and abased 
 at last. 
 
 He stood beside her silent ; his faith would not leave nor 
 his love forsake her, but the abyss of a heavy guilt yawned 
 between them, the barrier of a pitiless silence severed them. 
 The words of the holy Mother of Monastica came back upon 
 his memory: 
 
 6 Take to your bosom that flower alone which lives in 
 the fulness of light, and folds no leaves unopened from 
 your gaze.' 
 
 But passion and faith were strong in him stronger than 
 wisdom, stronger than vengeance. He stooped and laid his 
 lips upon her brow. 
 
 1 The shadow of others' shame may darken you ; no shame 
 of yours is on you. Whatsoever you are be mine ! ' 
 
 The sea stretched outward, league on league of still gray 
 water, with no colour on it in the young hours of the dawn, 
 no life, save the movement here and there of some awaken- 
 ing ocean bird. The cliffs, tawny and water-stained and 
 sunbrowned, rose aloft, curving inward and shaping- one of 
 the many indents of the irregular southern coast ; mighty 
 shafts of stone that seemed to touch the skier>, and were 
 deeply riven here and there in fissures filled with the cling- 
 ing of the vine. Grand, solitary, wild, there was no human 
 aid, no boat's help to be looked for here. 
 
 The sea lay there, but between them and liberty it 
 stretched an inexorable desert, impassable, and giving no 
 freedom except deatk 2 F 
 
434 IDALIA. 
 
 ( Moments are years, we cannot waste them,' lie mut- 
 tered, as he looked across the waters, where no sail broke 
 the space, and upward at the rocks which frowned sterile 
 and lonely, locking in the breadth of ribbed beach-sand. 
 ' A fisher-boat, sea- worthy, might save us still. I know a 
 village that should lie not far from this. A cluster of fish- 
 ing-cabins ' 
 
 ' Yes, there is one. Let me think.' 
 
 She paused awhile, seeking in half-forgotten memories 
 for all her knowledge of the coast. 
 
 'Yes, a mile northward of us. A few huts under the 
 cliff, and men with the sea's strength in them when once 
 they are afloat. Go you to them ; they may surely have a 
 felucca that could cross that motionless sea.' 
 
 ' Go ! And leave you ? ' 
 
 i Else we must perish together. There is no help here/ 
 
 6 Better that ! ' 
 
 ' No ; you shall not die by Bourbon steel for me. I am 
 known well in this country ; the story of my arrest must be 
 common to all now. This mask-dress, which is all they left 
 me, would draw curiosity at once, You look like a mari- 
 naro ; you can hire the boat unsuspected, you can steer 
 here, and, once here, with our pistols at their foreheads we 
 can make the sailors take what way we will. Go, I shall 
 fire if any danger come. You will here the shot far in this 
 still air.' 
 
 ' Is there no other way ? ' 
 
 * None. Leave me there is no fear. And, in truth, I 
 could not move farther yet. I am worn out at last.' 
 
 She spoke faintly, wearily, and a gray death-like hue had 
 stolen over all her face, where she leaned her head upon 
 her arm, her eyes lustreless, and with their lids heavily 
 drooped looking outward at the sea, whose grave she 
 coveted. The fearlessness that had challenged death ; the 
 force that had endured any torture rather than purchase 
 peace and liberty by the betrayal of comrades; the high 
 and dauntless spirit that had laughed at danger, and loved 
 peril for its very hazard's sake these, which would never 
 have yielded to any tyranny, or pang, or jeopardy that 
 could have tried them, were unstrung and crushed by the 
 horror which had possessed her from the first moment that 
 she had seen the sleeping Greek and heard his crime his 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 435 
 
 creven sin of craft and slaughter. Humiliation rested on 
 her ; the deadliest suffering sucli a nature as hers can ever 
 know a thing which, until the sun had set in the past 
 day, had never touched her temper. A shame that was 
 ineffaceable seemed to her burnt into her life for ever, 
 and under it a strength which had never succumbed, a 
 dignity which had never blenched or quailed before the 
 sternest trials, surrendered at last. She had had the for- 
 titude of men, the fearlessness of soldiers, but they seemed 
 for the hour at least to die out in her now. 
 
 He looked at her, and he saw that the privations of her 
 prison, the scant food of many days, the high-strung ten- 
 sion, and the exhausting exertions of the long and breath- 
 less ride, had told heavily upon her; and he who would 
 have coined his very life to purchase aid for her, could do 
 no more for her than the flock of monacci that flew past 
 them with the breaking of the morning light. 
 
 He struck his heel into the sand with an agony of power- 
 less grief. 
 
 ' Great God ! you will perish here of hunger, of thirst, of 
 sunstroke, of misery ! We were better in a desert than 
 thus. I will go. I will bring help, if there be help 011 
 earth.' 
 
 He went down the low strip of sanded shore, under the 
 beetling shadow of the cliffs, northward to the fishing village 
 on the edge of the waters, with low rounded cabin-roofs 
 that were like clustered brown bee-hives beneath the giant 
 shadow of the rocks. The wall of stone that shelved so 
 high upward into the earth-hovering clouds screened him 
 from view. The hamlet was a mile or more along the coast; 
 she was alone, with the hound at her feet, the loaded 
 weapon in her hand, the glistening sea ebbing away into 
 the distance where her eyes were fixed. 
 
 She sat motionless, while the noise of his footfall on the 
 wet sands died gradually away. She listened to it till its 
 last faint sound. 
 
 ' Ah ! if only for his sake he could pass out from my life 
 for ever,' she Inurmured. * Either way I must sin to him ; 
 kill him by forsaking him, or betray him by wedding with 
 him. To go to his heart with such dishonour as that 
 untold ' 
 She could have wished that the stroke of the red sun, 
 
 Bvfl 
 
436 IDALIA. 
 
 rising stormily eastward, could reach and still lier life, that 
 the gray waves rolling slowly one on another to her feet 
 could corne to her and wash her down into their darkness. 
 For she felt tainted with an assassin's craven crime ; she 
 felt driven into a traitor's guilt of secrecy and shame. She 
 laughed a little, with the unutterable weariness of futile 
 pain, with the ironic temper which had so long made jest 
 of every suffering, that it scarce now spared her own. 
 
 * I now know what sort of despair fills monasteries and 
 makes saints !' she thought. ' How honourable to Deity, to 
 give him the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked existence !' 
 
 Twelve hours before she had said, and said truly, that no 
 Yassalis ever failed ; she had known that her life had been 
 great in much even while blamable, it might be, in more ; 
 she had spoken of a future, in which much of dominion, of 
 magnificence, of a pure and noble ambition would still linger 
 a future in the glow of eastern suns, in the lands of her 
 inheritance, in the sovereignty of a chieftainship, where 
 boundless evil remained to be conquered, and boundless 
 liberty to be enjoyed a future in consonance with the 
 hatred of all bondage and the genius to rule, that were 
 inborn in her. Yet now now, since she had stooped down 
 and seen the ruddy after-light upon the face of the slum- 
 bering Athenian an endless night seemed to have fallen 
 on her, and every dream of future and of freedom to be 
 mockery. 
 
 Through the silence of the quiet dawn she sat without 
 any movement; her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, 
 and its mouth toward the sand ; the half-dead horses had 
 staggered under the shadow of the cliff, and were feebly 
 trying to find food from the sea-salted grasses and drink 
 from the brackish pools ; there was no sound, except the 
 monotonous chiming of the Mediterranean at her feet, no 
 refuge in the hard and barren surface of the colossal sea- 
 wall. She had sent him from her, chiefly for his sake, that 
 he should not wait beside her till he was netted by the 
 Church's webs, or slaughtered by the monarchist's steel, and 
 an unutterable loneliness was about her ; there seemed no 
 mercy on the face of the waters, but only a cold and dreary 
 smile. Beyond them lay liberty, but she felt as though 
 even the force to arise and seek it had been killed in her. 
 
 Time passed in glow, sickening measure ; the sullen light 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 437 
 
 of a tempestuous morning burned higher in the heavens ; 
 full day was come ; the couchant hound awoke with menace 
 in his eyes ; across the sands at her feet a shadow fell ; 
 there was no sound, no word, but she felt the presence, as 
 men feel the gliding abhorred presence of a snake, the steal- 
 ing velvet-footed approach of a tiger, ere they know that 
 either are near. She started, and rose to her feet, and fell 
 slowly backward step by step, till she rested against the 
 wall of cliff, her gaze in the fascination of horror fastened 
 on Conrad Phaulcon as he stood, with the crimson sun in 
 his face, and the gray water lying in a lonely waste behind 
 him, his contadino's dress disordered, his forehead darkly 
 flushed, his mouth working as the words halted in their 
 furious utterance : 
 
 4 Ho, Miladi! others can ride a wild ride besides your 
 lover and you. I have been on your track all the night 
 through ; I have scotched you at last. "Where is he ? 
 where ? "Answer me, or ' 
 
 She threw up her hands with a grand gesture of silence, 
 that even in that moment cursed him. 
 
 * Hush ! Never dare breathe his name ! you, his robber, 
 his assassin.' 
 
 The Greek's lips paled nnd shook. 
 
 * B/obber ! Assassin ! Strange words to me/ 
 
 The fire of his wrath was bated an instant before the 
 resurrection of the crime he had deemed buried beneath the 
 solitary shadows of the Carpathian pine-woods, 
 
 ' "Would that they were strange to you ! Why did you 
 swear falsely ? I knew that coward sin had your hand in 
 it, and you swore by the only memory you have ever 
 reverenced that you were innocent. I believed you I was 
 fool enough for that ! because, though treachery was your 
 native air, you still at your worst had never- taken perjured 
 oath by that one name.' 
 
 She spoke slowly, wearily, with an unutterable reproach 
 and bitterness in the quiet words ; under them he was for 
 the moment cowed ; he shook slightly through all the 
 splendour of his limbs, and his teeth gnawed the gold curls 
 of his beard. 
 
 * It was for what you worship Liberty !' he stammered, 
 with a sullen shame. 
 
 'Liberty! No marvel that the peoples are in chains 
 
438 IDALIA. 
 
 if the apostles of their freedom think to serve them 
 thus!' 
 
 The words echoed over the stillness of the gray and tran- 
 quil seas with a profound and eternal pathos ; it was the 
 sigh of the Girondists, when through the death-mists of the 
 scaffold they saw the angel of freedom they had dreamed of 
 changed into a vampire of blood. 
 
 The man before her, the lover who had left her, were 
 alike forgot ; in that moment her hetirt was with the nations 
 of the earth, the blind who find but the blind to lead them 
 when they escape the iron heel to track them down ; the 
 vast sum of suffering and heart-sick humanity that has no 
 choice betwixt those who leave it to perish in its slough, or 
 beat it forth to rot on battle-fields, and those who fill its 
 parching throat with the fetid water of distorted truths, and 
 fool its patient ignorance with lying grossness, that by it 
 they may force upward into power. 
 
 First beyond all, grief for them was with her ; for those 
 innumerable, uncounted, uncompassionated millions who are 
 the prey alike of despot and of demagogue ; by each alike 
 condemned to be the long, unnoted, pitilessly consumed coil 
 of fuse, lit and burnt out, to bear the flame by which am- 
 bition may show red against the skies, or to carry incen- 
 diarism in a conqueror's van. This reigned with her beyond 
 all things ; had so reigned ever, and would reign until her 
 grave ; this impersonal love, this infinite pity for the con- 
 crete suffering, the weary destinies of the peoples, on whom 
 1 the burden of the unintelligible world ' is bound so hardly, 
 so unequally. 
 
 Phaulcon, stung, enraged, shame-maddened, laughed out 
 in defiance of the scorn that lashed him like a whip of 
 scorpions. 
 
 ' Pine acting you were always a fine actress ! but this 
 could come as nothing new to you, Miladi. You were sure 
 enough that my friends and 1 were in it ' 
 
 ' God forgive me ! I was sure until you &wore your in- 
 nocence ; and then though I might have known that truth 
 trying to pass your lips would become falsehood in such 
 tainted passage! I did you too much honour, and believed 
 you.' 
 
 JN"o virulence and no mvecrrve couid hnvt, ca^i on him so 
 much shame and so much scorn as these last two words. 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 439 
 
 He laughed coarsely and carelessly still ; where he felt 
 himself a coward there he became a bravo; with the rank- 
 ling wound of humiliation came the brutalised instinct of 
 insult. 
 
 6 Said you believed me rather ! The Countess Vassalis 
 was always famous for her finesses. Beyond a doubt she 
 had the tact to assume a fitting ignorance of anything that 
 might have compromised her, and, by all appearances, set 
 her desires on this colossal courier in a fashion that would 
 have made it awkward, had he chanced to know that she 
 was banded with his (what is the word ?) assassins?' 
 
 The blood rushed over the weary dignity of her face ; she 
 looked him full in the eyes till his own fell ; she deigned no 
 further answer. 
 
 1 Idalia !' he stammered more huskily and hurriedly ; he 
 had always, of later years, feared her even while he tortured 
 her. 
 
 ' You have lost all title to call me by that name. Put 
 land and sea between us henceforth for evermore. Never 
 let me look upon your face again never, never, never ! 
 
 Her voice losing its controlled coldness, broke from her 
 with an irresistible intensity, while as her arm pointed out- 
 ward to the waters, she shuddered from him as men shudder 
 from some loathed corruption, and banished him from every 
 soil she touched, from every air she breathed. Eor one 
 moment the force of the magnificent gesture, rather than of 
 the words of banishment, thrilled, awed, intimidated him ; 
 he shrank a little, and fell back involuntarily a step or two 
 upon the tawny sands. 
 
 1 Go, go !' she said, still with that movement of her hands 
 >?rhich thrust him from her with such superb command as 
 that wherewith the Scandinavian priest thrust back with his 
 golden crosier the blood-stained king who came with murder 
 on his soul. ' Gro ! Show the only remorse and reparation 
 that you can still reach, and let my life be free of you for 
 ever.' 
 
 Again it had its weight on him, that sentence of banish- 
 ment, grandly given, yet withal having in it a certain aching 
 regret as of one who once had loved him well, though he 
 had fallen ; as of one who owed him deadliest wrong and 
 abhorred in him deadliest guilt, yet who, for memories not 
 wholly joerished, could not yield him up unpitied to the 
 
440 ID ALIA.. 
 
 dominion of evil, to the wreck of body and soul. He remem- 
 bered all that this woman had endured through him ; he 
 remembered how by him shameful treachery had attainted 
 the glorious morning of her youth ; how by him shadows 
 that could never wholly pass from her had been flung across 
 the splendour of her womanhood. 
 
 i Idalia, hear me a second/ he said with a gentler accent 
 in the hesitation of the words. ' You think I bear you no 
 tenderness I do, by heaven I do, though often I come so 
 near to hate you. It' I had been at Antina, that Roman 
 brute should never have touched you. Now now and ever 
 since I first heard of you in his fangs, I have been seeking 
 you. And it is in peril of my life I stay an hour in the 
 kingdom ; twofold peril from the Bourbon's grip, and 
 from one surer still to know it and to strike.' 
 
 ' Surer ? One does not live.' 
 
 ' Yes, one does ; one that is ten thousand eyes and ears 
 and lips incorporate, one that is thrice ten thousand intel- 
 lects fused together, one that may strike me down from 
 behind, and throw me like a dead dog into a wayside ditch, 
 only for this, that I disobeyed and stayed in Naples to be 
 near your prison.' 
 
 She gave an involuntary movement, half shudder and 
 half sigh ; she knew that the ' many in one ' he spoke of, 
 the far-reaching invisible hand, the wide, unerring prevision 
 and condign vengeance that he dreaded, were those of the 
 political society to which he had been bound in the early 
 days of his manhood, when fretting poverty had goaded, 
 restless intrigue had allured, and a warped yet at the first 
 not ignoble love of freedom and of country had impelled 
 him to its far-spread nets. 
 
 * You say this ? So you also said, by all you held most 
 sacred, that you had no share in and no knowledge of this 
 attempted murder !' 
 
 She spoke slowly, and with icy dullness that cast back 
 on him a hundredfold more piercingly than by invective the 
 thousand times of falsehood when he had dealc treacherously 
 by her, and so forfeited all right, all power to force on her 
 that he now uttered truth. The last two words cut asunder, 
 and broke down as though they had never been, the softer, 
 better thought, that in the moment previous had made him 
 well-nigh forget all else except the peril of death, or of *. 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 441 
 
 life worse than death, to which she, wronged in so much ? 
 had but so late escaped by a hair's breadth. All his jealous 
 hate leaped up aflame. 
 
 In that instant while she spoke the fear had passed from 
 him, the knowledge of his power had risen again; jealousy, 
 and avarice, and passionate lust of tyranny were stronger- 
 lived in him than the sting of conscience, than the awaken- 
 ing of shame. He hated her now with a ruthless hate, in 
 which such wavering and selfish love as he had through all 
 borne her died. 
 
 I Perdition ! You balked me once in my night's work. 
 You will not make me miss him again. Wait an instant,' 
 he said through his teeth. ' There is too close a tie between 
 us for us to part in that fashion.' 
 
 ' To a tie that you have outraged you cannot appeal.' 
 6 We are too needful to each other to sever so ' 
 
 I 1 am needful to you, doubtless. But you will never 
 again make of me, or tool, or weapon, or guide, or gold- 
 mine for your evil service.' 
 
 'Ah! "Fine thing a woman's word. But a few days 
 since you told me, with imperial scorn, that you had some 
 reverence for your oath !' 
 
 ' I had ; how much, let all I have lost, and sinned, and 
 wrecked, and slain for you bear witness.' 
 
 1 And yet ! ' 
 
 * And "jet here in your hands I break it, and break 
 from it. I am absolved from my vows for ever. / swore 
 them to a patriot ; you I know not you> a brigand, an 
 assassin I ' 
 
 ' Is an apostate nobler than an assassin, then, that you 
 vaunt your treachery and upbraid me ? ' 
 
 ' Nobler in nothing ; but apostasy is your guilt, not 
 mine. To truth, to liberty, to the peoples, / am loyal ; you 
 have forsaken these forsaken ! were you ever true to 
 them ? did ever you know aught of them ? and leagued 
 yourself with fraud, with avarice, with slaughter.' 
 
 * Bitter words, madame.' 
 
 ' Bitter ? God pardon you ! if you heard but sheer and 
 simple justice of all your traitorous guilt to me, would not 
 the blackest words in language fail to yield your due ? 
 But let us part in silence ; I cannot give you over to 
 your proper fate, for the sake of the only life we ever 
 
442 IDALIA. 
 
 cherished in common. But tempt my vengeance my jus 
 tice no longer ; if you are wise, go go while I can still 
 let you go unharmed.' 
 
 ' I stayed, at peril of life, to succour you if I could, to 
 learn your fate, to find your enemies, and, in reward of that, 
 saw you ten hours ago lavishing love upon your foreign 
 favourite, on his heart, in his arms you ! ' 
 
 < Well ? " 
 
 She looked him full in the eyes still, with a deep and 
 steady gaze ; there was a firm lowering gloom in her own, 
 like the look which comes into the eyes of one who, brave 
 and resolved, still counts the danger that lies before him, 
 and finding it vast, yet resolves but the more fixedly to go 
 through it. 
 
 ' You did it belike to dupe him ? ' he pursued, with the 
 insolent riot of his silver-toned laughter, the louder because 
 he had no belief in his own translation of her acts. ' He 
 had a strong arm to force back your jail bars, and a wild 
 brain to be lulled with your charming. You played the 
 comedy with many who so well ? was it but acted once 
 again with him ? You have done scores of finer finesses, 
 and daintier and more dangerous things, in waking love 
 than so easy a victory as blinding and duping this Scottish 
 athlete, and you have fooled men for far less stakes than to 
 free yourself from the gripe of our holy Monsignore. Tell 
 me that was your project, and I will pardon it, though 
 you blackened my name so heavily in the little melodrama. 
 Was it ? Yes, or no ! ' 
 
 <No!' 
 
 The answer was brief and cold ; she knew that for it this 
 man was like enough to fire into her bosom, where he stood 
 before her, the weapon whose muzzle thrust itself out from 
 the folds of his striped canvas shirt. 
 
 [For once he kept himself cool ; she knew him then to be 
 at his worst ; his vehement, eloquent, womanish passion of 
 wrath was never so dangerous as when, contrary to all his 
 temperament, he held it in check and waited, softly, silently, 
 warily. 
 
 6 N"O ? ' he laughed in echo. ' What ! has Miladi Yassalis 
 gone scathless in her scorn for all these years to be charmed 
 by a rough-rider's mountain sinews and gigantic limbs at 
 last ! *^thos ! terrible Bathos ! And what will you do, 
 
BESIDE THE SEA. 443 
 
 madame, with your new lover ? have him killed to keep 
 the secret of your weakness, like that fair frail Jewess of 
 the French Regency of whom we read ? ' 
 
 Under the course infamy of the sneer her face never 
 flushed, her eyes never relaxed their sturdy challenge of 
 him ; but a hatred beyond all words gathered darkly in 
 her regard, a scorn beyond all words set on her colourless 
 lips. 
 
 ' What will you do with him ? ' he repeated scoffingly. 
 c How will you square his claims and mine ? If you should 
 get your liberty again, my Countess, your favourite courier 
 will slightly embarrass you ! ' 
 
 ' You possess no claims.' 
 
 1 Truly ? "We will see that. But first, what will you do 
 with him ? ' 
 
 4 What shall I do ? I will tell you. Give him my life, 
 and defy yours.' 
 
 4 Ah ! As his mistress or his wife ? ' 
 
 ' His wife.' 
 
 4 Indeed ! And make him a chieftain in Roumelia, I sup- 
 pose ? ' 
 
 'Why not?' 
 
 ' Why not, truly : He will be admirably fitted to play 
 the mountain king, the barbaric lord ; and you well, your 
 new fancy may endure six months. I will give it that 
 lease of life ; and then men easily disappear in those hill 
 fastnesses, where every creature is your humble vassal ! ' 
 
 Her face flushed with a dark tempestuous shadow as 
 she heard ; she gave one movement, rapid, passionate, in- 
 voluntary it was to raise her pistol for the signal shot. 
 The gesture was restrained ! she looked her antagonist 
 firmly in the eyes. 
 
 ' Cease this. There aio none here to be cheated with 
 your outrages, and to insult me will bring you no result. 
 Once for all, hear and understand ; this one man has be- 
 come dear to me, and what is more, is honoured by me, I 
 shall be true to him, and I shall defend him as he has given 
 truth and defence to me.' 
 
 The words were very passionless, but they were inflexible 
 as steel ; his face changed lividly as he heard. 
 
 Wait ! ' he said savagely, as he seized her wrist. * You 
 know the fate we give deserters ? ' 
 
444 ID ALT A. 
 
 She calmly loosed her arm from him. 
 
 * Death ? "Well, you can slay me if you will. It will 
 worthily close your course, But be sure of this you wil] 
 #ot scare me with the threat of it.' 
 
 1 Threat ! Miladi, you will find it more than threat.' 
 
 1 Too likely. But I shall be his before it becomes fact.' 
 
 ' What ! you love him well enough to risk death for him 
 such a death ! by night, by stealth, in your beauty, in 
 your youth ? ' 
 
 ' Else should I love little.' 
 
 The Greek ground hard his beautiful smiling teeth, and 
 looked at her in silence a moment. He had dealt with her 
 in many moods, but never yet in one where this passion 
 ruled her. He had never known its pulse beat in her ; he 
 was stunned and bewildered by his own rage ; he could 
 almost have found it in his soul to deal her there and then 
 the fate that she so tranquilly accepted and defied. 
 
 6 Wait then,' he said, while his words stole out one by 
 one, ferocious, but yet slow and chill as ice. i You do not 
 fear it for yourself do you for him ? 5 
 
 She did not answer ; he saw a slight shiver pass over 
 her ; he had found the one weak link through which to pierce 
 the armour of her proud and resolute strength. 
 
 4 You do ? That is well. Then listen to one warning : 
 the first night this man sleeps in your arms shall be his 
 last. Wed him and kill him if you like ! ' 
 
 CHAPTEK XXX. 
 
 'THE SERPENT'S TOICE LESS SUBTIL THAT* *mi KTSS.' 
 
 THE fishing hamlet lay under the shadow of a great sea- 
 worn, red-brown, sullen cliff, that had the mists of the dawn 
 still on its rugged forehead, and the foam of the uprising- 
 tide now angrily splashing its feet ; a mighty fortress of 
 rock, that would break from its gloom to a wonderful beauty 
 Avhen the sun should come round to the west, and the glory 
 spread over the waters. There were but four or five cabins, 
 dropped inamong theloose piles of stones and the pale plumes 
 of the sand grasses ; huts low and nestled, and hidden like 
 the nests on northern beaches of the sea-hovering tern. And 
 these, few as they were, were deserted ; the men had been 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 445 
 
 out two days and two nights with their boats and their nets 
 out far beyond where craggy Ischialay, and their woman- 
 kind were alone left, with children like Murillo's beggars, 
 wild haired and ruddy cheeked, and with naked limbs of a 
 marvellous mould and grace, who lived all day long waist- 
 deep in water, and slept all night long on a wet soil, and not 
 seldom crushed the seaweed between their bright hard teeth 
 in the sheer longing of famine, and yet who, with all that, 
 might have thanked God, had they known it, that they were 
 born by the water's width and to the water's liberty, instead 
 of in the stifling agony of cities, where human lives breathe 
 their first and their last, never having known what one 
 breath of ocean wind blows like, or what the limitless delight 
 of a horizon line can mean. The women were line animals 
 and nothing more. Those who were young were splendidly 
 coloured and built ; those who were past youth were sere, 
 and yellow, and scaly as the fish they smoked and hung to 
 the beams of their huts for the winter's 'fare. They said 
 little, comprehended less. The shine of silver made their 
 eyes glisten, but they could give nothing in return for it. Of 
 the boats there was not one left ; not the craziest craft that 
 ever was hauled high upon a beach to be broken up into fire 
 wood ; nor of the boys did one remain of years enough to 
 handle a rope or hold a tiller. Here, on this barren shore, 
 there was no help ; the great freedom of the sea stretched 
 there as though in so much mockery ; it would yield nothing 
 save a grave. 
 
 He stood on the narrow strip of yellow sand, with the 
 ripple of the high tide rolling upward and over his feet, and 
 looked over the sweet, fresh tumultuous vastness of the 
 waters as men, when camels and mules, and even the hardy 
 sons of the soil, have perished one by one in their rear, look 
 over the stretch of the desert where no aid is to be called, 
 no change can come, except the aid and the change of the 
 death that shall leave their flesh to the vulture, their bones 
 to the bleach of the noon. 
 
 All he had done had been in vain. 
 
 Reaching the sea, they were as far from liberty as wnen 
 the monastery's doors had closed them in; unless some vessel 
 could be chartered to bear westward before the day should 
 be at its meridian, they must turn back and share the wolf's 
 lair, the hare's terror, the stag's life of torture, when on every 
 
44& IDALIA. 
 
 breeze may come the note of chase, when every curling moss 
 nnd broken leaf may bear a mark to bring the hunter's down. 
 An intense agony came on him as his eyes looked blindly 
 out at the gray waste, with the sun's first rays reflected ip. 
 a broad crimson trail across its gloom. The desire of his 
 heart was come to him, and with it had come also to him an 
 exceeding bitterness passing any that his life had known. 
 That which he had coveted with so passionate a longing 
 was granted him, and it brought with it a terrible penalty. 
 The weight of a sickly dread, never before then known to 
 the fearlessness of his nature, oppressed him ; a dread that 
 had its root less in her physical- danger tban in the darkness 
 that shrouded all knowledge of her real fate, all knowledge 
 of her past and of her future. 
 
 And even for her mere bodily peril, her peril from the 
 chains and the cells of the government, lie could do nothing ; 
 he could defend her to his last breath with such strength 
 as one man could bring against thousands that was ali. 
 There was not a sail in sight, as far as his eyes conld reach 
 over the water-line ; it might be two or three nights more yet, 
 as the women told him, before the fishing-boats would come 
 in ; to leave her for the length of time needful to traverse 
 the coast in search of some other sea-side hamlet was im- 
 possible ; he saw no course but to retrace his steps to 
 her, and leave the choice of their retreat with her. These 
 people were miserably poor, and would do what was asked 
 of them for the sake of the glitter of gold ; they were 
 bold, too, and willing to offer such shelter as their miserable 
 cabins could ; at the worst, it was possible that they might 
 rest undiscovered under the refuge of these lonely rocks 
 until such time as the fishing fleet, returning, should give 
 them means to sail westward, or send a vessel with orders 
 to the yacht. 
 
 He stood there some moments, looking seaward from the 
 beach, his head sunk, his thougts very weary ; he was con- 
 demned to the torture of inaction, the deadliest trial that 
 can be fastened on high courage and on eager energies. 
 He turned swiftly as he heard steps lightly passing along 
 the pile of rough loose stones that made a sort of stairway 
 from the high ground, down between two steep and leaning 
 sides of rock ; he looked up in anxious hope of welcoming 
 some batman who could help him to a vessel. As ho did 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 447 
 
 so, the morning sun, shining from the east, that faced him 
 as he turned, fell full upon his head and throat, and on his 
 tall athletic limbs, loosely clad in the linen folds of the fish- 
 ing-dress. Standing thus, catching the brightest glisten of 
 the morning beams, the barcarole dress served little to dis- 
 guise him ; and through the mist- wreaths that still hovered 
 round all the upper border of the shore his eyes, ere escape 
 or avoidance was possible, met those of the man above upon 
 the broken tiers of cliff. 
 
 They were the keen blue serene eyes of Victor Yane. 
 
 For a moment they looked in silence at each other, met 
 thus, face to face, in the coolness of the young day, in the 
 solitude of the unfrequented shore. On the one side amaze- 
 ment was sincere ; on the other, it was to perfection coun- 
 terfeited. Then with an easy supple grace, the man, in 
 whom Erceldoune's instinct felt a foe, swung himself down- 
 ward from ledge to ledge, and dropped upon the sands 
 beside him, with the common courtesies of a carelessly as- 
 tonished and complimentary greeting. 
 
 ' I came to bathe ; I am staying at a villeggiatura not far 
 from this,' he said, as his words of welcome closed. ' It is 
 a wild shore here, and unutterably lonely. You are yacht- 
 ing, I suppose ? ' 
 
 'No.' 
 
 Erceldoune thought nothing of what was asked him, of 
 what he answered ; he thought of her alone. This man 
 was her friend, her guest, her associate. Could he be 
 trusted with her secret ? Could he be trusted to assist 
 her flight ? And, if not trusted with it, could he be held 
 back from the knowledge of it ? 
 
 'Not yachting ? ' pursued Vane, carelessly still. ' I 
 thought that fisher-costume was surely a sailor's dress. May 
 I ask what brings you, then, to this world-forgotten 
 nook ? ' 
 
 * I came to get a boat, and a boat's crew if I could.' 
 
 4 Ah, you have lost your way ? There is a dangerous 
 landslip hard by.' 
 
 Erceldoune crushed his heel down into the wet loose 
 sand ; a gesture that was not lost on his companion. 
 
 * I know the coast well. I merely need a boat j of what 
 kind matters little. Can you help me ? ' 
 
 'I grieve to say no. My friend's residence is some 
 
44 8 IDALIA. 
 
 from here ; and, besides, they have not even a pleasure skiff; 
 they care nothing for the water. But you would not put 
 out to the open sea in a mere boat ? ' 
 
 ' "Why so ? ' 
 
 ' "Why ! Because I fancy no man would who was not 
 weary of his life, or ' 
 
 * I am not weary of mine.' 
 
 * Pardon me, I was going to end my sentence with, or 
 one whose life was menaced on the land.' 
 
 He spoke the last words gravely, gently, meaningly, with 
 an emphasis that left no doubt of their personal application. 
 Erceldoune's forehead flushed with a hot dark rush of 
 blood ; a tempestuous shadow came in his eyes ; he turned 
 abruptly. 
 
 ' Explain that phrase.' 
 
 * Nay ; translate it yourself, if you will.' 
 
 'Not I. lam in no mood for enigmas, and have no 
 time for them. You had your meaning ; out with it ! ' 
 
 He spoke between his clenched teeth ; a fiery misery 
 possessed him, and a great longing to wring the truth out 
 of this man who cross-questioned him, if he wrung it by 
 force with a hand on his throat and a heel on his chest. 
 
 Victor Yane looked him steadily in the eyes ; a serious, 
 compassionate, candid gaze, that silently rebuked his pas- 
 sions and his instinct of antagonism. 
 
 6 1 am sorry you trust me so little/ he said briefly. 
 
 Ornamented protests would have forewarned and fore- 
 armed his listener, whom the simplicity and manliness of 
 the reply put off his guard ; they made the loyal generous 
 nature that they dealt with repent as of some craven sin 
 of false suspicion ; rebuke itself as for some ignominy of 
 cowardly injustice. Moreover, Erceldoune saw that he 
 knew much ; how much it was best to learn at once, Jet the 
 learning cost what it should. 
 
 ' He has eaten at her board ; he has enrolled himself 
 her friend ; he cannot turn traitor to her ; he cannot play 
 false to a woman,' his thoughts ran swiftly, in the tumult 
 of a thousand emotions. It seemed to him so vile a thing, 
 that to suspect even his rival of it looked base to him. 
 
 ' Let us waste no words,' he said rapidly, while he stood 
 facing the new-comer with the challenge of his gallant eyes 
 testing the truth of those which met them. ' Time is life 
 
THE SERPENT'S VOICE. 449 
 
 to me, and more than life. You guess rightly so far. An- 
 swer me two things. "What do you know ? and why should 
 you be trusted?' 
 
 * The latter question, I imagine, one gentleman should 
 scarcely put to another.' 
 
 ' That may be. I am in no temper for these subtleties, 
 I know nothing of you except through rumour. Such 
 rumour would not incline me to place confidence in you. 
 You used strange language ; you seem aware of my present 
 peril. Simply say what it is you know.' 
 
 Victor Vane, with a dignity that had in it the com- 
 passionate forbearance of one who respects and pities an- 
 other whose insolence he can afford to pass over and ex- 
 tenuate, seated himself on the lowest stair of rock, and 
 answered, without hesitation, in a grave and regretful 
 accent : 
 
 4 Sir, I forgive your innuendo on myself, since the ex- 
 tremity of your peril may serve to excuse it ; and I believe 
 that this peril has fallen on you through a rashly noble and 
 generous action. We have met here singularly enough. I 
 do not know positively anything of your actions or posi- 
 tion ; but I should be half a fool did I not divine much of 
 both. Briefly, we are both acquainted with a fair revolu- 
 tionist, who has been made a prisoner of the royal execu- 
 tive. I heard, late last night, that she had been rescued 
 from her captivity ; rescued by a man in a fisher dress, who 
 displayed the most reckless chivalry in her defence, and 
 even implicated himself so deeply as to use violence to 
 Giulio Villaflor, whereby Monsignore lies now in danger at 
 his Cistercian monastery. I heard this ; such news soon 
 spreads, specially to Court and Church ; and I heard also 
 that both soldiers and sbirri are on the track of the fugi- 
 tives, who are known to have made their way seaward. 
 Now can you wonder that it needs no great exercise of 
 intelligence to recognise in you the barcarole who despoiled 
 Church and State of their captive, and to conclude that 
 the vessel you stand in need of is to be employed in the 
 service of Miladi Idalia, for whom, living or dead, botb 
 Church and State would give as weighty a reward as the 
 full coffers of the one and the lean treasures of the other 
 could afford to yield ? Scant penetration is requisite for 
 such a discovery ; every sailor on the coast will make it 
 
45 ID ALIA. 
 
 with me in a few hours' time. It is not a little thing to 
 free a political prisoner, and to leave a mighty prelate half 
 dead among his own monks. ' 
 
 He spoke perfectly quietly, his eyes, with an unusual 
 melancholy, looking straight and calm into the eyes of the 
 man before him ; eyes that said without words, ' You see, 
 she and you are in my power. One word from me, and 
 both are lost.' 
 
 Erceldoune gazed at him, answering nothing; his chest 
 and sides heaved like those of some magnificent forest 
 animal caught in the toils of the trapper. He cared no- 
 thing for his own life ; he would have sold it dearly, con- 
 tent enough if he died worthily ; but she for her he had 
 no strength; for her he had no courage; for her he could 
 sue what he would never for himself have sought ; for her 
 the grave was horrible to him, and had its sickliest terrot. 
 
 To parry facts with lies, to turn aside discovery with 
 subtle feints, was not in him ; to deny that which he knew 
 to be a truth never even passed his thoughts. This was 
 another calamity, another danger the darkest, perhaps, 
 that could have come on them ; but his instinct was to 
 brave and meet it, not to slink from it under a poltroon's 
 mask of falsehood. He went with a single step close up 
 to his companion's side, and stood above him. 
 
 ' Grant your conclusions right what then ? ' 
 
 ' That is rather for you to answer. Tour future is a very 
 hazardous one.' 
 
 ' I did not speak of my future, but of your course. "What 
 will it be ? ' 
 
 ' Do you insinuate that I should betray you ? ' 
 
 1 1 do not insinuate ; I ask. If the world may be be- 
 lieved, you have not been alway noted for your fealty.' 
 
 ' Coarse language, and not overwise.' 
 
 6 1 cannot stop to refine, nor yet, perhaps, to reason. Tell 
 me how I am to deal with you. As friend or foe ? ' 
 
 ' Sir, that is scarcely the way to learn. Diplomacy would 
 not dictate such rough-and-ready questions.' 
 
 ' Possibly. But I am no diplomatist.' 
 
 ' I imagine not, No one would suspect you of it.' 
 
 1 Spare your satire. Give me a plain answer.' 
 
 1 Not a popular thing commonly.' 
 
 Erceldoune shook with rage. This play of words was to 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 451 
 
 him in his extremity as the tickle of the whip's light lash is 
 to the caged tiger in its wrath. He flung himself away 
 with an unconscious violence. 
 
 1 Do your worst, if you choose to do it. Go and turn 
 traitor against the woman at whose table you sat, and un- 
 der whose roof you were welcome ! Adventurers fitly end 
 in renegades.' 
 
 As he turned his back on the other, and moved across 
 the sand to retrace his steps to her, Yane rose and silently 
 followed him, and touched his arm with the slight velvety 
 touch of a woman. 
 
 c Wait. You mistake.' 
 
 Erceldoune paused, and looked him full in the face. 
 
 ' Show my error, and I will confess it.' 
 
 Yane smiled a little in compassion. This nature so 
 warm, so bold, so frank, so free from every suspicion, so 
 willing to avoid every injustice seemed to him so pitiable 
 in its simplicity ; its naked strength, that could so easily be 
 pierced; its unselfish impulses, that could so easily be 
 duped ; its creed of truth, that was followed so blindly and 
 so recklessly. 
 
 6 You wrong me,' he said, with that tranquil dignity 
 which had again replaced the ironic frivolity of his usual man- 
 ner, ' wrong me greatly. Think but a moment, and you 
 will yourself see how. The cause for which Madame de 
 Yassalis has been arraigned is mine. Would it be likely 
 that I should find favour with Court or Church, even were 
 I base enough to seek it ? She is the life, the soul, the inspira- 
 tion, often the treasury, of our projects, the Manon Roland 
 of our Girondists. Is it not palpable that what strikes at 
 her must strike at us ? Besides, leaving every such reason 
 aside, can you believe that, as a guest, I should harm my 
 hostess, as a man, betray a woman ? Eather do me some 
 measure of justice, Believe, at least, that I can have some 
 admiration of your fearless chivalry, some sympathy for 
 your generous daring ; quixotic I may deem it, but reve- 
 rence it I must.' 
 
 Erceldoune heard him, swayed against his judgment, in- 
 fluenced against his instincts. The tone of the appeal 
 touched that knightly temper of trust and of liberality that 
 was always dominant in him ; he hated this man ; but to 
 let his hate prejudice him to injustice seemed very vile in 
 
 2 a 2 
 
45- ID ALIA. 
 
 his sight ; he thought that he owed a wider measure of 
 justice, a more generous extension of tolerance, to an enemy 
 than a friend ; where his impulses set him against, there ho 
 felt that his honour should more closely strive for fairnesa 
 to a foe : a code that had in its results, perchance, a folly 
 unutterable, yet had in its root a magnanimity and a 
 majesty scarce less great, and such as men would do well to 
 strive after in giving judgment. 
 
 ' Trusted, even a scoundrel will quit his baseness. And, 
 if he has ever loved her, he can hardly be a traitor to her,' 
 his thoughts ran as he paused there, and heard the measured 
 sweetness of his rival's voice. 
 
 And on those thoughts he spoke, making the error that 
 costs so many dear ; the error of gauging another character 
 by the measure of his own. 
 
 ' If I wronged you, I ask your pardon. Tour jests fell 
 sharply on a heart so sore as mine. Tou have our lives in 
 your power ; for her sake, hold them sacredly. All the help 
 you can give us is silence. I thank you for your promise 
 of that. Earewell ! And forget iny words if they did you 
 an injury. They were spoken in passion and haste/ 
 
 For the moment the words touched his hearer ; awoke 
 something of shame, something of admiration, something of 
 compassion, that had no scorn in it, but a dim instinct of 
 honour for the noble madness that believed in him, for this 
 self-rebuke that was spoken so generously, content to take 
 blame rather than to hold to an unjustified suspicion. All 
 the cruelty of jealousy, all the pitilessness of hatred, all the 
 unmerciful heartlessness of craft were in him against the 
 man whom he instinctively knew that the woman he 
 coveted loved. Yet they were for an instant stilled under 
 the vague emotion that woke in him that emotion of in- 
 voluntary homage which even the shallowest and the basest 
 natures will at times yield reluctantly to the greatness of a 
 brave sincerity. But it was very fleeting with him ; too 
 fleeting to change the hard set purpose that had possessed 
 him from the moment when his knowledge of his rival's 
 temper had made him at once divine who had been the 
 deliverer of their mistress, and had sent him seaward to 
 trust to hazard for the accident that should bring him 
 across the fugitives* path. 
 
 He stretched his hand out. 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 453 
 
 1 That was very nobly said.' And in those words he 
 spoke but what he truly thought. ' Sir Fulke, we may 
 eurely be friends ? ' 
 Erceldoune looked steadily at him, anddidnot take his hand. 
 
 * Pardon me my friendships are few, and I add to them 
 rarely. Aid her, and no friend shall be close to me as you.' 
 
 ' You speak strongly. Is Madame de Vassalis so dear to 
 you, then? ' 
 
 ' Judge by the risk I have run for her.' 
 
 ' True ! You are not the first ' 
 
 'The first for what?' 
 
 ' Well the first who thought his life well lost for her. 
 And forgive me the question, I have known her so long 
 what does she say to you for it ? ' 
 
 ' I fail to apprehend you.' 
 
 ' You do ? I mean, what reward does that fairest and 
 most fatal of sorceresses promise you if ever you escape the 
 dangers you have incurred for the sake of her eloquent eyes ? ' 
 
 He saw Erceldoune' s grasp tighten on the hilt of the 
 weapon thrust in his sash, and his teeth close on his lips 
 under his beard. 
 
 ' Her insults are mine,' he said curtly. ' By what right 
 do you use such a tone ? 
 
 '"By what right do you constitute yourself her champion? 
 It will be a thankless office.' 
 
 ' By the right of a man to defend his wife's honour.' 
 
 In the deep shadow of the overhanging cliff he did not 
 see the ashen colour to which the fairness of his listener's 
 face faded ; in the tumult of his own thoughts and passions 
 he did not hear the quick sharp catch of his companion's 
 breath. The tranquil gaze bent on him lightened an instant 
 with a tiger's hunger to kill ; the look soon passed ; Vane 
 laughed a little, very softly, very slightly. 
 
 ' Ah ! Miladi must think her jeopardy very imminent. 
 She never proffered so heavy a bribe before.' 
 
 Erceldoune's hands fell on his shoulders, swaying him 
 heavily to and fro. 
 
 ' What do you dare to mean by that ? ' 
 
 ' Simply what I say. If she bribes so high, she must 
 think her peril equal.' 
 
 * Why ? ' Am I so loathsome ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly not. You are a magnificent man ; just the 
 man for a lover. But marriage ' 
 
454 IDALIA. 
 
 6 Finish your sentence. Marriage ' 
 c May be a word on her lips, but will never be a chain 
 upon her liberties.' 
 ' You dare to mean ' 
 
 * Release. me, and I will tell you what I mean. I do not 
 speak for any threats of force.' 
 
 Erceldoune slowly let go his hold, and stood before him 
 with the morning sun-gleam on his face that was stormily 
 flushed, and wore the look on it that comes in a dog's 
 steady gaze when a leash holds him back from his antagonist. 
 His rival's eyes met his serenely ; in the calm transparent 
 depths there was an unspoken pity that made his blood glow 
 like lava. 
 
 * In a word I mean this. She has bought you with siren 
 words ; do you dream how many she has bought likewise 
 before you, and destroyed ? ' 
 
 ' I know that no man living shall insult her name to me 
 unpunished.' 
 
 ' Ah ! you will stop my lips with a blow ? You can, if 
 you choose ; you have ten times my strength ; but honour- 
 able women do not need such tragical defence. And let me 
 ask you one thing only before you refuse to hear me.' 
 
 ' Ask it.' 
 
 ' "Who fired at you in the Carpathians ? ' 
 
 In the warm glow of the summer dawn Erceldoune' s 
 limbs grew chilly with a sudden sickly cold. He did not 
 answer. He divined the drift of the inquiry ; and, knowing 
 what he now knew of her recognition of his assassin, he 
 tould not bring his voice to speak of it. 
 
 ( You do not know ! You should do so. Did you ever 
 ask this woman who is to be your wife ? ' 
 
 His chest heaved heavily with hard-drawn breaths ; his 
 memories were with the evening just passed by, when the 
 sunset had shed its ruddy hues on the face of the slumbering 
 Greek, and she had bid him spare that worthless life with 
 a passionate force of supplication to which she had never 
 stooped when her own existence had been in jeopardy. But 
 he was too loyal to her for his answer not to rise hot and 
 instant to his lips. 
 
 ' Ask her ? Would I do her so much outrage ? * 
 
 ' Yet no one could tell you so well.' 
 
 ' "What ! you are vile enough to say ' 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 455 
 
 * The villany is not mine ! I say that the Countess Yas 
 sails can tell you better who is the man that sought to 
 take your life than can any one else in Europe.' 
 
 Erceldoune heard in silence ; he felt giddy, blind, heart- 
 sick ; his knowledge of her association with the G-reek was 
 lying like a dead weight on the indignant scorn with which 
 he would, without it, have flung back the insult offered her ; 
 the remembrance was upon him of her intercession that had 
 screened the criminal from justice, of her conjuration that 
 had interposed between the guilty and his retribution, of 
 her agony of shame and of terror that had broken and bent 
 her haughty nature like a reed. 
 
 ' You lie,' he said savagely, unwitting what he did say, 
 seeking only to defend her at all hazards ; ' she never knew ; 
 he is her foe not less than mine.' 
 
 * Ah ! she has spoken of him, then ? ' 
 i What if she have?' 
 
 * Nothing. Only she is still less scrupulous than I ima- 
 gined. She said he was her foe, did she ? What other 
 things did she say of him ? ' 
 
 Erceldoune's hand seized him by the linen of his vest, 
 and shook him. as a strong grasp will shake the slender stem 
 of a larch-tree. His mouth was parched ; his words came 
 slowly and incoherently : 
 
 ' You will make a brute of me ! You have some hellish 
 meaning hidden speak it out, if you have a man's heart in 
 you. What would you dare bring against her? ' 
 
 Victor Vane freed himself with difficulty, and moved 
 slightly aside ; but there was no anger in the serenity of 
 his voice, only some pity and much patience. 
 
 c I have nothing hidden ; if you hear me, you will know 
 as much as I know. I see your error ; many have made it. 
 You have thought in such divinity of form divinity of soul 
 must dwell. Scores have made your mistake, and died for 
 it as you may before the game is out. Miladi has had 
 many lovers, and dead men tell no tales.' 
 
 He paused ; his rival's hand was on his mouth, and the 
 steel tube of a pistol was pressed against his forehead. 
 
 1 Another syllable like that, and, by heaven ! I will shoot 
 you with the lie on your lips.' 
 
 Courage had never been lacking in him ; his eyes looked 
 up none the less tranquilly into the dark, flushed, haggard 
 
456 IDALIA. 
 
 face above him, though the cold ring of the weapon pressed 
 its mark on his skin. 
 
 ' Of course you can if you choose. I am unarmed. You 
 will oblige your sovereign mistress, too. I know many of 
 her secrets.' 
 
 Erceldouue's arm fell to his side ; he shivered througli 
 all his frame ; he could not use violence to a man without 
 the power to return it; he could not force to silence words 
 which, if he refused to hear them, he would seem to know 
 were true in all their shame. He dropped the pistol down 
 on the sands between them, and crossed his arms on his 
 chest. 
 
 ' Say your worst. Our reckoning shall come later.' 
 
 ' Well my worst is the truth. You love this woman ; 
 but you are not in her confidence ; you never will be.' 
 
 He saw a quiver of pain break the wrath on his listener's 
 face, and he saw that the bolt had struck home. 
 
 ' You believe everything she tells you ? I never found the 
 man who did not credit what she chose to make him. You 
 worship her, but you worship your own ideal in her. I 
 have seen scores do that. I doubt if a man can look long 
 at her, and see clearly, unless he has known her well, and 
 comes forewarned to her as I came. Well, you have 
 thought her a mistress for "Shakespeare's self; " you have 
 seen her in great dangers ; you have imagined her foully 
 wronged ; you have cast away all your heart on her, and 
 now are casting your life away after it. And you do all 
 this without ever having asked yourself and the world what 
 a woman must be who, titled, is yet out of society ; who, 
 young, yet recklessly defies all custom ; who, rich, can 
 summon round her none but men, and those men adventu- 
 rers or conspirators ; who shelters your assassin in her 
 Turkish gardens, yet affects all ignorance of his identity or 
 Y icinage ; and who, driven at last to speak of him, tells you 
 he is her foe, yet omits altogether to explain why, if so, she 
 has so long shielded him from your discovery and the law's 
 justice. You love, and therefore you are blind. Yet is it 
 possible that even the blindness of passion can be so utterly 
 dark that you have never remembered all these things ? ' 
 
 The black blood gathered in his listener's face ; he kept 
 his passions down, because, for her sake, he held it best to 
 hear all her calumniator would bring against her, but they 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 457 
 
 well-nigh mastered him, rising the darker and the stronger 
 for the keen pang of truth that every shaft of the abhorred 
 words stung him with truth that she had herself placed it 
 beyond his power to refute. 
 
 ' Go on,' he said in his teeth. ' You called yourself her 
 friend, I think ? ' 
 
 The rebuke was bitter, yet it did not move the man it 
 lashed. 
 
 * Scarcely so much/ he returned quietly. ' Her acquaint- 
 ance indeed, her associate in not a few political matters 
 but scarcely her friend. Miladi's friend ships are too perilous. 
 Look you ; I had a friend once, an Austrian, though I bear 
 Austria no love. We had been lads together in Venetia, 
 and the war-lusts failed to divide us. 1 think he was the 
 brightest and the bravest nature I have ever known. Well, 
 in an evil hour he fell, as you have done, under the eyes of 
 Idalia. He had a military secret in his keeping ; a secret, 
 granted, that was of import to Italy, so perhaps you will 
 deem what she did was justified for Italy's sake. I might 
 have done, had I not known him from his boyhood ; I might 
 have done; who touches politics fast grows a knave. 
 Simply, she made him worship her, as she makes you ; 
 sunned him in her smiles, leant her lips on his, let him lie 
 in Eden for a while, till sense and judgment were both 
 gone as yours are gone. Then, while she promised him 
 her beauty as its price, she stole bis secret from him 
 bought it with those caresses you believe are only yours ; 
 and, when his honour was yielded up to her, turned him 
 adrift with a laugh at his weakness. Ah ! that is Miladi ! 
 So, I saw him shot one sunny summer dawn ; with the balls 
 in his throat, fired by a volley of his own cuirassiers. Po- 
 litically, we owed her much ; personally, I never in my 
 soul could trust the woman who betrayed Hugo.' 
 
 Erceldoune shook through all his limbs; the spasm not 
 alone of rage, but of a more cruel emotion. The tale had 
 too close a likeness with her own self-accusing confession, 
 her own keenness of remorse, not to bear a terrible burden, 
 of possibility with it a hideous surface of truth which 
 made it impossible it should be cast away as calumny. Yet 
 through the dizzy misery that came upon him with the 
 words he heard he grasped one thought still foremost oi 
 all to defend her, and to cast back every aspersion thrown 
 
45$ IDALIA. 
 
 on her, as though no doubt could ever rest with him, as 
 though she bad never bid him believe the worst of her that 
 the world could tell. 
 
 ' Is that all you stayed me to tell ? ' he said briefly. 
 ' It was not worth your while. I have no need for libels.' 
 
 ' It is not all. I know well that my words are wasted, 
 and that you think me a slanderer for them : that is a matter 
 of course. Hugo thought me the same when I told him 
 what the tenderness of his imperial mistress would prove 
 worth. I never knew any man saved whom her smile once 
 had doomed. I will not strain your patience longer; let 
 as keep close to one fact the attempt upon your life. You 
 deny the association of Idalia with that crime ? ' 
 
 * I deny it utterly.' 
 
 His voice had a harsh vibration in it like the tone of one 
 who speaks under unbearable physical suffering. He denied 
 it in her name ; but while he did so there ate like fire into 
 him the remembrance of that shame, that horror, that re- 
 morse, that passion, with which she had looked upon the 
 Greek, and held him from his vengeance. With his last 
 breath he would have declared her guiltless ; with his last 
 thought held her so ; yet the shadow of guilt fell on her, 
 and he could not drive from her the taint and the tarnish 
 of its reproach. 
 
 'You do? She is indebted for your chivalry,' resumed 
 the slow, sweet voice of his companion. ' I see how little 
 you must ever have heard of the finest mistress of intrigues 
 that Europe holds, to yield it so unhesitatingly. Now bear 
 with me a moment while I ask you why you are so certain 
 that she had no share in the attack made on you ? ' 
 
 ' Ask yourself. You know her.' 
 
 * And you mean that none who do can doubt her being 
 the proudest and the purest, as well as the fairest among 
 women ? Ah, but then I have passed by that stage ; / knew 
 her by repute long before I ever saw her face ! Your rea- 
 sons, then, for thinking her both innocent and ignorant of 
 your attempted assassination are these : that she was on 
 the spot at the time you were shot down ; that she saved 
 your life, and concealed the action even from yourself, 
 allowing it to be believed that Moldavian herdsmen rescued 
 you ; that you chased the leader of the band as far as the 
 gardens of her villa at Constantinople, and there lost sight 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 459 
 
 of him, though the walls of the garden were so disposed 
 that he could only have been concealed within them, if not 
 in the house itself; that she invited you to spend many 
 hours alone with her in the eastern hermitage, and so spent 
 them that she found little difficulty in making you believe 
 her all she would ; that she then sought to throw you off 
 by leaving you abruptly without any clue to her move- 
 ments ; and that when you persisted, against her wish, in 
 seeking her, you found her, first the associate, and a little 
 later the fellow-prisoner with the men of that very 
 party of extreme liberalists to whom you have always at- 
 tributed the murderous onslaught made on you. These 
 are your reasons for holding her innocent of all treason to 
 you ; they would not be very weighty evidences in law and 
 in logic.' 
 
 As the chain of circumstances uncoiled link by link in 
 the terse unadorned words, it seemed to tighten in bands 
 of iron about the heart of the man who trusted not less 
 than he loved her. His face changed terribly as all the 
 force of meaning and of circumstances arrayed itself against 
 her, and the vague doubts, that he had strangled in their 
 birth as blasphemies against her, stood out in unveiled 
 language. A dogged, savage, sullen darkness lowered on 
 his features ; it had never been on them before then ; it 
 was a ferocity wholly akin to his nature, hardened and im- 
 bittered by the knowledge of his own powerlessness to repel 
 or to refute the evidence arraigned. They were but facts 
 which were quoted facts not even Distorted in the telling; 
 the inference drawn from theni was the inevitable one, how- 
 ever his loyalty to her disowned it. He felt driven to bay ; 
 he was fettered to inaction by the knowledge that on him 
 alone her safety hung ; he was weighted to silence by the 
 memories which thronged on him of her own acts and 
 words ; of that poignant remorse which had sunk so deeply 
 into her nature, of that self-condemnation which had so 
 unsparingly condemned her. Tet amid all he never hesi- 
 tated in her defence, and his eyes fastened on her accuser 
 with a steady unyielding gaze. 
 
 ' I am no casuist and no rhetorician,' he said in his teeth. 
 : You are both. Once for all no more words. If you have 
 been her friend, you are a traitor ; if you have been her 
 foe, you are a slanderer. Either way, one word more, and 
 I will choke you like a dog.' 
 
460 ID ALIA. 
 
 * An unworthy and a coarse threat. What falsehood have 
 I told you yet ? I named but facts.' 
 
 ' Your outline might be fact. It was your colour was the 
 lie.' 
 
 * I think not. I can prove to you that your mistress 
 was in the secret of your assassins.' 
 
 ' And your motive in that ? ' 
 
 The lion-like eyes of Erceldoune literally blazed their 
 fire into those that met them with unchanged serenity. 
 There were volumes in the three words ; all of distrust, 
 disbelief, hatred, and scorn, that his heart held for the one 
 who had turned counsellor to him. Their sting pierced 
 deep ; but the wound of it was covered. 
 
 * My motive is this. A party with which I was to a 
 great extent associated, yet from whose measures I very 
 often dissented, implicated me by their extreme opinions in 
 many courses that I utterly disapproved, and implicated my 
 name still oftener unknown to me. I am entirely against 
 all violence and all fraud not from virtue I do not affect 
 virtue but from common sense. Politically, much is per- 
 missible ' 
 
 ' I am not inclined to hear your creed. I make no doubt 
 that it is an elastic one. Your motive ? ' 
 
 ' You pass it in your haste. I endeavour to explain it. 
 I became entangled in earliest youth with men whose asso- 
 ciation has been the greatest injury of my career. I have 
 never been able wholly to free myself from their influence, 
 but I have long ceased, to countenance their more unscru- 
 pulous intrigues not from virtue, I distinctly say, from 
 policy. It is a lack of sagacity that produces all crimes ; 
 nothing else ; except an excess of animalism, which pro- 
 duces the same results, because it amounts to the same 
 thing,' 
 
 * Spare your ethics. Your motive ? ' 
 
 ' Springs from the inability of my late associates to dis- 
 cern the kinship of crime and foolishness. When I first 
 heard of your robbery, I had my suspicions ; I was baffled 
 in my inquiries ; I believed that men with whom my name 
 was connected were concerned in it, but they feared that I 
 should learn their complicity, and for some time succeeded 
 in concealing it. Eecently indeed, the day before the 
 affair of Antina I found my suspicions right. I am 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 461 
 
 ashamed to say that I have traced that melodramatic villany 
 to those who call themselves of my party, although 1 have 
 fully and finally broken off all collusion with them. In a 
 word, I have felt disgraced that men with whom I have been 
 allied should have been capable of such an outrage, and so 
 much reparation as can lie in the acknowledgment is of 
 course your immediate due. I care little how you revenge 
 yourself, so that your vengeance may be the executor of 
 mine for the deception passed on me. Moreover, in learn- 
 ing the truth of the crime you suffered from, I learnt what 
 you have a right to know, since you believe the Countess 
 Vassalis worthy the surrender of your own life, which is 
 probably the cost you will pay sooner or later for your royal 
 efforts to save her.' 
 
 Erceldoune breathed fast and heavily ; a sickening sense 
 of mystery, of treachery, of evil, of half-truths told him 
 only that by them he might be led deeper into error, was 
 upon him. 
 
 'Had I twenty lives, she commands them,' he said 
 briefly. * Say out your meaning honestly, if you can.' 
 
 * Very simply, then ; the woman to whom you would give 
 a score of lives, if you had them, has from first to last 
 sheltered your assassin from you, and has counterfeited ten- 
 derness for you that she might gain an influence strong 
 enough to enable her to turn aside your vengeance from the 
 only man Idalia Vassalis ever loved.' 
 
 The words were cold, clear, incisive, calm with the tran- 
 quillity of unwarped truth. Under them Erceldoune stag- 
 gered slightly, like one who reels under a deep knife-thrust; 
 his face grew black with a hot rush of blood, his hands 
 fell once more on his torturer's shoulders, swaying him 
 dizzily to and fro. 
 
 ' Own that you lie, or by * 
 
 The closing oath rattled hard in his throat ; in the mo- 
 ment he could have choked her traducer dead with no more 
 thought, no more remorse, than men strangle the adder that 
 has destroyed the life they treasure closest. 
 
 Vane, deficient neither in courage nor in supple strength, 
 Bhook himself loose with a rapid movement, and lifting the 
 pistol from the sands, held it out with a grave, graceful ges- 
 ture, as though the weapon were a branch of palm. 
 
 1 Take it back, and shoot me dead with it, if you find that 
 I tell you untruth.' 
 
462 IDALIA. 
 
 'If! 9 
 
 6 Yes u if." I am no slanderer weaving a legend ; no 
 gossiper trafficking in cobwebs. I tell you a bard, unglozed, 
 pitiless fact ; there are many such in the history of the 
 woman you imagine has so stainless, so martyred, so royal 
 a soul ! Take back your weapon, and use it if I play you 
 false. You are longing to kill me now I see that in your 
 eyes ; but you are a lion, not a fox, and so you will not kill 
 in the dark. Make it day about you, broad noonday, by 
 which you can read the depths of your mistress's heart, 
 and then if she prove guiltless and I a liar then compen- 
 sate yourself as you will.' 
 
 Erceldoune answered nothing, but he stretched his hand 
 out and grasped the pistol in a silence that had more mean- 
 ing than speech ever carried. A dusky reddened light was 
 glowing in the darkness of his eyes the light that glows 
 in a dog's when the longing to seize and rend is rousing in 
 it ; his blood felt like fire ; the dawn seemed to grow like 
 night ; the corrosion of a jealous hate was in him, and in its 
 evil all other memories were drowned, all desires quenched, 
 all loyalty loosened. 
 
 The other stretched his arm out and touched him as he 
 turned and strode over the wet stone-strewn beach. 
 
 ' Wait. Where do you go ? ' 
 
 * I go to " make it daylight," as you say daylight strong 
 enough to unbare your villany.' 
 
 6 But first you must hear ' 
 
 ' I have heard too much.' 
 
 4 Stop an instant. B/emember, I have known the story 
 of Tdalia as you will never know it.' 
 
 . ' The more you know, the more honour should bind you 
 into silence.' 
 
 4 Madman ! When I tell you ' 
 
 ' Mad I may be. Bather that than a traitor.' 
 
 c It is a traitress of whom we speak.' 
 
 Erceldoune's eyes flashed a strange glance into his 5 it 
 was scorching as fire, yet it had it it a terrible appeal. 
 
 * Take care what you do,' he muttered. ' You will mak^ 
 me kill you.' 
 
 ' No. But I will make you prove my words truth or 
 slander.' 
 ' i go to do it.' 
 
THE SERPENTS VOICE. 463 
 
 ( You think you do ; you clo Dot. You go to hear a few 
 soft words from lips that have dupc-d tho subtlest in- 
 triguers in Europe, and to believe every phrase that they 
 breathe with a kiss upon yours, as though it were witnessed 
 by angels. I tell you that my honour shall not rest upon 
 so wayward and so frail a thing as her caprice of invention.' 
 
 c And /tell you that lier honour shall not rest upon the 
 tongues of traitors. You have dared to say she shielded my 
 assassin ' 
 
 * I say more ; I say she loved him. No ! Take your 
 hand off; you can seek my life later on; at present you 
 must save your own, if you do not want a Bourbon bullet 
 through your lungs for this woman who has fooled you, as 
 she fools us all. There is one man, one only, that your 
 mistress ever loved. She has wearied of him now, found 
 him a thorn in her side, learned to hate him as such women 
 can hate, drawn all the fragrance from her rose, and thrown 
 the old withered leaves away only the leaves are poisoned, 
 and they cling, they cling ! One man she loved, and she 
 lavished her gold on him, and she reared her ambitions for 
 him, and she was half his slave and half his sovereign, while 
 she was for all the world beside that beautiful, cruel, wanton, 
 pitiless, divine, and devilish sorceress that we know. She 
 has had many lovers, but she duped them all. This man 
 she never duped. A panther, with a velvet eye and a 
 glorious beauty ; a sun-god, with the soul of a fox and the 
 heart of a carrion-crow nothing more. But who shall 
 measure the passionate fancies of a woman and such a 
 woman ? Well, she loved him ; and he was your assassin. 
 No way so sure to shield him, as to bring you under her 
 dominance. It may be, it is true, that while fooling you 
 for his sake, you dethroned him, and she grew in earnest, 
 and it is he who is now to be thrown ad leones. It may be ; 
 Miladi has had many such caprices. That you may know 
 I say truth, and not falsehood, go and put but two questions 
 to her. Ask her first, who the man is who left you for dead 
 in the mountains ; ask her last, what the tie is that binds 
 her to the Greek, Conrad Phaulcon.' 
 
 Erceldoune had listened, without a word, without a breath, 
 his face with that tempestuous darkness lowered on it, and 
 a great horror, a great misery gazing vacantly out from his 
 dilated eyes. Yet the loyalty and the faith in him were 
 
464 ID ALIA. 
 
 stronger than all tests that wrung them ; he struggled to 
 keep his hold upon them, and to keep them pure, unsoiled, 
 unswerving, as men may strain to guard their honour un- 
 warped, when all the dizzy world about them reeks with 
 infamy, and presses them on to crime. 
 
 * I will ask her,' he said hoarsely, while his lips were white 
 and dry as dustj 'not to prove her purity, but to prove 
 your shame.' 
 
 Then, without another syllable, he turned and set his face 
 southward, and went by great swift steps, that sank into 
 the sea- washed sand, backward to where he had left her 
 backward, with the waste of waters lying silent and un- 
 troubled by his course, and the sun rising higher from over 
 the red wall of rock. Belief in what he had heard there 
 was none, even yet, in his heart ; off the brave allegiance 
 of his rash nobility the evil fell, finding no grappling-place, 
 no resting-lair ; but on him a heavy, breathless, deadly 
 oppression lay, and the first fear that his bold life had ever 
 known ran like a current of ice through all his veins. The 
 poison of doubt had been breathed on him, and its plague- 
 spot widened and deepened, let him rend the canker out aa 
 he would. 
 
 Once in the agony of his passion he stretched out his 
 arms to the vacant air as he went on in his loneliness, aa 
 though he saw her beauty, and drew it to him, though death 
 should come with it. 
 
 ' O, my love, my love ! ' he muttered unconsciously in the 
 longing of his soul. * What matter what you be, so you 
 are mi ne ! ' 
 
 It was in the blindness of the senses that he spoke, the 
 mere idolatrous desire for the loveliness that to him had no 
 likeness upon earth ; the cruel, intoxicated, fiery riot of the 
 * love lithe and fierce* that counts no cost to itself or to its 
 prey, and that would plunge into an eternity of pain to 
 purchase one short hour of its joy. A moment, and the 
 nobler passion in him rose ; the perfect faith, without which 
 his one idolatry would be but brutal* sed abandonment, 
 rebuked him ; his head sank, his eyes saw the gray glooming 
 sea through a hot rush of tears. 
 
 ' God forgive me so much sin to her as lay in the mere 
 thought ! ' he murmured as he went ; to think that the lipa 
 which had lain on his had ever breathf^ the kisses which 
 
'LET IT WORK. 9 465 
 
 betray, to think that the heart which had beaten upon his 
 had ever throbbed to the warmth of guilty pleasure, seemed 
 to him a blasphemy against her that was sin itself. For 
 even though those lips should be his, even though that 
 heart should beat for him, if there were past treachery or 
 present infidelity in her life, she would be dead to him 
 dead, more cruelly than though the steel had pierced the 
 fairness of her breast, and the golden trail of her hair been 
 drawn through the trampled dust of blood-stained streets. 
 
 If truth abode not with her, and the fealty of honour, 
 she was dead to him. 
 
 6 If her eyes shrink from mine, let the seas cover me ! ' 
 he prayed in his soul; and the length of the shore seemed 
 endless to him, and the tawny stretch of the beach seemed 
 the burning waste of a desert, and the surf, as it flowed up 
 and broke at his feet, seemed to force his steps backward 
 and backward, and to bind his limbs as with lead. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXI, 
 'LET IT WOEK!' 
 
 FOE many moments Victor Yane stood motionless, follow- 
 ing with his gaze the retreating shadow of the man in whom 
 his instinct had from the first foreseen his rival. The grave 
 patience, the gentle tranquillity, the subdued regret his 
 features had worn throughout their interview, passed away ; 
 a thousand emotions, a thousand shades of thought, of feel- 
 ing, and of suffering, swept over them ; alone there, with no 
 living thing near him save the white gulls resting on the 
 curl of the incoming waves, he had no need to wear a mask, 
 and he endured as sharp a misery as any he had dealt. 
 
 The deadliest pang in it was shame the carking, jealous, 
 bitter shame that where he had failed another should have 
 won; the knowledge that the love borne her by the man 
 who had left him was to the love that he himself had borne 
 as the purity and value of purged gold against a pile ot. 
 tinsel. It stilled in something the tortures of jealousy ; it 
 sated in something the thirst of hatred, to cast, were it only 
 in thought, irony and invective and scornful calumny upon 
 
 2 H 
 
466 IDALIA. 
 
 his rival. It was natural to him to despise, with all the 
 contempt of his fine and subtle intelligence, a character 
 that its own frankness and loyalty and high courage left 
 naked to all poisoned shafts, and that was so rashly liberal 
 in faith, so unwisely incapable of falsehood, so blindly and 
 wildly careless to how it wrought its own weal and woe. 
 Tet the most carking wound of all that now ached in him 
 was the latent sense of superiority in the man who had 
 supplanted him, who had succeeded where he had been 
 vanquished, and whom he had regarded with the cold disdain 
 of a flippant wit, as holding all his worth and merit in an 
 athlete's mere physical perfections of thews and sinews. 
 Steeled against all such emotion as he was, the greatness 
 and the nobleness of Erceldoune's faith forced themselves 
 on him ; they wrung a reverence out of him despite himself, 
 and they dealt him a mortal pain pain that was in one 
 sense vanity-moved, since it would no longer leave him the 
 one solace of scorn for his rival, but a pain that sprang 
 from, and that moved, a deeper, better thing ; a recognition, 
 tardy and unwilling though it was, of some greatness he 
 had missed in missing truth ; some base and guilty cow- 
 ardice that ho had stooped to when once truth had passed 
 off from his lips, banished with a scoff as only fit for fools. 
 
 Beyond jealousy, beyond hatred, beyond every other feel- 
 ing in him as he stood looking southward at the great shaft 
 of russet stone that screened the pathway of his rival from 
 his sight, there was on him then an intense humiliation. 
 Beside the sincerity, the fealty, the self-surrender, the 
 brave patience of a generous trust, his own subtleties looked 
 so unworthy, his own fine craft so poor ; another could ren- 
 der her a love that deemed life itself well lost for her, and 
 he he was her traitor. 
 
 There was enough of honour and enough of tenderness in 
 him for the contrast to strike into him, hard, sharp, swift as 
 steel. This man, whom he had contemned with all the 
 mockery of his brilliant mind, had grown great in his sight 
 simply through the ennobling influence of a mighty passion 
 und an heroic faith. He still cursed these with his lips as 
 insanity, as idiotcy ; but in his heart he knew their greatness 
 a greatness that he had by his own choice, his own act, 
 put far from him for ever. 
 
 Away in the world again, he would again cleave to his 
 
"LET IT WORK!' 467 
 
 old creeds, and deem the moment womanish weakness ; but 
 here in the loneliness of the morning, under the sting of an 
 intolerable torment, the man he hated was great in his sight, 
 and he himself was base exceedingly. "Where he stood 
 with no eyes on him that could read his shame, a red flush 
 slowly stole over the wanness of his face ; none living could 
 have brought it there, but the scourge of his own thoughts 
 did. 
 
 6 A traitor ! a traitor ! ' he muttered to those silent seas 
 that washed to and fro so wearily at his feet. 
 
 For though he had fallen willingly, the fall seemed to 
 him hideously vile ; as in the gray, cold, unpitying light of 
 a dawn that brings him no slumber, the sins and the burdens 
 that a man counts recklessly and bears lightly in the crowds 
 of the daytime and the dissipations of the night, stand out 
 in their true colour, and grow unendurable in his sight and 
 his memory. 
 
 But the better instinct too soon perished ; there was pas- 
 sion in him, and passion choked conscience. He could not 
 have told whether he most loved or most hated this woman ; 
 but whichever emotion swayed him farthest, the jealousy 
 that he had so often laughed at as a barbarism of a bygone 
 age was born of both, and in its fire quenched all other 
 things. If it were true that Idalia loved this man who so 
 loyally had served her ! In his own soul he did not doubt 
 its truth, and it sufficed to nerve afresh in him every im- 
 pulse of evil. He felt for her that covetous, sensual, piti- 
 less growth of mingled envy, admiration, and ambition, 
 which, long after all tenderness has perished out of it, will 
 retain all its imperious egotism, and all its thirst for sweep- 
 ing destruction of everything preferred before it. An 
 acrid bitterness against her for her pride, her power, her 
 keen wit, and her fearless intellect, had been blent with 
 the earliest hours of his subjugation to her ; and this served 
 now to strengthen tenfold the fierce, mute, aching im- 
 patience of misery with which he now mused on the pos- 
 sibility that this woman, so cold, so merciless, so full of 
 mockery for him, had ever stooped her haughty spirit down 
 to the weakness she had often played with, and so often 
 ridiculed. 
 
 6 Is it possible ! Is it possible ! She she ! ' ho muttered, 
 while his delicate lips shook and worked in the anguish 
 
 2 H 2 
 
IDALIA. 
 
 which, in a youth, would have been spent in tears. * She, 
 so victorious, so ironic, so chill, so world-worn, so magnifi- 
 cent, love for sake of a wanderer's eagle glances, a rough- 
 rider's lion graces ! She I a woman who could fill a 
 throne, and rule it single-handed ! Pshaw ! she is a volup- 
 tuary ; she is a coquette ; she has her caprices Miladi ! 
 And he ie$ handsome as a gladiator. She loves him O 
 yes she loves him for six months, six weeks, six days. 
 And what price will he pay for the paradise ? ' 
 
 The venomous words were murmured to the solitary 
 shore ; even thus, and alone, it was a cruel solace to him to 
 taunt her with those sneers, to soil what he had lost for 
 ever, to libel what he envied with so unquenchable a 
 jealousy, It could not harm her thus to slander her, when 
 none but the breaking surf and the fluttering sea-birds 
 made answer ; but he felt a relief in it, a joy kindred to 
 that joy with which he had thought of her in the dungeons 
 of the Capuano, when he had sold her into the hands of 
 G-iulio Yillaflor. 
 
 Moreover, he believed what he said ; partially because his 
 suffering made him cling to whatsoever could lessen it, 
 partially because the character of Idalia had escaped him 
 in many of its hues, keen and varied as were the worldly 
 experiences by whose light he had first set himself to read 
 it. He had known of her through a thousand tongues ere 
 ever he had looked upon her face ; the poison-mists breathed 
 from their distortions had never wholly faded from before 
 her in his sight. Such a woman needs a mind singularly 
 truthful and singularly liberal to understand her aright. 
 Truth he had not in him, and to all talent save his own he 
 was illiberal. Thus he had failed in following the complex 
 meanings of her life and of her thoughts. He had uttered 
 but what he held himself when he had said that 
 
 ' beautiful she is, 
 
 The serpent's voice less subtle than her kiss, 
 The snake but vanquish'd dust ; and she will draw 
 Another host from heaven to break heaven's law.* 
 
 But he had withheld what was not less true, that it was be- 
 cause she had this sin of merciless destruction in her, this 
 serpent skill of tempting, this guilty power over the fates 
 and souls of men, that he had first been fascinated to her 
 
'LET IT WORK! 1 469 
 
 dominion, and first seen in her a mistress by whom and 
 with whom he could reach all to which his restless and in- 
 satiable ambitions aspired, and aspired in vain. 
 
 ' Will he believe ? ' he wondered, as his eyes vacantly 
 rested on the sands where the tide was filling the foot- 
 prints of his rival. e Not he. What man would believe 
 the witnessing voices of the whole world if she once whis- 
 pered them false ? And she pays him, too, with love-words, 
 with the sweetness of her lips, with the touch of hair on 
 his cheek. Ah, Grod ! ' 
 
 He quivered from head to foot as the cry escaped him ; 
 he could have thrown himself on the sands and bidden the 
 sea surge up and cover him, when he thought of that caress 
 which already had been the reward of the man who had 
 succoured her. And he he who betrayed her, what had 
 he won by the treachery ? 
 
 'Revenge at least,' he thought ; and as he thought so his 
 head sank, his limbs grew rigid, his chest rose and fell with 
 a single voiceless sob. He only remembered that revenge 
 was valueless, since revenge could not bring him the lips 
 that he longed for, the beauty that he desired as the ice- 
 bound earth desires summer. 
 
 Valueless ? yet not so. It could not give her to him, 
 but it could withhold her from any other. 
 
 A young, shy, gentle, little sea-bird, whose wings as yefc 
 could scarce bear it, rose at his feet as he mused, and 
 fluttered a hand's breadth, and then trembled and fell, pant- 
 ing and glancing up with its bright dove-like, brown eye. 
 He took it savagely and wrung the slender, snowy throat, 
 and flung it out on to the crest of a breaker dead. He 
 had never before been cruel to birds or beasts ; such fierce 
 and wanton slaughter was not natural to him, but in this 
 moment it had a horrible pleasure in its brutality. He 
 had subdued all his impulses of hate so long, it sated them, 
 if ever so slightly, to wreak them on that innocent bird. 
 He had seen the dying eyes glaze and fill with misty fear 
 with a gladness he would have believed impossible; he 
 wanted to see hers fade out thus ; to stand by and see them 
 fade with just that look of terror and of helplessness 
 eyes that had given such smiling scorn to'him, such passion- 
 ate eloquence to others. He watched the tumbled heap of 
 white ruffled plumage washed in and out by the advancing 
 and retreating sea. 
 
470 IDALIA. 
 
 'I can destroy her as easily as I killed that bird,' he 
 thought, and the worst instincts of his nature had their 
 sway once more, as his mouth laughed with his slight, soft 
 smile. ' Barbaric ! Terrible barbaric ! ' he murmured. 'And 
 I was so wise in my diplomacy with him ; I told him 
 only truth. Talleyrand is right. Truth is so safe and 
 so sure ! ' 
 
 Then leaving the dead bird floating on the water's play, 
 he went whither he came. 
 
 'Monsignore will rally enough to sign an order,' he 
 mused. 'A half-score soldiers, and they will be netted. Ah ! 
 his only mistress will be the galley-oar, and her only lover's 
 embrace will be the fetters of the Vicaria. Miladi's new 
 passion will not be smooth in its course ! ' 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIL 
 
 * SHALL ETIL BE THY GOOD ? ' 
 
 WHEBE the Greek faced her on the sea-shore there was a 
 long silence between them a silence breathless and preg- 
 nant, like that which precedes the first low muttering of a 
 storm, the first dropping shots of a battle. Her eyes dwelt 
 on his with a terrible despair in their startled depths, and 
 his laughed back into them with the insolence and arrogance 
 of power. Many times their strength had come in conflict, 
 and many times the variable, unstable, serpentine will of 
 the man had been crushed under the straight, scornful, fear- 
 less will of the woman. Now, for the first time, he had his 
 vengeance, and she could not strike back on him, because 
 for the first time he had found weakness in her, and could 
 reach her through the life of another. 
 
 He laughed aloud in his victory. 
 
 * Choose, Miladi ! Your favourite maxims say, after the 
 first passion all women love the love, not the lover. If you 
 indulge the first you will slay the last. Choose ! ' 
 
 For all answer she swept with a sudden movement so 
 close to him, that he fell back with the coward's instinct of 
 physical fear. 
 
 1 You have been often bought for murder. What price 
 will you buy from it ? ' 
 
'SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD? 1 471 
 
 The words left her lips with a scorn that burnt like 
 flame, with a bitterness that cut like steel. Neither 
 touched him; he laughed again in the content of his 
 triumph. 
 
 * What price, my Countess ? None ! ' 
 
 * You want gold you love gold. You would sell your 
 soul for gold. You shall have it.' 
 
 The agony of dread upon her made her voice deep and 
 hushed, like the stealing of an autumn storm-wind through 
 forests; the passion of scorn within her made her face 
 flush, and darken, and quiver, as though the flicker of a 
 torch played on it. Neither moved him to shame. 
 
 * O, yes,' he said, with a slow smile ' gold, gold, gold. 
 Of course you would give me that. As much as you would 
 throw away on a banquet, or a diamond, or a web of lace, 
 should come to me, if 1 would stay aloof and hold my peace, 
 and let the Border Eagle build his eyrie on the Eoumelian 
 hills, and Miladi pleasure her new passion among her rose- 
 gardens. 0, yes ! gold as much gold as you have twisted 
 in your air for a mask ball might be mine, of course ; and 
 he he should succeed to Julian's dominion and Julian's 
 domain; he should have all that wood and water, and palace 
 and mountains, that I have been banned out of so long ; he 
 should be chief there, and lord, and his sons, may be, have 
 the heirship of the Vassalis line ! A charming cast for us 
 both ! With all gratitude for my share, and your will to 
 allot it to me, I must decline such a distribution betwixt 
 your lover and me. Gold, gold ! No, Miladi, gold will not 
 strike the balance between us now.' 
 
 She listened in silence; only that passionate shadowy 
 quiver, as of the light of a flame, on her face giving sign or 
 response to him. Her lips were close pressed together, and 
 scarce seemed to move as the words came through them, 
 hard, like the dropping of stones on a stone. 
 
 6 Your sin is envy ? Well, it is only another to a long 
 list. Mere gold will not buy you. What will ? ' 
 
 < Nothing.' 
 
 ' You are so incorruptible ! ' 
 
 6 Yes, here.' 
 
 ' Through envy, avarice, and hate ! ' 
 
 * Through three common movers of mankind, if so.' 
 
 6 You own them yours ? Then listen here. I speak no- 
 
4? 2 ID ALIA. 
 
 thing of your guilt to me nothing of your crime against 
 him. I will deal with you as though none of all that 
 measureless iniquity were on you. Conscience you have 
 not ; shame you do not know. I appeal to neither. I will 
 treat with your avarice alone. Tou love self-indulgence, 
 luxury, vice, mirth, indolence, splendour ; you have coveted 
 my heritage from the Vassalis, you have been thirsty for 
 my riches ; jou have wanted all that eastern pomp and 
 princely fief, you have hungered for Count Julian's posses- 
 sions, you have hated me for many things, yet for none so 
 much as for the inheritance of that great wealth ; that you 
 used it, and wasted it, and were welcomed to it long as 
 though it were your own, mattered nothing. It was mine, 
 and not yours; you never forgave the difference. Well, 
 hear me now. All that shall le yours all all to the last 
 stone of the jewels, to the lowest chamber of the palace, to 
 the poorest fig-tree on the hills, to the farthest landmark on 
 the plains. You shall have all, and reign there as you will.' 
 
 An intense eagerness thrilled through her voice, the burn- 
 ing wavering light upon her face grew hotter and darker, the 
 chained bitterness and fierceness in her gave but the subtler 
 inflection to the eloquence and the command that ran as of 
 old through all her words ; for the moment she dazzled and 
 swayed and staggered him. 
 
 1 All! 'he echoed. '//' 
 
 * Yes all ! Every coin, every rood, every bead of gold 
 in that treasure-house of splendid waste I will make all 
 yours all that the Vassalis ever owned. I will not keep 
 a pearl from the jewels, or a date from the palms. 
 All shall be yours all the things of your desire.' 
 
 6 And you ! ' 
 
 'I I shall be beggared.' 
 
 'Yet while she spoke, over her face swept one swift 
 gleam, like the glow of an eastern sun. 
 He gazed at her like one blinded. 
 
 * And for all this what will you ask of me ? ' 
 
 She lifted her proud head and looked down straight into 
 his eyes. 
 
 ' Of you I shall purchase my freedom and his life.' 
 
 His mouth quivered with rage as he laughed aloud once 
 more, 
 
 ' So-so ! Ah, the wildness of women's passions ! You 
 
'SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD?' 473 
 
 would buy your lover at that cost ? O, fool ! you who once 
 were subtle and wise as the serpent ! ' 
 
 Her teeth set tight, but she kept down her wrath. 
 
 * Profit by nay folly/ she said briefly. ' Take all I have 
 leave me only him.' 
 
 The first words were stern ; over the three last her 
 voice unconsciously softened with an infinite pathos and 
 yearning. 
 
 That involuntary thrill of longing tenderness steeled him 
 in an instant to the first eager impulse of acceptance, 
 prompted by his lust for wealth and ease and power, and all 
 the half-barbaric voluptuous royalties of theRoumelian palace 
 that had seethed in him for so long. Other evil instincts 
 were more potent still than avarice. He smiled, a low 
 and cruel smile. 
 
 ' Magnificent ransom, for a landless courier. But at what 
 price will not your sex gratify its caprices especially the 
 caprices of the passions ! Your lover should know the sacri- 
 fices you would make for his embrace ! For myself, the 
 bribe is high ; but I decline it.' 
 
 The blood faded from her face, even from her lips ; a gray, 
 heavy shadow, as of desperation, fell over her, that seemed 
 to drain the very colour from her eyes and from her form, 
 and leave her, white and chill there, as a statue. 
 
 ' "What will you gain ? ' she spoke with a hard, brief, 
 stony tranquillity. 
 
 ' Why a romantic thing to be sure, and an unremunera- 
 tive ; yet the sweetest thing, as men find, that the world 
 hold s vengeance.' 
 
 ' Neither he nor I have wronged you.' 
 
 * May be. But both have galled me ; both ' 
 
 ' Been wronged by you. True. I forgot the reason of 
 your hate.' 
 
 His face flushed darkly. 
 
 ' I do not bear you hate. I tried to free you. But I 
 swear this man shall not wed with you, and live.' 
 
 'And why? Have you not done us injury enough? 
 You poisoned my life with infamy, and would have taken 
 his in a thief's slaughter. Can you not let us be ? Can you 
 not sell yourself for pity's sake, as you have 'so often sold 
 yourself for shameful things? Take my bribe. Impoverish me 
 as you will; enjoy all I have to give ; seize all you have ever 
 
474 IDALIA. 
 
 coveted ; bind it fast to you on what terms you choose ; 
 make me poor as the poorest that ever asked my charity ; 
 only leave me this one thing, his life.' 
 
 She spoke still with the same strange enforced serenity, 
 but beneath it there ran an intense melancholy, an intense 
 yearning; they could not move, but steeled him in, his 
 purpose. 
 
 ' The thing I will not leave you/ he said savagely. ' Ah ! 
 I know how men go mad for that beauty of yours ; he 
 would hold himself rich as emperors were that his own, 
 though you had no other gold than just what gleams in the 
 coil of your hair. I know, I know ! And so you can love 
 at last, my queen ! all that ransom for one wild mountaineer ! 
 But you shall only ransom him one way, Miladi : only by 
 forsaking him.' 
 
 6 1 will never forsake him.' 
 
 1 So ! Then his wedding night will be his last.' 
 
 Her hand worked with a fierce, rapid, clenching move- 
 ment on the butt of the pistol. 
 
 'Wait,' she said, slowly, while each word fell on the 
 silence like the falling of the great slow drops of a storm. 
 ' You threaten him ? One word from me, and he will 
 give you over to justice for your crime to him. One shot 
 this moment from me, and he will be here to take his 
 vengeance.' 
 
 He shrank slightly, for cowardice was ingrained in him. ; 
 but he knew how to deal with the brave and generous 
 nature of the woman whom he tortured. He looked her 
 full in the eyes. 
 
 'True. You might send me to the galleys. But you 
 will not.' 
 
 Her lips parted, her breast heaved, a great shudder 
 shook her. She answered nothing. 
 
 'You can summon your lover,' he pursued, after a 
 pause. 'You can tell him of my "crime," and also of 
 my tie to you. You can see us fall on each other, and 
 fight as tigers fight. You can wed him in peace if he kill 
 me ; as most like he will, since he is so far the stronger. 
 You can do this. But you will not.' 
 
 Prom the depths of her agonised eyes a flash like fire 
 passed over him. 
 
 ' I cannot ! You know it.' 
 
 He laughed slightlj. 
 
' SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD? 9 475 
 
 fi No, I did not know it. Women soon vanquish scruples 
 and tread out memories to gratify a passion. "Well, since 
 you hesitate so far, perhaps you will hesitate yet farther. 
 You will not break your oath by betraying me ; will you 
 betray this one man whom you say you "honour," by 
 linking him, in his good faith and his ignorance, with 
 us?' 
 
 She gave a sharp, quick breath, as though a blow were 
 struck her. 
 
 ' G-od forbid ! I have said, all bonds between me and 
 the past are severed for ever.' 
 
 4 1 see ! You will lock the book, and throw it aside, and 
 your blind worshipper will credit on your telling that the 
 pages were all pure blanks ! And yet I thought you said 
 you " honoured " him ? ' 
 
 All the haughty fiery blood in her flushed to life under 
 the subtle sneer. 
 
 i I do so from my soul. Let his name be ; it has no 
 place on your lips yours that gave the word to murder 
 him ! ' 
 
 i Fine phrases ! And yet you will deceive him ? ' 
 
 'I!' 
 
 * Yes, you, Miladi. You will not betray me to him 
 you cannot. So telling him nothing you will leave him 
 ignorant. And one fine day, were I to let you run your 
 passion's course, he would learn the truth, and find his 
 sovereign, his idol, his mistress, his wife, my ' 
 
 ' Wait ! You have said enough.' 
 
 'No. I say more. Forsake him, and he is safe from 
 me. Grive yourself to him, and I will add him his 
 marriage-gift death. Just such a death as he would 
 have dealt me on the Bosphorus shore. I can see the 
 gleam of his steel and the thirst of his eyes now ! ' 
 
 ' If he had killed you, what would he have done more 
 than justice ? ' 
 
 ' At least he would have rendered you inestimable service, 
 Miladi.' 
 
 She stopped him with an irrepressible gesture. 
 
 ' Hush, hush ! O Grod, such words between us ! ' 
 
 ' Well, we are enemies bitter ones enough.' 
 
 1 Yes ; enemies as the wronged and the wrong- doer ever 
 are. But your life is sacred to me ; how can you curse 
 mine? ' 
 
47 6 ID ALIA. 
 
 1 Mine sacred to you ? Is it so, Idalia ? Then, being 
 so, you will not betray me to your lover ? ' 
 
 She turned on him a look that had a weariness, a scorn, 
 an agony, a pity unutterable. 
 
 * No ; I must bear the burden of your guilt.' 
 
 * But you will betray him by leaving him in ignorance of 
 whom he loves of whom he weds ? ' 
 
 ' Though he knew lie would find mercy and greatness 
 enough to pardon. 7 
 
 She spoke not to him, but to the memories that rose be- 
 fore her memories that filled her heart with their bitter- 
 ness and their sweetness memories of the exhaustless 
 faith and patience and forgiveness of the man she was 
 bidden to abandon. 
 
 4 Truly. Then what think you, Miladi ? Is it a noble 
 return to cheat him as you meditate ? Is it a fine thing 
 to recognise this limitless tenderness borne you, only to 
 dupe it through its own sublime insanity? You have 
 fooled such idolaters scores of times, I know, only here 
 I think you said you honoured him? "Which makes a 
 difference, or might make it.' 
 
 She knew well how wide the difference was wide as 
 between innocence and guilt. 
 
 She answered nothing ; her face was gray and stern as 
 stone, only in the brooding horror of the deep dilated eyes 
 was there reply ; they spoke more than any language of 
 the lips. 
 
 The Greek laughed softly. 
 
 ' His bridal couch made in the nest of his " assassins ! " 
 His stainless and glorified mistress proved the masker of 
 the Silver Ivy ! Madame, I think I might let his passion 
 run untroubled, and leave my vengeance to the future 
 some future when he should reach the truth from some 
 chance word, from some side-wind and hear the secret 
 that a woman who "honoured " him never told all through 
 the days and nights she lived in his sight and slept upon 
 his heart. Hear it when he was bound to her beyond 
 escape, and could gain no freedom through knowing her 
 traitress to him as to all others. Ah, I am not so certain 
 that I will not let you wed him ! It will be a surer stab 
 to him than comes from steel that one truth learned too 
 late: 
 
* SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD?' 477 
 
 There was a long silence. 
 
 She shuddered from head to foot, as though the scorch 
 of a red-hot brand passed over and marked her ; then an 
 intense stillness fell upon her a stillness in which all life 
 seemed frozen in her, and every breath to cease. He 
 waited, mute and patient now. 
 
 At last she raised her head, and turned it full upon him ; 
 as the reddened glow of sunlight flickered on it, it was 
 dark, and cold, and resolute, with an exceeding strength 
 and an absolute despair. 
 
 ' For once you have shown me duty, and saved me from 
 a crime. My hand shall not touch his again.' 
 
 * Because you will not * 
 
 ' Because your guilt is on me.' 
 
 'And yet you are willing to lose all your riches, and 
 your power, and your victories, and your pleasures, for 
 this one man ? ' 
 
 ' I am so willing.' 
 
 4 Then it is ' 
 
 'That you have shown me what would be my sin to 
 him. You cannot be betrayed. He shall not be. 1 
 
 ' You mean ' 
 
 She turned on him ere he could speak with the swift, 
 lithe, terrible grace of a stag hunted and hounded into a 
 fierceness borne of sheer torture, and wholly alien to its 
 nature. 
 
 'Silence! or I shall forget what you are, and let him 
 take his vengeance on you. Can you not be content? 
 You led me into cruelty and error a thousand times 
 under the masking of fair colours and of fearless aims ; 
 you now show me in the one redemption of my life the 
 one purer, better, higher thing only an added guilt, a 
 fresh dishonour. I lose all through you. Are you not 
 content ? ' 
 
 The vivid passion, the agonised irony, died suddenly, as 
 a flame drops to the ground ; her head fell, her limbs sank 
 wearily on the broken rocks, a full dead apathy returned 
 on her, in which she lost all memory, even of his presence. 
 He looked at her, hushed, awed, moved to something that 
 was almost dread of his own work, intimidated by the 
 suddenness and the completeness of his own victory ; he 
 United, hesitating, and as one afraid, some moments ; she 
 
47$ IDALiA. 
 
 gave no sign that she even remembered he was near ; 
 every second wasted might cost them both the loss of 
 liberty, if not of life ; but he lacked the boldness that 
 could have pressed on her then the question of mere bodily 
 danger, the mere physical perils from the cell and the rods 
 of her persecutors. 
 
 There was that in her attitude, as she sat bowed, motion- 
 less, with the loosened weight of her hair sweeping down 
 into the salt pools of the beach, and an icy chilliness of 
 calm on the colourless immutability of her features, that 
 subdued, and shamed, and had a nameless terror for him. 
 
 Some sense of reluctant reverential fear was always on 
 him for the woman whom, nevertheless, he had goaded and 
 trepanned, and injured, and tortured through the length of 
 many years. Some touch of love for her eve? lingered in 
 him." 
 
 He paused a long while, at some distance from her, while 
 the incoming tide rolled nearer and nearer up over the 
 shingle and the sand, till the surf washed over her feet. 
 She never noted it ; her eyes, without sight in them, gazed 
 at the dusky changing mass of water that here and there 
 beneath the spell of waking light broke into melting lus- 
 trous hues, like the gleam of colours on a southern bird's 
 bright throat. 
 
 He drew closer, with a doubtful hesitation. 
 
 1 You will come with me, then ? ' 
 
 She gave no sign even that she heard the words. 
 
 6 1 am not alone/ he pursued. ' Lousada, Veni, and the 
 boy Berto sought you. I fell in with them as I neared 
 here ; they are fugitives, and proscribed themselves ; they 
 lie hid by day in an old sea-den of Yeni's ; they look to get 
 away by the coast in a night or so ; they would give their 
 bodies to shot and sabre to save your hand from a rough 
 touch. Will you come to them ? ' 
 
 He could not tell whether she heeded him ; he saw her 
 face in profile ; it was still, cold, passionless, stern with a 
 mute intolerable suffering, like some Greek head in stone 
 of Destiny. 
 
 He felt a restless fear of his own victory. 
 
 He spoke afresh, rather to break that death-like silence, 
 filled only with the ebbing and the flowing of the sea, than 
 for the sake of what he uttered. 
 
'SHALL EVIL BE THY GOOD? 1 479 
 
 * Veni's sea-nest is safe safe, at least, for a little while ; 
 it lies yonder, through there, where a passage-way pierces 
 the rocks. All that acanthus hides the entrance. It has 
 sheltered many before ; Fiesoli lay there once, in the first 
 days of his proscription. Lousada doubts little that he 
 can get a brig from Salerno, and steal away off westward 
 three nights hence. It is the best chance. You will 
 come ? ' 
 
 At last she lifted her head, and looked at him. 
 
 * But for Giulio VillafLor I would go far sooner back 
 to the dungeon of Taverna.' 
 
 His face paled ; he knew her meaning knew the un- 
 speakable loathing and scorn of himself that made the se- 
 verities of captivity and wretchedness look fairer in her 
 sight than every recovered freedom shared with his com- 
 panionship. 
 
 ' There is no other alternative,' he said sullenly. ' You 
 will come ? ' 
 
 ' I will come.' 
 
 He was once more victorious ; and once more with vic- 
 tory stole over him a strange chill dread, as he who has 
 brought down and netted the lioness of the plains will feel 
 something of awe, something of fear, when in his toils lies 
 the daughter, the mate, the mother of free-born kings of 
 untrodden soil when beneath the rain of his blows, and 
 from out the meshes of his trap, the great fearless luminous 
 leonine eyes look at him, suffering but unquailing. 
 
 ' Why do you wait, then ? ' he asked. 
 
 6 1 wait for him.' 
 
 ' So ! You will, after all, be false to one of us. "Which?' 
 
 * Neither.' 
 
 ' What gage have I of that ? ' 
 
 'That I have said it.' 
 
 He was silent a moment ; he scarcely dared dispute that 
 single bond her word. Traitor himself to her, he knew 
 that his treachery would never be repaid him by its own 
 coin. 
 
 1 You wait for him ? ' he said. * Then so also do I.' 
 
 * Are you weary of the shame of your life, that you seek 
 to lose it ? ' 
 
 * No ; but he shall take it rather than I will leave you 
 here.' 
 
480 IDALIA. 
 
 Through the calm upon her face the calm of martyr- 
 dom, of despair he saw the conflict of many passions, of 
 infinite misery. 
 
 1 Will you choose for us to meet ? ' 
 
 "Where her forehead rested on her hands that were thrust 
 among the masses of her hair, the great dews started as 
 they had never done when the scourge was lifted at Ta- 
 verna. 
 
 'We shall not part alive,' he pursued. 'Perhaps you 
 count on that ? Your lover is the younger and the strong- 
 er ; there are few men he would not worst. You rode all 
 day through the heat and press of a battle under Verona 
 once, I remember ; may be you wish to see a lif e-and-death 
 contest.* 
 
 She answered nothing ; a shiver as of intense cold ran 
 through her. 
 
 ' You can enjoy your new passion, true, if he kill me. A 
 dead body flung, with a kick into that surf, the waves to 
 wash it seaward, none on earth to care enough for me to 
 ask where I have drifted 'it would be easy work. Is that 
 the reason why you " wait " ? ' 
 
 1 G-od ! how can you link such guilt with me, even in 
 thought ? ' 
 
 4 Why not ? That will be the end, if we meet in your 
 sight to-day, unless, indeed, fate turns the other way, and 
 your lover falls through me. Sit there, Miladi, and watch 
 the struggle ; you will never have seen two harder foes. 
 Turn your thumb downward, like those dainty, haughty 
 [Roman dames you copy in philosophies and seductions ; 
 turn it down for the slaughter- signal, if you see me at his 
 mercy. How free you will be then! But listen just a 
 little if he press me too close, we have not the northern 
 scorn of a timely thrust, and it will be but in self-defence! ' 
 
 As he spoke, ne drew gently half out of its sheath the 
 blade of a delicate knife that was thrust in his waistband, 
 and let the beams of the sunrise play brightly on the narrow 
 shining steel. 
 
 The glitter flashed close beside her. It sent fire and life 
 like an electric shock through all the icy stillness of her 
 limbs ; she rose with a convulsive force ; her eyes had the 
 gleam of an opium-drinker's in them, her voice had scares 
 a likeness of itself. 
 
'UNTO HIS LAST. 9 481 
 
 f I come, I come ; do what you will with me, so that his 
 life escapes you ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 'UNTO HIS LAST.' 
 
 THE Greek let the slender blade of steel slide back into 
 its case. 
 
 1 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 afterward 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 in bygone years when the great pleader, Fie- 
 soli, had hidden there, proscribed for too fearless a defence 
 of a political prisoner; 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 resistless disquietude. 
 
 The length of the cavern wound like a tangled skein 
 through the depth of stone, no light breaking through it, 
 and the air was chill, and close, and dank, like the air of a 
 tomb ; it was cramped and tortuous, and the 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 swpet down some sun- 
 lighted terrace among the roses of a golden summer-tiine. 
 
 ' She will never fear ! ' he thought ; and to the heart of 
 
 2 i 
 
482 IDALIA. 
 
 the man tlia-c 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 gleam- 
 ing ; it came from the flame, now leaping, now sinking, of 
 a tire 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 pro- 
 scribed revolutionists, of men who suffered for liberty of 
 speech, and were content to perish under the deathly chill- 
 ness 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 beautiful young 
 Eafaelle face drooped pale and weary over them. 
 
 It was the lad Berto ; left sentinel while his comrades 
 spent the daybreak seeking a vessel down the shore. He 
 was but a child; but he had long put away childish things ; 
 years before he had seen two of his brethren fall side by 
 side in an emeute of Milan, 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 chamois the woman 
 who dared love, and follow, and bear sons to a republican 
 rebel. 
 
'UNTO HIS LAST. 1 483 
 
 He started, and rose with a sentinel's challenge ; then, 
 as he saw who came, bowed low ; the weary sternness of 
 his fair face never changed in boyish sport, or youthful 
 laughter, or under the light of a girl's shy eyes ; wrong had 
 been stamped heavily on him too early, and if in his future 
 life 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 lie 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 het 
 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. 1 1 will look to the fire, Berto ; 
 go and sleep. You need it.' 
 
 6 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 enfilade, 
 and heap them in her skirts, and mount him on her charger 
 to bear them to the revolutionary brigades, while 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 when a woman 
 of the Northern Isles had toiled wearily, begging her way, 
 into Rome to look once more on her son's face, and had 
 reached in time to see the last earth thrown upon his coffin, 
 while 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. 
 
 ' Tes, 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 
 
 2i2 
 
484 1DALI*. 
 
 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 had heard of her as within 
 the power of Griulio Yillaflor, 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 him- 
 self, he had warped and misled the idealic ambitions, the 
 fearless genius, the poet's fate, the hero's visions, that he 
 had found 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 de- 
 fiance, her pride into unmerciful scorn, her wit into sceptic 
 cruelty, and when these were done went farther, 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 ; while 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 
 
'UNTO HIS LAST 485 
 
 contra todos, y todos contra yo 3 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, while he 
 was penniless and an adventurer ; jealousy that the lavish- 
 ness of her gift, the generosity of her thought, never tem- 
 pered, but inflamed. He knew that he had done this, and 
 that of his own act he had turned the tenderness of her 
 heart toward him into abhorrence, had changed the love and 
 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, shrink from him with all the abhorrence 
 of a brave nature for a craven's sins, 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 he had broken she yet remained 
 faithful. 
 
 It had been wanton destruction he had wrought, it was 
 irrevocable loss he had sustained ; some sense of all he had 
 i forfeited and killed when he had become her worst traitor, 
 and had made the eyes that once sought his in love cast on 
 i 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 th Vassalis race that he hated, Greek in its 
 
4S6 ID ALIA. 
 
 type, eastern in its calm. He thought of the great palace 
 of the Yassalis 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 suscepti- 
 bilities of a vivacious and womanish nature. He addressed 
 her ; she did not reply. He set food and wino 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 eye- 
 balls 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. 
 
 1 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 naught else. 
 
4 UNTO HIS LAST. 1 4%7 
 
 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 watch- 
 fire, and went down into the shadow of the farther recesses, 
 whence a steep cramped stairway, cut upward 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 
 secret sought its subterranean shelter. The stair was per- 
 pendicular 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 sense that her eyes were on him, 
 under the scourge of her unuttered scorn, under the mute 
 reproach that her mere life was to him. He would not 
 loose 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, aud timorous of the 
 danger round them as any long- chased stag; he cast him- 
 self down to rest awhile 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 rarefied air as up the passage 
 of an aural 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 mask dress ; beyond, on 
 every side, stretched the dense Eembrandt shade of the 
 vault ; her eyes, wakeful with a terrible wakefulness that 
 seemed as though it would never again relax and sink to 
 sleep, never stirred from the one spot in the red embers, 
 which they looked at without knowing what they saw. 
 
 c 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 
 
488 ID ALT A. 
 
 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 greab agony ; 
 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 andunconquered; 
 here at last no one of these availed her, but she was bound, 
 powerless and paralysed, under the net of circumstances. 
 Before this she had never been vanquished ; now she was 
 chained down beyond escape beneath the weight of an 
 intolerable oppression. 
 
 The pine-embers glowing crimson on the gray 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 al 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 ambitious 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 
 while 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, while in the splendour of her dreams and the igno- 
 rance of her gracious youth she had held the one a stainless 
 patriot, the other a glorified martyrdom ; she had been tre- 
 panned through the truest beauty of her nature, blinded 
 
'UNTO HIS LAST: 489 
 
 through the purest desires of her heart. The patriot was a 
 knave, only the more perilous because also a coward ; the 
 cause was a lie, only 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 stainless 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 steeled into 
 defiance, the independence of her life accepted willingly an 
 isolation which yet was a sovereignty ; she had a wide ven- 
 geance in her power, and she took it with too little mercy. 
 Those memories thronged on her as they had thronged on 
 her foe in the loneliness of the sea-vault, while that vow of 
 implicit obedience to his will, of unvarying association with 
 his schemes, of eternal silence on his tie to her, and of eter- 
 nal devotion to the interests of his order, which had many 
 a time aroused in her such passionate and contemptuous 
 rebellion even while she repaid his betrayal by fidelity, now 
 
49 ID ALIA. 
 
 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 plea- 
 sures of her abundant life, had made her the compelled ac- 
 complice 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. Now it wound round 
 another life than hers. She would have accepted as retribu- 
 tive 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 his own noble rashness, but from the curse 
 of the love he bore her. 
 
 All she could do for him was to save his mortal life ; all 
 she could be faithful to him in was to withhold from betray- 
 ing him. Her nature was strong, and she could have wrung 
 her own heart, burned out her own desires, put away from 
 herself all peace for ever without faltering, could she thereby 
 have purchased oblivion and rest for him ; but these things 
 were unpurchasable ; his suffering through her was irremedi- 
 able and to endure this knowledge she had no strength. 
 
 Time passed ; she sat still there, 3s@ar hands clasped round 
 the rifle, her head drooped on its mouth, the flames now 
 dying low to darkness, and now upleaping toward the black 
 roof of the quarried rock. Motionless there, with the 
 tawny lustre of the fire on her, she looked like a statue of 
 bronze, the outline of that attitude of frozen vitality, of 
 mute despair, thrown out distinct in the hot ruddy light 
 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 snowdrift ; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew 
 nothing, till a hand touched her, and a voice was on her ear. 
 
 * O G-od ! what horror you gave me ! I traced the foot- 
 steps 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 
 
* UNTO HIS LAST: 49* 
 
 to him. In a breathless, pitiless silence they looked upon 
 each other, the red gleam of the flames between, 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 out 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 agony 
 of doubt. 
 
 t 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 called 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. 
 
 1 1 fear for you. G-o go go ! This place is death ! ' 
 ' Tour place is mine. Why are you here ? ' 
 She answered nothing ; she cowered there in the play of 
 the fire's glow, while ever and again her glance sought the 
 gloom of the cavern's recesses as a hunted stag seeks the 
 haunts of the forest whence his hunters may spring. She 
 had said that she would keep truth both to her tyrant and 
 to her saviour ; she had said that she would 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 abso- 
 lute and eternal. She was usurped by the one knowledge 
 of the jeopardy his life was in while near him was the crimi- 
 nal who before had sought it the criminal she had sworn 
 to screen. 
 
 His eyes softened with an infinite yearning as he saw 
 her misery ; it was not in him to harbour doubt while pity 
 could be needed ; his nature was long-suifering and blindly 
 generous ; he only remembered that the woman for whom 
 
492 ID ALIA. 
 
 lie would have died a thousand deaths was there in her 
 anguish before him anguish that 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 arid 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 sink 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. 
 
 6 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. 
 
 ' O Grod ! 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 
 woke 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 ; this danger, which filled 
 her with one instinct alone the instinct to tear him at alt 
 cost from this snake's nest which held his foe, to compel 
 
* UNTO HIS LAST: 493 
 
 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 toward the mouth of the cavern. 
 
 e Go go ! This place is death for you.' 
 
 ' What ! and you are here ? ' 
 
 The words were stern with the sternness of doubt and of 
 demand as he drew himself back from her hold, and looked 
 down into her face with a look that had never been in his 
 eyes before when they had gazed on hers. The longing of 
 his heart and the agony of suspicion strove within him 
 against each other. 
 
 A smile passed over her face ; the smile that is the re- 
 signation, the self-irony, of an absolute despair. 
 
 t 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. 
 
 4 You srnile at my misery ? Are you, then, the thing 
 that they say the beautiful, pitiless, glorious, infamous 
 temptress, seducing men to your will 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 lips 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, in- 
 coherent ; 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 bad no pity for 
 
494 ID ALIA. 
 
 herself; and here she h?*d pity exhaustless, and filled with 
 an unsparing- self-reproach for this man, who out of the 
 very nobility of his soul, the very guilelessnes of his trust, 
 fell thus beneath her feefc, 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 un- 
 pitying contempt and rigour of intellectual disdain and of 
 sensuous allurement ; here she was merciless unto 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 tran- 
 quillity which had had its terror even for the Greek. 
 
 ' "Who has called me a traitress ? ' 
 
 His eager eyes burned 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. 
 
 1 A traitor himself a liar who shall eat his lie in the 
 dust. Grod 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 against you ; I would not soil you 
 with so much as suspicion. O, 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 noble fearless light of faith 
 upon his face made her blind as with the lustre of the noon- 
 day sun. This was the man she must forsake for ever 
 while 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 he ? * she asked. 
 
 ' Victor Vane ; your guest, your friend/ 
 
 4 And he said?' 
 
UNTO HIS LAST 495 
 
 At the name her old superb irony flashed over her face, 
 her old superb wrath gleamed in her glance, her lofty height 
 rose erect as a palm, her eyes met his in all the fulness of 
 their regard. He needed no other denial of the calumnies 
 attainting her. 
 
 1 He said?' 
 
 ' "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.' 
 
 1 They were ? ' 
 
 e 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 grayness of death is approaching. He saw it, and 
 his voice came in broken rapid breaths, imperious and im- 
 ploring. 
 
 i Are they one, this Greek and my murderer ? ' 
 
 She answered him nothing. He saw a hot deep flush rise 
 upward over her face and bosom the flush of a bitter degra- 
 dation. 
 
 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 fire 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 
 slaughter. 
 
 * What is he to ^ou ? "Where is he now ? ' he panted. 
 
496 IDALIA. 
 
 * 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, seek- 
 ing their heat. She felt as she had done when once, in 
 a Livonian winter, the night-snows had overtaken and en- 
 shrouded 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 mis- 
 tress, 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 vou 
 not 1 ! ' 
 
 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. 
 
 1 Not you? Ah, would it were not, my love, my love, niy 
 love ! ' 
 
 In the yearning 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 morning 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. 
 
' UNTO HIS LAST.* 497 
 
 4 Wait. I love you. I cannot lie to you there. But 
 that ends, now and always. I say you have jDeen 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. Porgive ine, if you can ; 
 curse me, if you cannot. Whatever you do, leave me as 
 thought 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 in- 
 flexible. 
 
 He listened, watching her with a grave wondering pain 
 and pity ; he had his own thought of the meaning of her 
 words : and the patience and the belief in him were in- 
 finite. 
 
 ' Though death came by you, do you think that I would 
 leave you ? ' 
 
 The great salt tears sprang into her aching eyes ; in her 
 agony she could have set the muzzle of the rifle to her 
 forehead, and died there at his feet. She had a more mer- 
 ciless ordeal to live and make herself loathsome in his 
 sight. 
 
 ' No ; you would not,' she answered him. * But if dis- 
 honour came by me ? ' 
 
 His frame shook with a sudden shudder ; but still she 
 could not turn Jiway 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 awhile. 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 yon 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 
 adoration of this man, who out of the truth and the virtue 
 of his own heart judged and divined her life thus rightly, 
 
4; 8 1DALIA. 
 
 despite all weight of circumstance, all darkness of calumny. 
 But she knew that to leave him to think this was to bind 
 her to him for evermore. She knew that he musfc think 
 else than this ere lie would be forced from allegiance to 
 her. 
 
 'You think nobly, becanse you think by tho 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, t 
 judge you thus by the light of your own nature. You speafc 
 to me o* divorce of dishonour. You know the coward who 
 attempted my life, and will not render him up tr my justice. 
 These are bitter things ; yet I can see day through them. 
 It may be that you have fallen among much guilt, and yet 
 are unstained amid 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-rights. This is how I judge you. If I judge 
 rightly, I said to you that you could not stretch my tender- 
 ness farther than I would yield it, I say so now ; trust only 
 my love, it shall never fail you.' 
 
 ' O 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 fore- 
 head ; the evidences against her that her accuser had un- 
 coiled 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, sen- 
 suous, tyrannous, and self- chosen. 
 
'UNTO HIS LAST.' 499 
 
 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 
 bowed, broken 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. 
 
 4 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 name- 
 light ; it was colourless, and lined 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. 
 
 1 Ah, you are just and pitiful as a god ! Grive 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 alle- 
 giance. 
 
 * 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. 
 
 * Eirst 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 ? ' 
 
 2x2 
 
500 IDALIA. 
 
 She answered nothing ; the red shadow of the fire 
 gleamed upon her face, but it was not so dark and so hot 
 as the flush of shame that scorched there. His hands held 
 her like iron. The force of jealousy rose in him ; the fero- 
 city 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 abase- 
 ment. 
 
 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 j he 
 knew neither what he did nor said ; he knew only that she 
 could not meet his eyes, that she could not answer his chal- 
 lenge. 
 
 1 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 loud and hoarse rang from him down the stillness 
 of the vault ; he staggered where he stood, and loosed her 
 from his hold, and stretched his arms out mechanically, aa 
 though he had grown blind and sought support. The mer- 
 ciless 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 na- 
 ture, 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 i3 one man one man onlythat your mistress 
 ever loved.' 
 
 The words seemed whispered by a thousand voices that 
 rushed down the empty air; he had been betrayed by 
 
1 UNTO HIS LASTS 501 
 
 her that this criminal might be sheltered from his ven- 
 geance. 
 
 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 traitress ! a wanton ! a slave of your senses ! a 
 priestess of vice ! O 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 abase- 
 ment. 
 
 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 think I shall end your life and mine ! ' 
 
 Her eyes, heavy with the mists of a great misery, fathom- 
 less and hopeless like the eyes of the Pates in Greek sculp- 
 tures, gazed up to his. 
 
 ' Do you dream J 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 ? ' 
 
 The word rang in sullen echo down the stillness of the 
 cavern ; a hard bitter agony passed over her face. 
 
 '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 the 
 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. 
 
502 ID ALT A. 
 
 The baser passions of bis 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 their 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. 
 
 1 Love that is faithless and shameful ? What is that to 
 me ? If you have wronged my vilest foe, the woman /loved 
 is dead. 1 
 
 The sentence in its brevity had a despair deep as death. 
 
 "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 infi- 
 delity to his enemy would have been as dark in his sight 
 as infidelity to himself she honoured him with a great 
 reverence. 
 
 1 Tes. 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 desolation 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 that flashed its ruddy glow into the darkest shadows 
 of the cavern. As the flames darted into lustre they shed 
 their hue on the fair head of the G-reek stretched out in 
 all its velvet beauty from the deep gloom of the farther 
 vault. He drew back swiftly, as the tell-tale glare searched 
 for him and fell upon his face. 
 
 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 
 
<UNTO HIS LAST* 503 
 
 the flames. The slight limbs of the Athenian had no force 
 against the vengeance of the man who saw in him at once 
 his 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, so that full in their light and full in her 
 sight he should take his justice on the wretch who had 
 once struck at his life, and now took far more than life 
 from him. 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 end 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 thrust her back, and Hung her 
 heavily off him. 
 
 ' Tou 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 life, 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 other's throats ! You love 
 to see tiger's play ? 80, 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 snapped the bone, and wrenching 
 the knife from his hand, flung it far away into the depths 
 
504 1DALIA. 
 
 of the cavern, while the sinewy arms of the man he had 
 wronged gathered them fresh into their deadly embrace. 
 The slender southern limbs had no chance, the serpen- 
 tine 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 un- 
 bearable fire of the eyes he had left for the carrion birds 
 to tear. A sickly horror, a facination of terror, held him 
 breathless and unresisting to the will, of his foe ; Ercel- 
 doune 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. 
 
 * Grod ! ' 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? 7 
 
 She threw herself 011 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 ! ' 
 
 1 Eor your sake ! You dare plead by that plea to me ? ' 
 
 * O Heaven ! what matter what I plead by ! Grive me 
 his life give me his life ! ' 
 
 6 The life of a murderer to the prayer of a wanton ? A 
 fit gift ! Stand back, or I shall kill you with your para- 
 mour.' 
 
 ' 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 tempest 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 his 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 
 
'/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT: 505 
 
 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 down 
 through the gloom, and out to the air, to the sea, to the 
 day, ere his strength should fail him, and the stain of 
 bloodguiltiness lie on his hands. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIY. 
 
 ' I GIVE MY BODY FOR EVER TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT, 
 AND 
 
 CONRAD PHATJLCON slowly gathered himself from the 
 ground, faint, blind, staggering from the force with which 
 he had been thrown, and looked on where she had fallen 
 senseless, her proud head sunk on the gray wood-ashes, 
 her face white with the whiteness of death. He thought 
 her dead ; and a mortal dread fell on him, a mortal chill- 
 ness froze his heart. In his own cruel, tyrannous way 
 he loved her still, and he thought that he had killed her. 
 Moreover, she had been faithful to him. Listening and 
 watching there, he had found that she had kept her bond 
 to him, and had not betrayed him. The evil against her 
 died out from him ; a shame that was almost remorse stole 
 on him. Senseless there, like some fair statue shattered 
 down by a hand that stayed not for sake of beauty or of 
 genius, she smote his conscience, all dulled and crushed 
 and burned though it was. Throughout their lives he had 
 betrayed, and oppressed, and goaded, and dishonoured her; 
 throughout them she had done him good for evil, and 
 been true to him against his own untruth. This strength 
 and this fealty pierced him harder, because of their utter 
 unlikeness to the cowardice and the greed of his own 
 nature. 
 
 "With hands that trembled, and tears that stood thick 
 in his eyes, he touched her, and sought to revive her. His 
 temper was the temper of a child, and he had a child's 
 fleet facile emotions, a child's wanton cruelty and worth- 
 less repentance. Like a child, he could wring his bird's 
 throat without mercy, and weep useless tears when the 
 victim lay cold and huddled in death. 
 
506 IDALIA. 
 
 6 Idalia, Idalia ! ' he murmured softly. He feared the 
 sound of his own voice in that stillness. 
 
 After awhile sense returned to her; her lips parted with 
 slow struggling breaths, her veins grew warm, her eyelids 
 quivered and opened heavily to the glare of the resinous 
 flames. She knew him where he bent above her, and lifted 
 herself with a sudden breathless shuddering force. 
 
 ' Go, go, go ! Never dare come again in my sight ! ' 
 
 He lingered, scared and awed by the words and the ges- 
 ture, that were like an imprecation upon him, by the blaze 
 of her eyes as they unclosed, wide and wild, to the tawny 
 light. 
 
 1 Go, go ! ' she cried afresh. ' You could hear what he 
 deemed me, and hold your peace ! Go ; there are wrongs 
 gods themselves could not pardon.' 
 
 He knew it ; he turned slowly away, and went from her 
 glance, from her presence. 
 
 She rose faintly, and reeling lightly ; her eyes dwelt on 
 the black noiseless gloom and the checkered play of the 
 flames with that gleam, like the gleam of madness in them, 
 that had had irresistible terror for the man she banished. 
 She stood awhile looking out at the darkness that closed 
 her in, while for all the world without the morning sun 
 was shining. She was like one drunk with alcohol ; her 
 brain was stunned, yet her force intensified ; the power 
 and the vitality in her were strong almost to ferocity 
 the ferocity of that unbearable suffering which is in itself 
 a madness. Like some lithe-limbed leopardess, stung to 
 bloodthirstiness by the dastard shot that has struck it 
 from an unseen hand, she passed swiftly across the depths 
 of shadow to the place where the boy Berto lay sleeping 
 still in the intense slumber of long fatigue. 
 
 She laid her hand upon him. 
 
 'Wake.' 
 
 He did awaken, and sprang wonderingly from his bed of 
 dry sea-grasses. 
 
 6 Illustrissima ! "What is there ? ' 
 
 ' There is need of you.' 
 
 ' 1 am ready.' The fair, pale, boyish face had the calm 
 keenness of the Napoleonic type. ' It is ? ' 
 
 ' Treason.' 
 
 'Ah!' 
 
' / GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT: 507 
 
 His eyes caught the terrible meaning, his mouth the 
 terrible smile, that were on hers. 
 
 ' Treason against me ? If to me, so to all, so to Italy. 
 A traitor never sins once. Go, seek Lousadi and Veni ; 
 seek your brethren, seek any one of our people. They 
 know how to avenge the unpardonable sin. Bid them 
 bring him here ! I will give him his sentence. ( 
 
 The boy smiled the smile of a St. Just. 
 
 ' He has lived his life,' he said, in the old Roman idiom. 
 ' His name, Eccellenza ? ' 
 
 She stooped and breathed it on his ear the name of 
 Victor Yane. 
 
 "Without word or pause he bowed low, took his rifle, and 
 went on her errand. A child by years, yet already weighted 
 with the weariness and the wisdom of maturity, by reason 
 of the penalty he paid for having let his childish soul 
 brood over the burdens of the peoples, and dream of 
 liberties under the leprous shadow of a dominant priest- 
 hood, while other children laughed and played, and only 
 asked of life that the vine should give fruit, and the sleek 
 herds milk; that their gay feet should ply in the taran- 
 tala's measure, and the sweet sun dance in their own bright 
 eyes. 
 
 She, left there in solitude, and bound by her word to 
 keep the limits of her den, paced to and fro in the fire-lit 
 darkness in that fierce, futile rebellion with which she had 
 paced the dungeon of the Church. Her eyes were burn- 
 ing, her throat was swollen with long thirst, her teeth were 
 locked like a vice. All sense, thought, volition, seemed 
 scorched up and withered in one intolerable misery, one 
 unalterable shame. One thing alone seemed left to her 
 her vengeance. 
 
 She was of the nature which happiness makes sweet, 
 rich, generous, as southern sunlight ; which calamity ren- 
 ders fearless, strong, and nobly calm beneath all adverse 
 faith ; but which wrong and treachery in an instant turn 
 hard, dark, dangerous as the force of iron. 
 
 She laughed aloud in the loneliness. 
 
 ' He played the traitor so ! Well, he will learn how 
 we deal with traitors. Fool, fool, fool ! ' 
 
 Then, as that laugh died, the weakness of her bodily 
 frame, the agony of her soul, beat down the false alien 
 strength of bitter imssions. 
 
508 IDALIA. 
 
 ' 0, my love,' she moaned. i It was for your life, not for 
 mine.' 
 
 And she sank down amid the gray ashes by the fire that 
 was slowly dying out, with the stupor of exhaustion steal- 
 ing on her, and her eyes fastened on the gloom beyond, 
 strained, and senseless, and savage with pain, like those of 
 an animal that is chained to a stake for the torture. 
 , To her there could have been no martyrdom like the 
 martyrdom of undenied dishonour ; borne for his sake, and 
 incurred through the fulfilling of her oath. 
 
 Without, the boy Berto passed into the white not glare 
 of day. His errand was perilous; and he knew what 
 Tedeschi rods were like, how Papal steel could thrust ; 
 but he had the firm, silent heart that Nature early gives 
 to those whom she will hereafter make leaders among men, 
 and, having a purpose to accomplish, he did it unflinch- 
 ingly, through to the end. He went swiftly and straightly 
 now over the lonely shore, with the eye of a hawk, with 
 the speed of a greyhound, glancing on every side for those 
 he sought, and going warily, lest he should be seen by the 
 soldiers, whom he knew were out, more or less near, seek- 
 ing for the proscribed who had escaped them. He ran 
 swiftly, mile on mile ; reaching a crest of land, he paused 
 at last for breath. On one side lay the sea, now blue 
 and laughing in the full noonday ; on the other, mountain- 
 bounded, the low-lying lands, with their broad sunlit de- 
 solate tracks dotted with herds of swine and grazing buf- 
 faloes, with the thickets of wild myrtle and green pools 
 of water. There he saw what made him drop suddenly, 
 and hide like a young hare. 
 
 What he saw were the barrels of carbines among some 
 acanthus-covered stones, that screened a score or so of 
 soldiers, and farther onward the solitary figure of a man 
 in the clothing of the Capri fishers. The soldiers lay close, 
 their heads alone above the fallen blocks of shattered tra- 
 vestine ; the tall form of the Capriote, dark and towering 
 against the intense light, came onward, fast, blindly, tak- 
 ing heed of nothing, seeing nothing, in his path ; passing 
 straight through the horned cattle as though they were an 
 insect cloud, with his head bare to the heat, and his eyes 
 without sense in them ; headlong, as if he were deep in 
 drink, yet with a nameless, terrible madness on him that 
 had as terrible a majesty. 
 
'/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENTS 509 
 
 Fascinated by it, the Eoman boy watched him as he 
 reeled through the sunlight, while the browsing herds were 
 scattered by the tornado of his course. Others watched 
 him also, as he came nearer and nearer straight across the 
 plain, pausing for no obstacle, breaking through all vegeta- 
 tion, passing like the wind over the width of the country. 
 Then, rapidly as a lasso is thrown, the soldiers sprang upon 
 him as he passed the broken stones ; his arms, his limbs, 
 his body, were bound and knotted with cords ere he could 
 cast off one of the score of hands that seized him. Fettered, 
 powerless in an instant, with the naked blades flashing 
 round him, he stood like a wild horse netted by Gruachos, 
 his mighty muscles panting under the close-drawn bonds, 
 his eyes wide-opened on his captors, red and glaring and 
 senseless. There was no escape possible. 
 
 He stood a moment, looking vacantly down on his bowed 
 limbs and the savage wolf-eyes of the soldiery. All con- 
 sciousness seemed dead in him ; he had rushed on through 
 the scorching day, till, had they not arrested him thus, he 
 would have fallen sun-stricken ; he was passive from the 
 sheer intoxication of suffering, and he was weak in his body 
 also, for, from a wound on his shoulder, blood was oozing 
 through his shirt. Yet, as he felt the withes on his limbs, 
 he made one bound, like some magnificent forest animal 
 entrapped ; he fought against his captors then on the sheer 
 instinct of combat, with his head dropped like a bull of 
 Aragon when it charges to give to the torreador the fatal 
 blow of the cogida; and with his firm white teeth, the only 
 weapon left him, clenched hard and fast at the throat of the 
 soldier nearest him. 
 
 For some minutes there was a struggle that made even 
 the bold veins of the Eoman boy run chill weakened, 
 hampered, jammed, powerless as the captive was, he had 
 terror for his assailants, as the bull when its black hide is 
 steeped scarlet with gore, and its flanks are transfixed with 
 the lance-heads, carries death for picador and banderillo 
 still. Then, brute force conquered; the hirelings of Francis 
 were scarce better than brigands, and courage awakened no 
 homage in them. When they fell away a little i'rom each 
 other, and the dust of the parched plain that had risen in 
 clouds above the scene of the conflict sank, they had pulled 
 him down as with a lasso he was stretched there on the 
 
510 It) ALIA. 
 
 short burnt turf, his eyes distended, his mouth filled with 
 sand, his limbs lashed fast with cords. 
 
 To them he was but a Capri boatman, a thing of the 
 people, a scum of the sea, a rebel on whose life a good price 
 was set, an animal to be thrust to the shambles, how 
 roughly mattered little so that out of his heart they should 
 cut that which they sought to know. 
 
 They heaved him up, with a kick, by the ropes they had 
 passed round his waist and under his shoulders ; they 
 loosened a little the cords binding his ankles, and bade him 
 stand, holding a carbine at his head ; then they fastened 
 him by his belt to two of the strongest-built of their band, 
 and, with bayonets fixed in his rear, drove him on in their 
 centre as the Aragon bull is driven on at the point of the 
 lance from pasture to circus. 
 
 So they took their way through the white breadth of the 
 sunlight over the brown lonely plains, with their prisoner 
 set in their midst. He had never spoken once. 
 
 The child Berto rose slowly from his hiding-place in the 
 Jow myrtle-bushes ; many a time his hand had been on his 
 rifle to send a message of death through these wolves of the 
 Apennines who wore the king's livery, and dishonoured the 
 title of soldier ; as many times he had paused, knowing that 
 one shot could avail nothing, and that, were it fired, he 
 would only share the captivity of the man whom he sought 
 to release. As his slight girlish frame rose up out of the 
 leafy screen and against the sunny blue of the sky, his 
 teeth were set tight, hia pale features had grown like 
 marble. 
 
 ' They go to take him to their captain ; they will make 
 him tell where her refuge is. If he will not tell they have 
 rods, they have the water-torture drop, drop, drop, ah ! 
 till one is mad !' he muttered aloud, in his breathless rage. 
 He knew nothing of this stranger, save that he guessed him 
 by his dress to be the sailor whom he had heard had rescued 
 her from Taverna in the cavern his sleep had been too 
 profound to awake to any distant sound but the sight of 
 the conflict and the capture alone sufficed to rouse all the 
 revolutionary and patriotic soul that was in him. He 
 wrung his hands as he watched the soldiers move over the 
 plain, growing dark and distant as some far-off troop of 
 buiTalo. 
 
1 / GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.' 51! 
 
 * Ah, the brigands ! the assassins ! And I could not fire 
 a bullet for him !' he cried, in his solitude. ( Miladi must 
 know of it. She can say whether he will bear the scourge 
 and be silent. If I had thought he would speak, I would 
 have shot him dead before they could have got him. Almost 
 I wish I had. It had been surer.' 
 
 For the Homan lad knew the means passing the strength 
 of humanity to endure by which men who were mute 
 against royal or priestly will were made to find voice in that 
 fair dominion of Naples. 
 
 6 She must know/ he mused ; waited an instant, then 
 with the speed of a lapwing, once having the swell of the 
 hillocks between him. and the soldiery, he retraced his way 
 over the lowlands to whence he came, until out of the laugh- 
 ing brilliancy of the noon-sun he came into the darkness of 
 the cave, which now was only lightened by the low flicker of 
 the expiring pine-flames. 
 
 Her attitude had never changed. There was that in it, 
 as she sat beside the great heap of silvered ashes and of 
 burnt-out wood, that struck the boy's heart with a sudden 
 awe and fear. The abasement, the subjection, of a fearless 
 life has ever in it a certain terror the mournful terror of 
 every fallen greatness for those who look upon it. 
 
 He went softly to her, and spoke low in her ear before 
 she saw him by her. 
 
 ' Eccellenza, the soldiery are out.' 
 
 She gave no sign that she heard him. 
 
 ' The soldiers have him ! Can you trust him, Illustris- 
 shna? 5 
 
 She still seemed to hear nothing where her gaze was fixed 
 upon the dying fire. The boy touched her timidly. 
 
 ' The king's people have him, Miladi. Will he be true ?' 
 
 She started, as though some corpse had been galvanised 
 to life, and turned her face to him. 
 
 ' True ? Will who be true ? He whom all are false to ? 
 Yes, true to death true to death !' 
 
 He saw that her mind wandered, that she had not aright 
 understood him. 
 
 ' Eccellenza, hear me/ he said softly. 'The soldiers have 
 made that friend of yours their prisoner.' 
 
 A cry broke from her that woke all the echoes of the 
 cave, and thrilled the lad with its piteous wail ; she sprang 
 
512 ID ALIA. 
 
 to her feet, convulsed to passionate energy, to fresh 
 existence. 
 
 1 Prisoner ? The king's prisoner ? he ?' 
 
 The boy's voice sank to a whisper ; he had not thought it 
 would move her thus ; he knew she was well used to send 
 men out to die. 
 
 ' They took him on the shore there, by the ruins ; they 
 caught a brave man like a snared wolf, the cowards ! He 
 fought gods ! how he fought ; but they threw him like a 
 bull in the lasso. "Will he keep silence, think you ?' 
 
 ' Will he ? He will keep silence till they lay him mute 
 in death. Ah ! God reward you that you came to tell me ! 
 Keep silence ? He would perish by a thousand tortures 
 ere ever he would betray his darkest foe !' 
 
 She knew nothing that she uttered as the words poured 
 from her lips ; she put the wondering child aside, and swept 
 across the vault to the chill dense shadow where the Greek 
 had crouched ; she stood before him ere he had seen her 
 move. 
 
 * I break my word to you. I go from here.' 
 
 ' Go!' he rose dizzily ; the violence of his fall had stupe- 
 fied him. ' Go. Not where I do not follow.' 
 
 c Follow, if you will.' 
 
 4 "Where, then?' 
 
 ' To the soldiers of Francis.' 
 
 She laughed aloud as she spoke the laugh of a breaking 
 heart ; she knew that the cowardice of his nature would no 
 more let him pass out where she went than if gates of 
 adamant opposed him. He was startled and bewildered ; 
 he felt tenfold fear of her as she stood there in the shadows 
 before him, with that despair on her face and that lau^h on 
 her lips ; he had thought her dead or dying ; a superstitious 
 hesitation held him afraid and irresolute. 
 
 4 Wait wait,' he said, stretching his hands out to hold 
 her. * What is it you dream of? "What mad thing would 
 you do ?' 
 
 4 Save the life you and I have sent out to destruction.' 
 
 Before he could arrest her she had passed him, and was 
 far out beyond the watch-fire, and lost in the gloom of the 
 entrance passage; her hand was on the boy Berto's shoulder, 
 and thrust him out down the tortuous passage, swiftly and 
 silently up to the open air. When once more the darkness 
 
'I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.' 513 
 
 lay behind her, and on her face was the breath of the morn- 
 ing, she bent to him. 
 
 1 Which way? 1 
 
 He pointed to the northward, looking with wistful 
 anxiety in her face. 
 
 4 Miladi, what is it you will do ?' 
 
 i My duty late in the day.' 
 
 The hound had followed -at her side; she stooped and 
 kissed his forehead, then sent him from her back into the 
 shelter of the cavern, reluctant, yet obedient. 
 
 ' Will you not need him ?' the boy asked. 
 
 * JSTo. Even a dog's life is too noble to perish for mine. 
 See you to him, and cherish him for my sake.' 
 
 4 1 ! I go with you, Eccellenza.' 
 
 ' No go rather on the errand I gave you.* 
 
 <But- 
 
 ' Hush ! I have said none go with me. And for that 
 you came and told me this thing may the beauty of life 
 rest with you ever, my child !' 
 
 She passed her hands softly over his fair curls, with the 
 glow of the morning fallen full on her eyes, and the bright- 
 ness of the sea lying before her. 
 
 Then as rapidly and silently as a shadow passes she went 
 from him on her fatal way. 
 
 Over the heavy rugged ground the soldiers forced their 
 prisoner, with his arms lashed behind him, and the carbines 
 held at his temples. They were a dozen men under a cor- 
 poral, scouts sent out by the commandant of the gendarmerie 
 scouring the shore ; low scoundrels who had been thieves 
 ere they donned the king's uniform, and would be brigands 
 when they had doffed it. So that they dragged him to their 
 captain, and compelled him to tell what they sought from 
 him, they heeded nothing beyond. His bound feet stumbled 
 over the rough declivities ; his chest was stifled under the 
 crossed cords till he could barely breathe. "With every 
 jerked step that his guards took over the roughness of the 
 ground their shot might be lodged in his brain; the red 
 ants, disturbed in their hills, swarmed up his limbs and 
 clung there ; the open wound of his shoulder was cut by 
 the tight-drawn ropes ; still he said not one word, but went 
 on in their midst, with his bloodshot eyes staring out at 
 earth and sky, yet seeing nothing, and with a heavy, sullen, 
 murderous darkness on his face and on nis soul. 2 L 
 
5 M ID ALIA. 
 
 Of physical suffering lie was insensible ; the deaclness of 
 despair had numbed in him all corporeal consciousness. 
 There had only survived in him the mere mechanical brute 
 instincts of defence and of resistance. Beaten in these, he 
 resigned himself passively, dumbly ; too vast a ruin had 
 fallen on his life for him to heed what befell his body. So 
 far as thought still was distinct to him, so far as any ray of 
 it pierced the blackness of desolation in which every memory 
 save one was lost, he wished that they would strike him 
 dead upon the plain they traversed. 
 
 They wondered that, cramped and bruised as he was, and 
 strong to ferocity as they had found him, he went with them, 
 thus mutely and unresistingly ; they did not note the keen, 
 hard, ravenous, longing look, as of one starving at sight of 
 food, that his eyes ever and again cast upon the steel tubes 
 of the slanted carbines that carried death and oblivion so 
 near, and yet denied them to him. 
 
 Beyond this he knew nothing ; he was dragged over the 
 low-lying country at a pace as swift as the heat of the day 
 and the unevenness of the uncertain paths would allow ; 
 whether he had force to bear it, in the sultry noontide of 
 summer, they never heeded. If he had fallen, they would 
 have pulled him on still, as best they might, with his head 
 striking the stones. He knew nothing ; the sunlight was 
 like the blaze of fire ever about him ; the hard hot skies 
 seemed to glitter as brass ; water, mountain, the darkness 
 of myrtle, the rush of wild birds, the blue gleam of the sea, 
 the brown baked earth beneath his feet : these were all 
 blurred shapeless shadows to him, while his eyes looked out, 
 straight onward, with the red dusky mastiff flame in them 
 that made his guards mutter among themselves that this 
 man was mad, and should be shot like a mad dog. 
 
 And they judged right : he was mad, with the Othello 
 madness that believes what it adores dishonoured. 
 
 At last their march paused ; the silence was broken by 
 the noise of loosened tongues ; there were stir, and tumult, 
 and the clash of arms around them ; they had joined their 
 comrades, they had brought their prisoner to their captain 
 to be judged. Under some mighty pillars of yellow traves- 
 tine, the lonely relics of some forgotten temple, four or five 
 score of black-browed, loose-harnessed soldiers, the worst 
 of a worthless army, were scattered, lying full length in the 
 
' / GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. 9 515 
 
 shade, taking their noonday meal, or slaking their thirst at 
 a sluggish noxious streamlet stealing by the columns' base 
 among the violet-roots. They had been checked a moment 
 in their search by the sea for the fugitives ; and lay like 
 hot, panting, ferocious dogs, ready to rise and ue their 
 teeth at a moment's tempting. 
 
 They swarmed round him. like a pack of wolves, but no 
 change came on his face; with a hundred soldiers round 
 him, lean, savage, ruffianly, for the most part, as any Abruz- 
 zian banditti with the glitter of their steel, the muzzles of 
 their carbines, the yelling of their oaths, the clamour of 
 their triumph about him where he stood powerless in their 
 midst, they could not tell that he even saw them there. His 
 eyes never glanced to them : they looked still, straightly, 
 sightlessly, to the low line where sea touched sky. There 
 was no consciousness in them ; but there was that reddened 
 light that stilled their riot of exultation with a vague sense 
 of danger in this chained man, standing so calmly in their 
 hostile crowd. 
 
 They fell back as their commander, told of the capture, 
 came from the nook of shadow, where, with his subaltern, 
 he had been at rest apart. He was little more than a 
 guerillero a coarse, rough, careless, Calabrian - born 
 filibuster. 
 
 He glanced over the captive brought him, in whom he, 
 like his men, saw but a fisher of Capri. 
 
 ' A fine animal/ he muttered, as he glanced over a paper 
 of instructions, comparing the details there with the per- 
 sonal appearance of his prisoner. c So ! you are the sacri- 
 legious scoundrel who broke into the monastery of Taverna, 
 and used foul violence against the august person of his 
 sacred grace Yillaflor!' 
 
 ' 1 am.' 
 
 Erceldoune answered mechanically ; his tongue clove to 
 his mouth ; his voice was hoarse and savage. 
 
 * Basta ! you are in haste to be hanged !' swore the Cala- 
 brian, half disappointed at an avowal which left him no 
 excuse for the ingenuity of threat and torture. c Since you 
 confess yourself guilty, go farther, and tell us what have 
 you done with the bona roba you stole from her prison ?' 
 
 The word struck like the stroke of lightning. 
 
 Life, sense, name, grief, rage, rushed over his hearer 
 
 2 i,2 
 
516 ID ALIA. 
 
 with a torrent's force; the foam gathered on his lips ; he 
 strained for a moment like a fettered lion at his bonds. 
 Then he was still as with the stillness of death. 
 
 ' Speak where is she ?' 
 
 He made no answer. 
 
 ' Have you no tongue ? "We will make you find it, and 
 use it. Tell me, quick, where is this woman hidden ?' 
 
 His vengeance was in his hands ; one word, one gesture 
 only, to where the sea-cave lay, and his wrongs would be 
 avenged, without the lifting of his hand. 
 
 i Speak out,' hissed the soldier, whose rage was rising. 
 ' Where is this empress democrat ? Where does she hide ? 
 She knew how to use that buffalo strength of yours ; but 
 she will fool you, once she be free. We know what Miladi 
 is ! Give her to us ; and you may save yourself a necklace 
 of hemp, mayhap.' 
 
 There was still no answer to him ; the great dark eyes of 
 his captive looked out, far beyond him, far beyond all 
 around them, with a dry, vacant, senseless agony in them 
 that never changed. 
 
 4 Has the sorceress put a spell on you?' swore the Cala- 
 brian. * Look you you are safe to go to the gallows. 
 Corpo di Christo ! it will be odds if his Grace do not think 
 a quick twitch of the noose too gentle a punishment for 
 you : Monsignore has a long arm and a heavy hand. You 
 are a fine animal it were a pity all that sinew should rot 
 in quick-lime ; we will get your life saved somehow if you 
 put us this minute on the track of your mistress.' 
 
 He might never have spoken for aught by which he could 
 tell that he was heard. The threat that his body would be 
 given to slaughter had little import to the man in whom au 
 life, save the mere breath of existence, had already been slain 
 by worse than a thousand deaths. 
 
 ' Have you no voice ?' yelled the commander, infuriated 
 that his unwonted oifer of mercy met no response. ' We 
 will find a way to make you speak, with your will or 
 against it. Once for all will you show us where this 
 woman is sheltered ?' 
 'No.' 
 
 The Calabrian gnashed liis glittering teeth. 
 'Altro! You defy us, you hound? We will see how 
 Jong that obstinacy lasts. I have licence to deal with you 
 
*/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENTS 517 
 
 as I see fit; to string you up by the throat to that column, 
 if I judge it right in the need of my service. We will 
 soon make you find voice, you dog of a rebel ! Here, take 
 him, and lash him to that pillar there in the full suri ! ' 
 
 He was already bound fast, in cords that crossed and re- 
 crossed, and left him scarce liberty to draw the air through 
 his lungs ; it was an easy matter to fasten him to the shaft 
 of the shattered column that stood in the glare of the noon, 
 unshaded even by a branch or a coil of ivy. 
 
 * Strip his shoulders, and let the gnats find him out/ 
 laughed the Calabriau, moving away to finish his meal and 
 take a midday slumber. l We will see if they and his thirst 
 do not make him give tongue.' 
 
 He was obeyed. 
 
 They stripped the iinen from his chest and shoulders, 
 and left him, lashed with cords to the travestine in the 
 fullest force of the vertical rays ; his wound uncovered, and 
 his head bare. At his feet ran the half-dry brook. They 
 went themselves into the shadow, and lay laughing, swear- 
 ing, mocking, taunting, chanting obscene songs, and hold- 
 ing up to him in the distance the wine-cans they had 
 drained. 
 
 The insults passed by Erceldoune unnoted, the jeers un- 
 heard ; in the desolation of his life they were known no 
 more than the sting of an insect is felt by one whom the 
 smoke and flame of a burning pile is consuming. 
 
 Yet they had chained him. to a martydrom. 
 
 The intense heat poured upon his brain ; the scorching 
 light quivered about him ; his veins swelled till it seemed, 
 with every fresh pulse of the blood, they must burst ; the 
 innumerable winged insects, humming through the summer 
 hours, attracted one by another, settled on his naked breast, 
 and thrust their antennae into the bruised skin, and pierced 
 their stings into the opening of the wound. He could not 
 free his hands to brush one of them away. His throat was 
 dry as leather ; his tongue was swollen and black ; his thirst 
 was unbearable ; and at his feet the shallow water stole to 
 madden him with the murmur of the cool ripples he could 
 not touch. The moments were as hours; the minutes as 
 years. The earth, the air, the sky, were as one vast fur- 
 nace that enclosed him ; where the jagged and beating 
 nerves had been laid open by the hatchet-stroke, the buz- 
 
5iS tDALIA. 
 
 zing gnats alit, and clove, and stung, and feasted. "Weak- 
 lier men would have had the mercy of insensibility ; with 
 him the vital strength, the indestructible force of life with- 
 in him, kept every nerve and every sense strung to their 
 keenest under the torture. 
 
 Tefc when they came to him ever and ever again, and 
 asked him if he would speak at last, his silence remained 
 unbroken. He was faithful to those who had betrayed 
 him. 
 
 He could receive release, as he could take vengeance, 
 by the utterance of one word. He could deliver over his 
 assassin to justice, and unloose his traitress to the doom 
 that waited her, by the same sign that should free him 
 from this slow excruciating death. He could cease to 
 suffer, and become the just accuser of those by whom he 
 was destroyed. He could sever his bonds, and divide those 
 whose guilty union was a worse agony to him than it lay in 
 the power of his torturers to deal. His own fate and theirs 
 rested in his choice. 
 
 And he bore his martyrdom and kept silence. The 
 supreme hour of his passion had come to him and tempted 
 him, and found him strong. The purity of his honour 
 would not let him take a traitorous shame even against 
 those who dealt him treachery ; the great love in him could 
 not forsake her utterly, although itself forsaken and be- 
 trayed. 
 
 The bond of his word was as religion to him still ; and 
 in his sight, though fallen, lost, dishonoured, she still was 
 sacred. 
 
 So far as thought could come to him in his agony, his 
 thought was still to save her. 
 
 And he hung there, bound by the waist, with the blaze 
 of the sun in his blind eyes and on his throbbing brain, and 
 the clouds of the booming circling gossamer wings growing- 
 darker and larger as his tormentors swarmed clown to fasten 
 upon him. 
 
 One of the soldiers^ whom he had heavily bruised in the 
 etruggle for his capture, came out of the shade and dipped 
 a wooden cup in the 'brook, and held it just beyond the 
 reach of his lips. 
 
 1 Speak, and you shall have drink ! ' 
 
 His throat was "baked like burnt clay ; his mouth was 
 
/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.' 519 
 
 full of dust ; his tongue was cloven to his teeth ; he 
 longed for water with the death thirst of the desert. 
 
 The Italian reached and touched his beard with the rim 
 of the cup, so that the coolness of the draught mocked him 
 close. 
 
 1 "Will you speak ? ' 
 
 He faintly moved his head in denial. 
 
 The soldier laughed with taunting mirth, and shook the 
 water from the bowl out on to the herbage at his feet ; he 
 knew that every wasted drop would be an added pang. 
 
 Still he never spoke. 
 
 They left him again to the Tantalus torture. He had 
 his freedom in his own choice ; in the utterance of one 
 word ; and he let them do their worst upon him rather 
 than turn traitor to the woman whom he held his traitress. 
 
 They came and grouped about the pillar, and looked up 
 in his face again with riotous laughter and foul-mouthed 
 outrage at him in his defeucelessness. The brazen sky 
 burned above in pitiless lire $ the smiling cruelty of the 
 salt sea mocked him with its tossing sunlit freshness ; the 
 red ants were slowly climbing the base of the column, 
 scenting blood, and swarming upward to fasten on him ; 
 through the air the first mosquito winged its way, herald of 
 troops to come. 
 
 ' Will you answer now ? ' asked the chief. 
 
 He turned his aching scorching eyes on them, while his 
 mouth could scarcely whisper the reply : 
 
 'No!' 
 
 The Calabrian flung himself round on his men in the 
 rear. 
 
 * Take him down, and scourge him till you cut the truth 
 out of his heart ! ' 
 
 They were like a herd of Pyrenean dogs ; the sight of 
 prey roused all their ravenous instincts. Men tasting once 
 the power and the pleasure of torture rarely pause till they 
 lose their sport to the king-player, Death. 
 
 They unbound him from the column, and fastened him 
 afresh to a low block of stone, stripped to the waist, so that 
 his chest and back should be left undefended for the curling 
 throngs of the lash ; his face was set still seaward, so that 
 the fair breadth of the free waters mocked him with its 
 liberty, His head hung heavily downward j throes of 
 
520 IDALIA. 
 
 pain, like the scorching of fire, throbbed through his 
 wounded flesh, the rushing of pent-up blood filled his lungs, 
 his brain, his ears, his throat to suffocation. There was a 
 pause of some moments ; they were weaving together some 
 cords and some leathern belts into the thing they needed. 
 The chief sauntered near him once more, and looked at 
 him doubtingly : he knew the Capri mariners could be 
 dogged in brainless obstinacy as any Capri mule, but he 
 saw that this man's endurance was far more than the mere 
 mute, contumacious persistence of a sullen ignorance. 
 He struck away, half compassionately, a gnat that was 
 alighting on the prisoner's bare breast. 
 
 * You are too fine a brute to be cut in pieces with the 
 lash. Look you, they have tough arms have my men ; 
 they will make their belts lay your lungs open if you keep 
 silent. Do you know how the leather can cut a man's 
 flesh ? ' 
 
 He bent his head in assent; in Russia he had seen a serf 
 die under the scourge. 
 
 * You do ? 'Well, that grand frame of yours will not 
 spare you ; they will mash it to pulp. "Will you not speak 
 now?' 
 
 * I have answered.' 
 
 * You are a fool and a madman ! 5 swore the Calabrian. 
 ' You lose your life for a worthless wuman.' 
 
 A spasm that the bodily torture had never brought there 
 passed over his captive's face. He kept silence still. 
 
 The Italian shrugged his shoulders and strolled away. 
 
 There was a moment's longer pause, then two soldiers 
 came to their work ; they had the whips that they had 
 made, with the heavy buckles at the end of the belts serv- 
 ing as the leaden points with which the lash is commonly 
 weighted. The blows would fall from either side as the 
 strokes of the woodman's hatchet fall on a tree. The rest 
 of the band closed round in a semicircle, their commandant 
 slightly in advance. 
 
 Then then only as he saw the scourges in their hands, 
 and knew the indignity that approached him, the mute 
 calm of his endurance, the apathy of that desolation of the 
 heart in which all bodily suffering passes as naught, changed 
 and broke. All ths fire of his nature, all the pride of his 
 race, all the dignity of his manhood, flashed to sudden lite ; 
 
* / GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.' 521 
 
 he never spoke, he was bound, motionless, but he raised 
 his head and looked them full in the eyes, with all the 
 haughty passion of his fearless blood once more aflame. It 
 was but one look ; his arm could not avenge him, nor his 
 strength resist the outrage ; yet before it they paused and 
 quailed. For the instant they stood irresolute, cowed by 
 the challenge of his unshrinking leonine regard ; then, 
 savage at their own sense of shame, they threw themselves 
 forward, the metal -weighted throngs swirled round their 
 heads, gathering full force to curl round him like a serpent's 
 folds ; the watching soldiery drew deep noiseless breaths in 
 silence, the hot hushed air of noon had not a sound upon 
 it ; he stood erect to his full height, the courage of the 
 soul victorious over the torture of the body ; before the 
 uplifted hands could fall, a single word echoed down through 
 the stillness 'Wait! 1 
 
 The scourgers paused ; the chief swung round to see who 
 dared bid his men's obedience halt ; into their startled 
 crowd came the woman they sought. Against the glitter 
 of the sea and the brown desolation of the plains they 
 saw Idalia. 
 
 From the captive they had bound a long bitter cry rang 
 a cry that the lash would not have forced from him, 
 though it should have cut his heart in twain. 
 
 Breathless as a long-chased stag, she pressed her way to 
 him and fell at his feet, and strove with both hands to 
 wrench apart the knots that held him, and looked upward 
 at his face with the dumb agony of the brute's. The 
 Calabrian seized her, and drew her back; he knew her 
 but by name, and her face was strange to him. 
 
 ' Woman ! how dare you ? Who are you ? * 
 
 ' I am Idalia Vassalis. Take me bind me scourge 
 me. But let the guiltless go.' 
 
 The rough mountaineer looked at her amazed, awed, 
 dazzled, doubting his own senses. 
 
 ' You are the Countess Vassalis ? ' he echoed slowly. 
 
 There in her mask robes, with the gold all soiled and 
 blackened, the scarlet aflame against the sun, breathless, 
 worn, exhausted, yet with such command in her eyes, with 
 such misery on her face, with such majesty in her glance, 
 she moved him to fear as the sight of Cleopatra, captive, 
 would have moved a Latin boor of the Cohorts. 
 
.522 IDALIA. 
 
 ' Yes, yes, yes ! Are there no men here who can swear 
 to me ? I am the rebel you seek. Take me ; do what you 
 will with me ; deliver me up to your masters but free that 
 man who is innocent! ' 
 
 The Calabrian shaded his eyes with his hand ; he felt 
 giddy before her. 
 
 ' Is it she ? ' he whispered a comrade. 
 
 * It is she ! ' said a Lombard from the ranks. ' I saw her 
 before Yerona ; my shot killed a horse under her.' 
 
 She turned her head to the soldier. 
 
 * I thank you for your witness. ISTow do your duty. 
 Bind me, and free your prisoner.' 
 
 ' Free him ! So ! he has as much guilt as you.' 
 ' He has no guilt. You tortured him to discover me ; 
 now that I yield myself to you, what plea have you to hold 
 him longer ? Unloose him, I say ; fasten me there in his 
 stead ; use those thongs upon me ; it will not be the first 
 time you scourged a woman. Take him down, and bind me 
 there in his place, by every justice in earth and heaven ! ' 
 
 Erceldoune's voice crossed her own, husky, and forced 
 with difficulty from his swollen parched throat. 
 ' Do not heed her. She speaks only to save me 
 The Calabrian laughed coarsely. 
 
 1 Ah ! This fine Capriote dog, is he your love toy, then, 
 Illustrissima ? ' 
 
 ' He is my victim. May not that better release him ? ' 
 The coarse outrage had no power to wound her ; she had 
 no consciousness, except of the man who, for her sake, was 
 bound in the cruel scorching noonday well-nigh to the 
 pangs of a crucifixion. 'Is he to suffer for those who have 
 wronged him ? He does so when he suffers for me. If I 
 be your enemy, I am tenfold his ; will not that quell your 
 rage against him ? I have ruined him ; that should give 
 him grace in your sight. From first to last he has been 
 wronged by me. Plundered, wounded, left for dead by 
 those who were of my people ; used by me, forsaken by 
 me, driven to peril and bondage by me has he not more 
 to hate me for than you ? In the nobility of his heart he 
 shields me still, because he once has pledged me shelter, be- 
 cause his honour still is greater even than his immeasurable 
 wrongs ; but he does so only because he is above even his 
 own just vengeance, only because he will not purchase 
 freedom even at cost of lives that are his curse.' 
 
*/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT. 1 523 
 
 She sank down at his feet once more ; she strove to rend 
 his bonds asunder ; he seemed to her great as never man 
 were great in that silent martyrdom, endured for those 
 who had betrayed him. He looked down on her, doubt- 
 ing his own senses, doubting that the burning of the sun 
 made him, in delirium, dream the words he heard, the face 
 he saw. 
 
 1 Free him ! ' she cried aloud, with that ferocity of un- 
 bearable misery which makes the gentlest savage. ' What 
 plea have you to hold him ? I am here ; I surrender to 
 you. Take me to king or priest, as you choose ; give me 
 only his liberty for mine ! ' 
 
 Instinctively his heart went out to save her ; his con- 
 sciousness awakened through the feverish mists of pain 
 enough to know that remorse flung her here to perish for 
 him, enough by unconsidered impiflse to seek to save her 
 still. 
 
 4 Do not heed her, I say/ his lips breathed hoarsely. ' She 
 only speaks to spare me ' 
 
 4 Ho ! ' laughed the Calabrian, ' how you quarrel for the 
 kiss of the lash! Now we have you we will keep you 
 both.' 
 
 She turned on him with her old imperious command. 
 
 ' You will not dare to take his life ! He is of England 
 not of Italy. Such things as he has done against your 
 king and your laws he has done never for himself, only at my 
 instance ' 
 
 ' A likely tale, to screen your fellow-rebels, miladi ! Tell 
 it to more credulous hearers ' 
 
 1 You think that J speak falsely ? ' 
 
 For the moment the old glorious challenge of her dis- 
 dainful pride beamed from her face ; they who saw it, 
 thought, despite themselves, that if this woman were not 
 above a lie, then never truth was uttered in this world. 
 
 1 It is no matter how you speak,' the Italian made her 
 answer ; ' you are my prisoners. I shall but give you over 
 to those who will judge you.' 
 
 ' Give me, then. Am I not here that you may do your 
 worst with me ? But by all justice, all mercy, all pity, leave 
 him free ! ' 
 
 * It is impossible ! ' 
 
 She threw herself before him j she let her fallen hair 
 
5^4 ID ALIA. 
 
 bathe his feet, she poured out the vivid utterances of an 
 eloquence that none ever heard unmoved, she sued to him 
 as never for herself would she have sued an emperor ; for 
 the orfly time in her life she abased herself to supplication 
 she to whom the praying of such a prayer was worse 
 than the endurance of any chastisement. 
 
 The CalabriaiT heard her, startled, dazzled, shaken, but 
 he would not yield. 
 
 'It is too late,' he said abruptly. 'Miladi, why did you 
 not think before what serving you might cost to a brave 
 man ? You treated him like a dog : well, he must die a 
 dog's death. The blame of it is not mine.' 
 
 There was a certain pathos in the words ; he was brave 
 enough himself to honour the courage he had so mercilessly 
 tried ; her head sank as though the rebuke of Deity spoke 
 by the rough soldier's mouth ; she crouched, with a low 
 moan like a stricken animaPs, at the foot of the column 
 where Erceldoune was bound. 
 
 He turned on her his strained and aching eyes. 
 
 ' Why have you so much mercy on my body ? ' 
 
 There was an infinite reproach in the infinite patience of 
 the wondering words. "Why had she who had slain his soul, 
 his spirit, his hope, all in him that made the living of his 
 life of any peace, of any worth, thus had mercy on the mere 
 torture of limb and nerve and sinew ? Why did she who 
 had been so pitiless, so wanton in her cruelty, feel compas- 
 sion and contrition before the coarse indifferent doom of 
 merely physical pain ? 
 
 The Calabrian looked at them in silence, then motioned 
 to his men. 
 
 4 Take them from the sun-glare, and bind them together.' 
 
 In a sense he felt pity, because he felt the homage of 
 courage to courage, for this man whom he had seen so 
 loyal at such awful cost ; but for her he had no emotion, 
 save dread of her as a sorceress, save wrath against her 
 for one whose fell temptations had been so fatal and so 
 ruthless. 
 
 She made no resistance ; she never felt the grating of 
 the leathern thongs upon her wrists ; she had lost all 
 consciousness of personal suffering ; she had come to de- 
 liver up her life for his, and the sacrifice was given too late ; 
 she had no knowledge left her save this, no heed for what- 
 
' / GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENTS 525 
 
 soever they might do to her, though she had given herself 
 back to a worse captivity than the prison of the grave. As 
 the leash with which the soldiers coupled them like hounds 
 was pulled tighter, drawing her wrists together, and up- 
 ward where she was sunk on the parched turf at his feet, 
 her hand touched his ; he shuddered as he had never done 
 when the mosquito had thrust its sting into his unshielded 
 breast. 
 
 She felt rather than saw that mute agony of the bound, 
 defenceless, powerless limbs ; it passed through her in ten- 
 fold bitterness. This man, who had held himself unworthy 
 to touch but the hem of her garment, who had deemed 
 himself blessed as with the gift of gods if her eyes but 
 dwelt with a smile on his, now shrank from the contact 
 of her hand as from pollution, from iniquity. 
 
 ' Take me away,' she moaned wearily. ' Would you 
 chain him to his murderess ? ' 
 
 They hesitated, and looked toward their chief. 
 
 4 Leave me, and take him down ! ' she said, with that 
 vibration in her voice that scared them like startled sheep. 
 ' He dies there, and you have not mercy enough even to 
 lift him up one drop of water, even to thrust away one 
 sting that fastens on him. He is dying, I say. If you 
 are men, and not fiends, unloose him ! ' 
 
 They had been as fiends in their sport; the southern 
 cruelty that will rend a bird's wings from its body, or a 
 butterfly's dainty beauty asunder, laughing softly all the 
 while, had been awakened in them ; they were loth to quit 
 its indulgence. 
 
 He looked as though she said aright, and that he was 
 dying lashed there to the column ; his eyes were blood-red, 
 his mouth open and swollen, his forehead purple with 
 suffused blood ; his heart beat visibly, great slow laboured 
 throbs, under the cords ; he was fast losing consciousness. 
 
 She wrenched herself from their hold, and caught the 
 wooden cup the soldier had cast down, and filled it with 
 the water of the stagnant stream, and held it upward to his 
 lips ; he quivered from head to foot, and shrank from the 
 draught that through the parching heat he had been 
 athirst for with so deadly a longing. 
 
 ' Do not torture me more ! ' 
 
 The \vhisper was almost inarticulate from Ms dry 
 
526 IDALIA* 
 
 stiffened lips ; the cup fell from her hold. She knew his 
 meaning ; remembered the memory which made the thirst 
 that he endured less torture than that action from, her 
 hand. She turned passionately on the nearest soldiers. , : 
 -: t * Show some human mercy ! Bind me there in hi* stead, 
 tear me limb from limb as children tear the fire-flies; it 
 will be rarer pastime for you to put a woman to torment ! 
 You know what matter of thing is justice ? Then, if you 
 do, b}r every law of justice make me suffer, and spare 
 him.' 
 
 Under their drooping lids, his eyes lightened a moment 
 with a gleam of consciousness : his instinct was still for 
 her defence. 
 
 *Let me be. So best/ he said faintly. 'It will soon 
 end,' 
 
 She was worthless, she had so declared herself ; she was 
 his traitress and another's paramour; yet the loyalty in 
 him survived still still to lay his life down for her had its 
 sweetness to him. 
 
 A shrill wailing cry broke from her like that of some 
 creature perishing in the trough of waves or under billowy 
 flames > 
 
 * O Christ ! have you no pity ? Take him. down while 
 there is breath in him, and bind me there in his stead. I 
 will never bid you spare me one pang ! ' 
 
 They looked doubtfully at their chief ; he signed them 
 to obey her. 
 
 ( She says justly ; it is she who ought to suffer. Loose 
 him and bring him out of the sun,' 
 
 They unloosened the knotted cords that swathed hi a 
 limbs to the column ; when they were wholly unfastenc4 
 he swayed forward, his head fell on his breast, his body 
 bent like a reed, there was foam upon his beard, and his 
 eyes were closed. 
 
 A great stillness came then upon the soldiery about the 
 place ; through them, under their breath, they whispered 
 that their work was done that he was dead. 
 
 She alone thought not as they thought, that his sacrifice 
 for her was crowned by the last sacrifice of all. 
 ' He is not dead,' she said simply. 
 
 There was a strange calmness and certainty in the words; 
 that thrilled through those who heard them : they looked 
 
/ GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENTS 597 
 
 at her, neither touching nor opposing her ; she had terror 
 for them terror for them as of some great, fallen, half - 
 shameful, and half-glorious thing. Every intense passion 
 carries its reaction of fear upon those who witness it ; hers 
 had such on them now. They dimly felt that if they, in 
 their wanton cruelty, had been the actual murderers of 
 this man, she knew herself far more utterly his destroyer 
 than they could be, who had but harmed his mortal form. 
 
 1 He is not dead,' she said, with that vibration of an ex- 
 quisite joy crossing the icy desolation of despair which 
 smote the most callous there to some vague sense of un- 
 swerving pain ; as though her voice reached him, he 
 raised himself slightly, where two soldiers held up his 
 sinking frame, his lips gasped for breath, his eyes un- 
 closed to the dazzling gleam of the day, he stood erect, 
 while a loud cry broke from him 
 
 1 O God ! I cannot dio ! ' 
 
 The English words missed the listening southern ears ; 
 she alone knew the agony in them of the great imperish- 
 able strength that would not let life leave him, that would 
 survive all which strove to sky it survive to keep sensa- 
 tion, memory, knowledge in him, and to refuse the only 
 mercy he could ever know, the mercy of oblivion and an- 
 nihilation. 
 
 The Calabrian, who had ordered him this torture, looked 
 softened, and went and laid his hand upon his prisoner's 
 shoulder. 
 
 * You are a fine brute. I am sorry you provoked us. See 
 here this woman is the guiltier : she says so ; she is come 
 to suffer in your stead.' 
 
 He heard, though all his senses still were dim though 
 earth, and sea, and sky, and the ring of the armed men, and 
 her face in the white furnace-heat of the sunlight were all 
 one misty blaze of colour to him. He heard, and his lips 
 moved faintly. 
 
 She shall not suffer for me.* 
 
 So far as thought could be clear to him, he thought that, 
 having sinned so deeply against him, remorse at the last 
 had struck her, and drawn her to bear witness for him ; he 
 thought that there yet dwelt in her too much still of native 
 courage, of inborn nobility, to let her rest in safety and 
 security, while through h^r sin, and to give her freedom, 
 
5=8 IDALIA. 
 
 he endured the doom tp which she had cast him out ; he 
 thought that, so far, she was true to herself, though false 
 with worse than a Delilah's treachery to him. To take 
 vengeance upon her was a poor, vain, wretched quittance 
 that never glanced by him ; a grossness, a baseness that 
 could have no place with him ; his great tortured passion 
 could no more have slaked itself in such a payment than it 
 could have wreaked its wrong by the bruising and the mar- 
 ring of that mere loveliness of form which had been the 
 lure and instrument of his destruction. 
 
 The Italian swore a heavy oath. 
 
 i Are you mad ? Why, of her own testimony she has 
 been your ruin ! ' 
 
 He saw his captive's breast heave with a mute, tearless, 
 convulsed sob, that no corporeal torment had ever wrung 
 from him. 
 
 1 Of a woman's compassion she says it out of her own 
 mouth you would not condemn her ? ' 
 
 It was the sole denial, the sole evasion of the truth that 
 ever his voice had spoken. To save himself, he would not 
 have borrowed the faintest likeness of a lie ; but in the 
 dizzy mists of his reeling senses, in the exhaustion of in- 
 tense pain, this one instinct remained with him to save 
 her even from herself, to screen her even from the justice 
 that would avenge him. 
 
 As she heard, where she stood bound, held back by the 
 guards who had seized her, her eyes met his across the 
 breadth that was between them, of hard, hot, white, cruel 
 light; guilty or guiltless, faithful or faithless, by that 
 look he knew that she loved him as no woman will love 
 twice. 
 
 His head sank, his eyelids closed, he shivered in the 
 scorching (Jay. She loved him, or she had not coma 
 thither she loved him, or never that language had burned 
 for him in her glance. But this love love of the trai- 
 tress, of the voluptuous betrayer, of the temptress of sin, of 
 the ' queen of evil, lady of lust ' what was this to him ? 
 
 He could have better borne to see her lie dead at his 
 feet. 
 
 Some touch of veneration for the courage they had wit- 
 nessed, for the self-sacrifice they vaguely understood, had 
 corne upon the brigands round him -brigands in their 
 
1 I GIVE MY BODY TO INHERIT PUNISHMENT.' 529 
 
 coarseness, their training, and their brutality, though they 
 wore the livery of a monarchy. They had seen that this 
 man could hold his own in contest with the strength, and 
 the rage, and the prolonged resistance of lions ; they saw 
 now that he could suffer and submit with the mute endur- 
 ing patient self -surrender and self-command of those saints 
 of whom the priests had told them in their boyhood, dim, 
 pathetic, ancient legends, half forgot and half remembered. 
 They yielded him a certain, reluctant, wondering homage, 
 and they brought him, with more gentle usage, where the 
 thickly-woven olive and acanthus made a shadow from the 
 sun, and gave him water to slake his burning throat, and 
 drew the linen folds of his dress over his wounded chest 
 with what was, for them, almost tenderness. To her they 
 had no such pity ; they knew her a revolutionist, a rebel, 
 an infidel as they were told, a woman of evil, murderous, 
 and fearful sorcery, who could revenge with the jettatura 
 all those who incensed her by resisting her seductions ; 
 they hated her with a great sullen hate, the stronger be- 
 cause it was the barbarous hatred that is born of fear ; but 
 for their commander they would have shot her down with 
 a volley from their carbines, that those fatal eyes might 
 gaze on them no more with the glance that they be- 
 lieved could wither them like a sorceress's incantation. 
 They bound her arms behind her with ruthless severity, 
 till her fair skin was lacerated and bruised; then they 
 forced her down on to the yellow grasses that grew lank 
 and long among the fallen temple-stones, and passed the 
 ropes that bound her round a block of travestine : from 
 the moment that she had asked for his deliverance, she 
 had never spoken. 
 
 He was so near her that, stretching her hand out had she 
 been free, she could have touched him where they had laid 
 him down ; his pain-racked limbs were stiff and motionless ; 
 he could not have stirred one step to save his life ; his frame 
 was racked with cramp, and the virus from the insects' teeth 
 seemed to eat like vitriol into his flesh ; his face was buried 
 in the grasses as his forehead rested on his arm ; he could 
 not bear to look upon her ; he could not bear to feel her 
 gaze was on him. To the watching eyes of the soldiers 
 about them, to the certainty of captivity, or worse, that 
 waited them they were both unconscious ; all that either 
 
 3 ic 
 
530 ID ALIA. 
 
 knew was that presence of the other, which surpassed any 
 martyrdom to which military and priestly power could ever 
 bring them. 
 
 There was silence for some time around ; the chief of the 
 scanty troop had sent the fleetest runner among them 
 northward for orders from the one who, with the warrant 
 of his Grace of Villaflor, had the direction of his search 
 and the disposition of his prisoners. He was uncertain 
 what to do, and whither to take them ; in a thing of so 
 much moment he feared to move rashly or wrongly: the 
 people were inflamed moreover, the times were rife with 
 unrest and sedition, the mouths of the populace were 
 whispering tales that made the national blood burn hot 
 against the Bourbon ; he feared a riot even it might be a 
 rescue if he bore this woman, to whom his superstition 
 gave such spells, and to whom the revolutionists gave such 
 homage, in the full noonday captive toward Naples. 
 
 An hour heavily passed by ; round them the soldiers 
 were couched, panting in the heat, but with their look 
 watchful as a dog's, and their cocked carbines slanted 
 toward those they guarded. Where they had fastened her 
 she sat with her head bowed down, and her eyes, that 
 burned like fire under their swollen aching lids, fastened 
 on him where he lay ; he never stirred, but every now and 
 then a great shudder shook his whole frame, though he 
 never lifted his face from where it rested on his arms, 
 though his limbs felt dead as with the numbness of Arctic 
 >frost. Fettered, she sat and looked on him this man, 
 who had thought no evil thing could ever come to him, 
 .once having gained the treasure of her love. He had lost 
 all actual knowledge that she was near, in the exhaustion 
 that had succeeded to the long strain on every nerve and 
 fibre. Delirious teeming fancies swam before his brain 
 even in that lethargy of worn-out powers ; in them he had 
 no sense of the reality of her presence beside him, but in 
 visions he believed he beheld her, the priestess of passion 
 and pain, the goddess of darkness and of the spells of the 
 senses, whom no man shall worship and live. 
 
 The messenger returned. The answering command was 
 -whispered by him to his officer. There was noise and move- 
 ment and haste and dehjy around them under the shadow of 
 the aged silver olive-tr&es. Neither knew nor heeded it. 
 I*ate had wrought its worst on them. 
 
'I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS! 9 53* 
 
 The soldiers brought a long low waggon, taken from a 
 homestead some way in the interior, oxen drawn, and com- 
 monly used to bear the load of millet-sheaves at harvest, or 
 the piles of purple fruit at vintage time. They half dragged, 
 half lifted him upon the straw within it with a kindly 
 gentleness still, for they pitied him insomuch as he had 
 fallen beneath her power, they honoured him insomuch as 
 their uttermost ingenuity of torture had failed to wring from 
 him one moan or oath ; and they roughly motioned her to 
 a place beside him, a superstitious terror of her keeping 
 their hands from touching, and their tongues from offering 
 her insult. She stooped over him where he lay, half sense- 
 less, on the strewn cornstalks. 
 
 " O Heaven ! how you suffer ! " 
 
 The darkness of his eyes, humid and lustreless, gleamed 
 on her a moment under his half-closed lids ; he turned with 
 restless fever on the straw. 
 
 * Tou think this pains ? ' 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXV. 
 
 ' I WOULD HAVE GTTEN MY SOUL FOB THIS 
 
 THE oxen toiled laboriously on their wearisome way; the 
 wagon jolted on its large unpainted wheels ; the soldiers 
 marched on either side, and in the van and rear : the tawny 
 leathern covering flapped idly to and fro, while about it 
 clung a faint sweet fragrance from grass-crops and vine- 
 loads carried through many changing seasons of the earth. 
 
 Where they went she had no knowledge ; they had bound 
 her eyes ; that the noon in time passed and the cooler day 
 followed she could tell by some diminution in the intensity 
 of heat, and by the tender music of birds' throats that every 
 now and then broke out from myrtle-thickets and lemon- 
 gardens that they wended their way through as the hours 
 advanced. The measured march of the men, and of the 
 heavy tread of the cattle, at intervals paused ; then she 
 heard the muttering of voices, and some change in their 
 guards' position round the wagon, as though uneasiness or 
 insecurity was prevalent among the scanty troop. Time 
 
532 ID ALIA. 
 
 seemed endless ; but she knew that she might easily err in 
 its reckoning, for the oxen moved with great tardiness, and 
 neither man nor beast could press on with any swiftness 
 till the sun had sunk lower. At her feet Erceldoune lay 
 motionless ; she could not see or touch him, she would listen 
 for each sigh and catch of the painful breath he drew 
 through his aching chest. The exhaustion which had suc- 
 ceeded to the torment he had undergone still lasted; a 
 feverish lethargy held him almost insensible ; he was con- 
 scious of some unrest, of some added pang when the un- 
 even rugged roadway shook the labouring wagon, and then 
 he turned wearily on the straw beneath him, but to greater 
 sensibility he never roused. They had screened him from 
 the heat with some broken boughs, and had laid some 
 wetted linen on the excoriated skin that their blows had 
 bruised, and the gnats had stung the soldiers compas- 
 sionated him as the prey of the ' evil eye.' At times, from 
 the weakness that had followed on the ordeal he had en- 
 dured, his breathing and the pulsations of his heart were so 
 low that neither could be detected by her eager ear; she 
 could not tell whether life had ceased or not, and her own 
 heart stood still with a fear that no jeopardy of her own 
 life had ever roused in her. And yet what would exist- 
 ence, if it lingered in him, be to him ! Only existence 
 dragged out at the galley-oar amid the companionship of 
 felons. Or even if his country and his friends gained 
 freedom for him only one unending misery through his 
 memory, through his loss, of her. 
 
 In her despair she strained at the cords that bound her, 
 and bent toward him, though her hand could not reach nor 
 her lips touch his. 
 
 ' Speak to me ! for pity's speak to me ! ' 
 
 There was no reply ; her voice had ceased to have power 
 to rouse him. 
 
 ' Can you not hear me ? ' she murmured to him, as that 
 horrible stillness froze her blood. ' O, by the love you have 
 borne me, hear one word, one word only I have never be- 
 trayed you ! ' 
 
 There was no answer still ; sunk in that lifeless languor 
 even these words that came too late had not the spell 
 to wake him. His bodily suifering had conquered his bodily 
 strength at kst ; he was stretched like a felled tree at her 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS/' 533 
 
 feet, and had nor sight, nor hearing, nor any knowledge of 
 her presence near. 
 
 The escort moved on, on its weary route. 
 
 Through the darkness and the stillness round her the 
 sounds of the declining day, that was still bright upon the 
 world, came with strange distinctness. The song of a child's 
 voice on the air ; the noise of a water-wheel in a stream ; 
 the slow droning notes of monastic bells ; the laughter of 
 vinedressers among the budding vines ; the mournful chant 
 of a requiem as a village funeral passed with the crucifix 
 borne aloft ; a thousand murmurs of sweet sunlit idyllic 
 life, came on the stillness with a jarring cruelty through the 
 ceaseless tread of the soldiers' feet, and the slow creaking 
 of the reluctant wheels. 
 
 At length they paused finally. The sun by this was 
 sinking low westward. The Calabrian in command touched, 
 and bade her descend. She drew back. ' Where he goes, 
 
 I go.' 
 
 She spoke, not with the supplication of a woman who 
 loved to rest near what she loved, but rather with the en- 
 treaty of remorse to share the victim's fate, with the de- 
 mand of a leader to endure whatever fell to the lot of one 
 who too loyally obeyed such leadership. The soldier laughed 
 noisily. 
 
 * O yes ! you shall have your lover, 'llustrissima. Come 
 or it will be worse for him ! ' 
 
 She obeyed, obliged to be content *with such a promise, 
 lest the threat against him should be borne out. Her eyes 
 were still bound from the light. She heard them lift him 
 down from his bed of straw. She thought they bore him 
 after her, as heavy steps followed in her rear ; and a heavy 
 hand thrust her forward down long stone passage-ways. 
 "Where they had brought her was a large granary, or group 
 of store-houses, very lonely, and built strongly in early days 
 when the ungathered gram had to be not seldom defended 
 with a fierce struggle from the raids of foreign bands that 
 fought their quarrels ont upon Italian soil The building 
 was two-storied, and the vast barn-like chambers were of 
 etone, with slender windows barred with rusty iron, and with 
 a faint dreamy odour in them from sheaves of millet stored 
 ^there, and from a quantity of the boughs of the sweet 
 ^myrtle, which had been cut awav to lay clear the stems of 
 olives to the air. 
 
534 ID ALT A. 
 
 They cut tbe cord that bound her hands, and left her 
 just within the door as they closed it, and drew the bolts 
 without. 
 
 She tore down the bandage that covered her eyes, and 
 saw that they had played her false. In the darkened room 
 she stood alone. 
 
 For many hours afterward time was a blank to her. 
 
 "Whether sleep succeeded to the exhaustion, the endur- 
 ance, and the sleepless toil of the past days and nights, or 
 whether she again lost consciousness, and lay as in a trance, 
 she never knew. The irresistible reaction that follows on 
 overwrought excitation came on her. The worn-out limbs 
 and the strained nerves succumbed to it, and it stole upward 
 at length to the brain, and deadened it to all sentient life, 
 to all remembrance, to all thought. 
 
 When she awakened, she was lying, thrown forward on 
 the heap of dying myrtle. All was intensely still ; through 
 the slit of the casement the midnight stars were shining, 
 and the hooting of an owl came wailingly on the stillness. 
 
 Her first memory was of him. Her first action was to 
 arise and look out on the night. A beautiful country lay in 
 the pallor of the young moon's rays ; she knew the landscape 
 well ; it was but few leagues from Naples. Below, under 
 some great trees of olives and of lemon, two sentinels were 
 pacing with their carbines slanted ; except for their measured 
 tread there was no sound. The place was lonely and de- 
 serted ; the outbuilding among maize-fields and olive-slopes 
 belonging to the Crown. She looked ; then went back to 
 the couch of withering myrtle, and sought to make her 
 thoughts grow clear ; and the manifold hazards and remem- 
 brances of her past became of use in her extremity. But 
 the task was beyond her strength. She was fasting she 
 was devoured with thirst she was conquered by physical 
 fatigue she could see, hear, remember, nothing but the 
 face of the man who had been willing to perish for her 
 sake, the gallant beauty bound to the stone-shaft, muti- 
 lated, bruised, agonised, the voice which yet amid all that 
 torture gave her no reproach more bitter than that one re- 
 buke ' Why have you so much mercy on my body ? ' She 
 loved him with the voluptuous warmth of southern pas- 
 sion ; but she loved him also with that power of self-nega- 
 tion which would have made her accept any doom for 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS 1* 53 g 
 
 herself, could she thereby have released him to freedom and 
 to peace. Her pride of nature, her imperial ambitions, 
 her habit of dominion, and her desire of homage, had given 
 her long a superb egotism, even while she had been ever 
 willing to give all she owned for the furtherance of iofty 
 aims. But now all heed of herself was killed in her ; on 
 her own fate she never cast a thought of pity. She had 
 played a great game, won many casts in it, and lost the last. 
 That was but the see- saw of life. But he for his loyalty 
 he perished ; for his nobility he suffered as felons suffer ; 
 by the very greatness of his faith he was betrayed ; by the 
 very purity of his sacrifice he was lost for ever. 
 
 Time crept darkly on. The odour of the myrtles was 
 like the mournful fragrance from flowers strewn upon a 
 coffin. From below, the monotonous tread of the slow 
 regular steps sounded faintly ; in the gloom bats flew to and 
 fro, and an owl, who had her nest among the rafters, flit- 
 tered in and out through the bars of the unglazed case- 
 ment, seeking and bringing food for her callow brood. The 
 silence was unbroken ; the darkness very heavy, and filled 
 with a stealing, sickening sense of unseen life, as rat and 
 Wizard darted over the stones, and the downy wings of the 
 night-birds brushed the air ; she felt as though she should 
 lose reason itself in that horrible stillness, that fettered 
 misery, that impotent inaction. 
 
 Amid all, there came on her a strange dreamy wonder 
 how the life of the world was passing. For twelve days she 
 had been as dead as though she had lain in her tomb. When 
 they had seized her at Antina, the time had been pregnant 
 of great things ; whether they had been brought forth or 
 strangled in their birth she could not tell. All that had 
 been done among men was a blank to her. 
 
 Then all such memories drifted far from her again. Onc3 
 remembrance alone remained that of the man who suffered 
 his martyrdom for her rather than render up to justice one 
 by whom he believed himself betrayed more foully than the 
 sleeping Sisera slain under the sanctity of the roof- tree. She 
 knew it might well be that never again would they look upon 
 each other's face ; that they might drag their lives on asun- 
 der, chained apart at the labour of felons, with eternal silence 
 betwixt them, and knowing not even when each other's life 
 should cease. 
 
53& ID ALIA. 
 
 It is a horrible knowledge that one, living, yet will be 
 for ever as the dead. 
 
 Fear had never touched her ; yet now a supernatural 
 terror seemed to glide into her veins. The black shades of 
 the stealing lizards, and the cold touch of the bat's wing as 
 it passed, grew unbearable ; the darkness seemed drawing 
 in on her closer and closer ; the eyes of the night-birds 
 glowed like flame through the gloom ; she uttered a bitter 
 cry, and threw herself against the bars, and shook them 
 with all the force of destiny. ' Let me see him once, that 
 he may know ! ' she cried out to the peace of the night. ' O 
 Grod, that he may know ! ' 
 
 'The cry, though not the words, was heard. 
 
 The door was unbolted, and opened. The light of a lamp 
 fell on the floor. The Calabrian entered. 
 
 1 So ! what is it, Miladi ? ' He came, careless and ready 
 for a braggart's insolence. She turned her eyes on him, and 
 the look smote him speechless. 
 
 ' You played me false,' she said to him. ' Where is he ? ' 
 
 He stammered, then was silent. She dazzled and af- 
 frighted him, as her sudden apparition had done in the blaze 
 of the noonday. He thought course and evil things against 
 her ; he had heard them said, and deemed them true ; but 
 in her presence, even to think them seemed a sacrilege 
 
 t "Where is he ? ' she repeated. i Answer me.' 
 
 3 He is near you/ He spoke at random ; with the flicker 
 of the lamp on the scarlet of her dress, and the gleam of 
 her loose-hanging hair, her beauty looked to him un- 
 earthly. 
 
 ' In this building ? ' 
 
 "- Yes. You are both kept here because until ' He 
 stopped confusedly, and bent above the wick of the lamp, 
 as though it needed trimming. 
 
 ' Until what ? ' 
 
 ' Until the king's pleasure,' he replied sullenly. 
 
 She came closer to him. 
 
 * You are a soldier ? ' she asked. 
 
 'Yes/ 
 
 { Well, then, brave men are commonly pitiful. Let me 
 see him for one hour to-night/ 
 
 He would have laughed out a coarse jest j but as he met 
 her look he dared not. 
 
r WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS ! ' 537 
 
 1 Impossible ! ' he answered curtly. l No prisoners must 
 commune with each other.' 
 
 ' I know, I know ! ' she interrupted him. ' But gold keys 
 unlock all barriers ! I am rich. Name your price. You 
 shall have it if you can give me one hour with him.' 
 
 ' Impossible ! ' he muttered once more. 
 
 1 No ; possible if you will do it. IV hat can it harm 
 you ? You have both under lock and ward. All I ask is a 
 little speech with him. See, I told you I had wronged him 
 deeply. Can you not think I want his pardon ? ' 
 
 The humility of the words coming from lips so proud, 
 and bending a spirit so indomitable, touched the soldier, 
 who under a rough rind, had a certain latent kindliness. 
 
 6 Nay ; I would do it for you if I could out of charity/ 
 he made answer. ' But it is not in my power I tell you.' 
 
 ' It is in your power, if it be in your will. An hour 
 a half hour but a few moments and you shall have a 
 thousand five thousand ducats ! ' 
 
 He looked at her stupefied ; he was avaricious, like most 
 Italians. 
 
 ' How can you get them ? They will have confiscated all 
 you have ! 
 
 1 In Italy yes. But that was little. My wealth lies else- 
 where. I will write you an order on Paris, that will give 
 you the sum down in gold.' 
 
 6 You speak truth ? ' 
 
 ' Did you ever hear that I spoke any other thing ? 
 
 He laughed. ' Basta, never. They all say that you lash 
 king and priest with your tongue ! Well, I will see what I 
 can do. J 
 
 He left her ; barring her in. She waited in an anguish 
 of dread. She had spoken calmly and briefly to him ; but 
 alone, the great veins stood out on her forehead, and her 
 limbs shook with the passion of hope and fear. She would 
 have laid her head down on a scaffold with the breaking of 
 dawn, if to-night she could thereby have purchased the 
 power to say but a single word to the man who believed her 
 his traitress. 
 
 Before long the Calabrian returned ; he had nothing of 
 the soft grace common to his countrymen ; but he had a 
 rough good faith, which, blent with his liking of gold, served 
 her better. He held her an inkhorn and a slip of paper. 
 
538 1DALIA. 
 
 f It was a miracle to get these ; I sent tc the ostiary for 
 them. Write, and you shall see this stricken lion of yqurs ; 
 sure you have wounded him some way worse than ever we 
 did.' 
 
 She laid the paper on the stone window-sill, and wrote 
 an order for the payment, in Paris, of ten thousand francs 
 in her name to his. He read it with the hesitation of a bad 
 scholar by the feeble oil light ; then a laugh spread itself 
 over all his features. 
 
 ' So ! I have a brother, a singer, in Paris, who will serve 
 for this work. It were as much as my life, Miladi, were 
 worth for your name and mine to be seen together. Come ! 
 you shall go to your comrade ; but, of a surety, rich lips like 
 yours might add one another payment ? ' 
 
 The indignant blood flushed her face ; but she restrained 
 the haughty impulse that moved her. 
 
 *' Brave men do not insult captives who cannot resent/ 
 she said briefly. ' I have fulfilled my bond. [Fulfil yours.' 
 
 He hung his head ashamed, and motioned her to pass out 
 before him. There was a short broad stone passage, with a 
 door at the farther end the great barn-door of another stone- 
 chamber. He drew the bars aside, and pushed it open, set- 
 ting his lamp down within the entrance. * You shall be 
 alone an hour, 5 he said, as he closed the door afresh, and the 
 bolts rolled back into their places. 
 
 The oil-fed wick shed but a narrow circle of light beneath 
 it ; it did nothing to illumine the impenetrable darkness 
 that lay beyond in the central and distant parts of the corn- 
 room ; there was no more sound here than in her own prison- 
 place, the same flitting of grey downy wings, the same glid- 
 ing murmur of hidden night-awakened insect life. She 
 thought that again the Italian had betrayed her ; that she 
 was still in solitude. 
 
 But though her eyes could not pierce that dense wall of 
 unlightened shadow that fronted her, such light as came 
 from the lamp for here the moon did not shine was cast 
 full about her, and on the dusky scarlet cloud of her dra- 
 peries. And on the silence a cry rang that startled all the 
 night-birds in their restless flight, circling beneath the raf- 
 ters. Unseen himself, he saw her, and deemed it a vision 
 of the bitter dreams that swam, as shadows seem to swim 
 on waters, through his aching brain. 
 
1 / WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS / ' 539 
 
 He rose slowly from the straw in which he lay, reeling to 
 and fro in his weakness, and came out from the gloom and 
 faced her silent. 
 
 She looked at him a moment, then fell at his feet as she 
 had fallen when he had been bound beneath his scourgers. 
 
 He did not move, nor touch her; his eyes were fastened 
 senselessly upon her ; he shivered as though hot iron seared 
 him. 
 
 ' Can you not leave me in peace to suffer ? ' he cried 
 wildly. ' Off off off! What J loved is dead ! Ay you 
 tempt me you bring me her beauty you would give mo 
 her kisses, her passion, her sweetness, her shame. I will 
 riot I will not ! "What I loved is dead ! I am faithful ! ' 
 
 All through the hours of the night, dreams of her had 
 mocked, and pursued, and tortured, and assailed him ; he 
 was drunk as with the fumes of wine with the burning of 
 the love that still lived ; his mind, weakened and delirious, 
 had only been conscious of phantoms that seemed to throng 
 on him, tempting him in a thousand shapes, binding him 
 down the slave of his senses, forcing on him joys torn out 
 from the hell of guilt. ' "What matter what you be what 
 matter what death come by you, BO you are mine ! ' The 
 old, old subtlety that has tempted all men from the first hour 
 that they fell by women, had besieged him through all the 
 lonely watches of the night. Now he knew not her living 
 presence from the visions of his temptress. 
 
 In horror she knelt before him. 
 
 * Hush ! hush ! Ah ! for heaven's sake, believe my love 
 at least, though it has cursed you !' 
 
 He thrust her from him, with the senseless blaze still in 
 his eyes. 
 
 ' Love ! Ay, shared with a score. Love that is poison 
 and infamy ; love in my arms to-night, in another's to-mor- 
 row ! O, I know, I know it is sweet, and cruel, and rich, 
 and men fall by it and perish through it. But to me it were 
 worse than naught. Can you not tell how I loved her ? v 
 
 The words which had been at first raving and violent, 
 sank at last into an infinite weariness and pathos. Tears 
 rained down her face as she heard them ; never had she 
 honoured him as she honoured him now, when he refused 
 subjection to a vile passion, and held her dead to him because 
 he held her base with the baseness of deliberate and self- 
 chosen vice. 
 
540 IDALIA. 
 
 * I can tell !' she murmured. ' You love as slie merits 
 not, nor any woman. Yet love farther still, and, if you 
 can, forgive I* 
 
 He started as the voice thrilled through him, and roused 
 his consciousness of some actual life near him. 
 
 * Forgive ? forgive ?' he answered her. ' Do you not know 
 that what men have to pray for, before women like you, is to 
 have the power to hate ? Forgive ? That were sweet as the 
 touch of your kisses ! It is to shun, to abhor, to resist you, 
 that strength is needed !' 
 
 He was not wholly conscious of her presence ; the sense 
 that while she had betrayed she yet had borne him a cruel, 
 worthless, sensual passion had been forced on him even while 
 he had found her sheltering his foe, had been borne out by 
 her own words, even by her outbreak of remorse, as she had 
 pleaded for his life on the sea-shore : that sense remained 
 with him, and against the weakness in him that made such a 
 love even as this look priceless, strove that nobler instinct 
 which had governed him when he had said to her, ' love that 
 is faithless and guilty what is that to me ?' 
 
 He had thought that, for her sake, he should shrink from 
 no crime ; that for the guerdon of her beauty there would 
 be no guilt before which he would pause ; but even now, in 
 the semi-insanity brought on him by the torment through 
 which he had passed, he was truer to himself than this ; and 
 the caress of a wanton could never have replaced to him the 
 loss of the l one loyalty, one faith' of his life. He would have 
 defended her and cleaved to her in her extremity, and 
 endured in her stead for sake of the imperishable fidelity he 
 had sworn to her ; but it would have been only, when the 
 last thing was done and the last sacrifice rendered, to have 
 put her from him for evermore, and never to have looked 
 upon her face again. 
 
 She lay at his feet, and heard him thus abjure her power ; 
 thus entreat for force to be blind and dead to the allurement 
 of what he deemed the voluptuous visions of his cheated 
 passion ; and she honoured him as never she had honoured 
 any living man ; honoured the slave who, because his slavery 
 was shame, broke from it, and became her king by virtue of 
 the very majesty of that rebellion. Snakes had crawled and 
 beasts had-crouched in human likeness many a time before 
 her ; this man alone stood before her undebased, having rent 
 
' / WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS / ' 54 1 
 
 the withes of base desire, having cleaved to the liberty of an 
 unstained honour. 
 
 And her heart went out to him in supplication, remem- 
 bering alone the wretchedness that through her had fallen on 
 him. 
 
 ' My God, yes ! I have brought you only evil. But hear 
 me once before we part for ever. Hear nie but once : you 
 perish by me, but I have no guilt to you' 
 
 He breathed loud and hard ; his eyes stared on her in the 
 dusky light ; he took but one sense from her words : that the 
 infidelity of her life had been against others ; that though 
 she had lied to him and beguiled him and forsaken him, 
 against his rival she had done deeper sin than against 
 himself. 
 
 6 You love me ?' he muttered, as he strove to thrust her 
 back. ' Be silent, then. Go, go, go ! I have no strength. 
 If once I pardon, never shall I resist you.' 
 
 Pardon ! Its softened mercy took the shape of deadliest 
 temptation ; it looked sweet as life to forgive ; to forgive, and" 
 steep all wrong, all pain, all hate in one divine oblivion ; to 
 forgive, and heed not the pollution of the soul, so only the 
 grace and graciousness of mortal form were his ; to forgive, 
 and call sin grace, shame honour, and treachery truth, if so 
 alone the heaven he had lost were his. 
 
 She rose up and faced him, silently awhile ; the great 
 slow tears swam before her sight ; her tongue was stricken of 
 its fluency ; she knew that for her, through her, by her, this 
 man was condemned to a living death ; yet that it was not 
 his lost life, but her lost purity, which was his despair now. 
 
 Then she went to him ere he could repulse her, and laid 
 her hands upon his breast, and looked full upward to his 
 eyes ; and her voice was low, and had a strange sweetness 
 in it. 
 
 ' "When to-night is over we shall never meet again. TLe 
 truth may be told now. I have never betrayed you.' 
 
 A marvellous change passed over his face ; the suffering 
 and the darkness and the haggard desolation on it were 
 suddenly crossed as with a golden flash of light. He 
 answered her nothing ; but his gaze strained down into hers 
 as though it read her soul. 
 
 Her hands still leant upon his breast ; her eyes still were 
 lifted up to his ; her yoice had still that sweetness, which was 
 
542 IDALIA. 
 
 so calm as with the calmness of those from whom all hope 
 has passed, and yet had a yearning piteous passion in it that 
 no words could give. 
 
 { We may speak now as the dying do you and I ; we die 
 to-night. To-morrow the living world will have no place for 
 us save a prison and a grave. You perish through me ; I 
 have killed you. Your murderess yes ; but never your 
 traitress.' 
 
 He trembled through all his limbs under her touch and 
 her words ; the breath of her lips seemed to toss his life to 
 and fro as the winds play with reeds. His brain reeled. 
 They had said that her voice could steal reason itself from 
 those whom it tempted ; they had said that her lie brought 
 a thousand times subtler charm of conviction than the truth 
 of other women ever bare in it. At dawn she had abased 
 herself in guilt before him ; now, at midnight, she swore to 
 him that no treachery to him was on her. 
 
 * Not mine !' he echoed, ' when my foe is your paramour, 
 my assassin your care ! Silence ! silence ! They say that 
 you tempt men till they lose all likeness of themselves all 
 power to sec you as you are ; but you died to me for ever 
 when you owned yourself dishonoured.' 
 
 f Wait ! At dawn you gave me your pity.' 
 
 * Pity ! pity ! God ! you know what a man's passion is !' 
 he cried to her. * Can it yield that cold, merciful, sinless 
 thing when it consumes itself in hell fire ? Pity ! What 
 pity had you ? ' 
 
 It was the sole reproach he had cast at her. 
 ' Ah, hear me only hear me. To you I had no sin.' 
 He gave but one meaning to her answer ; a bitter moan 
 broke from him ; for an instant his arms touched her to draw 
 her once more to his embrace ; then they fell as though 
 nerveless and useless. 
 
 * Then you had sin to another. I have not the strength I 
 thought ; I cannot pardon to the uttermost. 1 would not 
 forsake you ; I would not harm you. But the woman I 
 loved is dead, I say. Do not bring me in mockery of her a 
 courtesan.' 
 
 The words were incoherent and faint ; but they had an 
 exceeding pathos ; the longing aching melancholy of a life 
 henceforth without one hope. Her very heart seemed to 
 break as she heard them, as they strove after justice and 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS /' 543 
 
 tenderness to her even amid the havoc of his shattered faith, 
 his unutterable desolation. 
 
 * Listen !' she answered him. ' I bring you a woman who 
 sinned if ambition were sin, if too little mercy were sin, if 
 imperious pride and cruel victory were sin, if evil fellowship 
 and enforced sufferance of alien crime were sin ; but of all 
 other I am innocent.' 
 
 His hands fell heavily on her shoulders, in the dim light 
 that flickered on the paleness of her face ; his own was 
 wholly in darkness ; but through the gloom his eyes burned 
 down' upon hers with the glare of wildly-wakening hope 
 straining through the belief, by her own lips, of her guilt. 
 
 ' Innocent ! When you are his mistress !' 
 
 ' 1 am not his, nor any man's.' 
 
 ' Ah, God ! Take care how you betray me afresh. I am 
 mad, I think, to-night.' 
 
 6 1 do not betray you. I have never betrayed. I left 
 you to believe me dishonoured lest worse should com unto 
 you.' 
 
 ' What ! when you loved him ?' 
 
 ' I loved him in childhood yes. Then only. 
 
 ' In childhood ! What are you to him ?' 
 
 1 Wait ! wait ! It sickens me to tell. Out of the great- 
 ness of your own heart you judged my life ; you judged it 
 rightly/ 
 
 ' What are you to him ? ' 
 
 f To my eternal shame his daughter.' 
 
 Her head was sunk down on the stone floor of the prison- 
 chamber as the words left her, slowly, unwillingly, as though 
 her existence itself were torn and dragged out with them. 
 To the woman who had the pride of an imperial blood, with 
 all the superb insolence of beauty, genius, and power, with- 
 out their peer, it was humiliation as deep as to lay bare a 
 felon's brand to own her kinship with crime and with cow- 
 ardice, to yield up the secret disgrace of her mighty race. 
 
 He, dead to all else, heard but the answer that gave her 
 back to him ; doubted not, questioned not, paused not for 
 proof or for dread, but with a great cry the cry of a heart 
 that was breaking with rapture stretched out his lacerated 
 arms, and drew her up to his embrace, and crushed her 
 close against his bruised and aching breast. 
 
 ' God forgive me that ever I believed even your own voice 
 against you ! God forgive me that I wronged you ! ' 
 
544 IDALIA. 
 
 His words rang clear and loud and sweet as clarion's 
 ring in his unutterable joy. Then his head sank, his 
 wounded limbs failed him, ecstasy vanquished his strength 
 as never wretchedness had done ; for the first time in all 
 his years of manhood he bowed himself down and wept as 
 women weep, with the agony of passion, with the abandon- 
 ment of childhood. 
 
 * # * * * * * 
 
 ISTot until long after were other words uttered between 
 them. The first that were spoken were hers, while the 
 pulse of her heart beat on his, and the low flame of the 
 lamp sunk out slowly. 
 
 c What use ! what use that you know the truth ! ' she 
 moaned. ' You have been martyred for me. Through me 
 you will perish ! ' 
 
 He smiled, as men smile in some sweet fancy of dreaming 
 sleep. 
 
 ' Though I may die with the dawn, I can thank Grod now 
 I have lived.' 
 
 * Lived to be cursed by me ! ' 
 
 ' Lived to be loved by you ; it is enough.' 
 
 ' Loved by a love that destroys you ! Can you ever for- 
 give ? ' 
 
 ' Forgive ? "What is left to forgive, since you are mine ? ' 
 
 'Tours for your ruin, your torture, your slaughter! 
 These are the love gifts I bring you ! J 
 
 'Think not of them! Lift your lips to mine and they 
 are forgotten ! ' 
 
 His thoughts held no other thing, his consciousness 
 grasped no other reality, than this one living priceless surety 
 of her, th.at came home to his heart, beyond doubt, beyond 
 suspicion, with all the divine force of a resistless truth. 
 Memories of evil and of crime floated, shapeless, amid the 
 sudden glory that seemed to fill the gloom of his midnight 
 prison with the glow of a southern dawn : he let them pass 
 he could not hold them. She unloosed herself from his 
 arms, and knelt once more beside him, so that in the dim 
 shadowy rays of the lamp he could only see the paleness of 
 her upturned brow. She longed to be sheltered even from his 
 sight in that hour. She had no fear but that the greatness 
 of his nature would reach to mercy and to pardon. She 
 knew that justice to the uttermost, and an infinite tender- 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!' 545 
 
 ness, would ever be hers at his hands. But none the less 
 she knew that through her he would perish ; and none the 
 less were the shame that sh-e must reveal against her race, 
 the taint of cowardly crime that must rest on her by impli- 
 cation, the degradation of her name that she must lay bare 
 before him, bitter beyond all bitterness to the pride that 
 was born at once of royalty and freedom, to the courage \ 
 that would have faced a thousand deaths rather than have ' 
 bent down to one act of baseness. 
 
 t Forgotten ? ' she echoed, where she bowed herself at his 
 feet. ' You are wronged so deeply, that no love but yours 
 could ever outlive such wrong. Listen ! I have spoken 
 but truth to you. I have striven to save you with all the 
 might that was in me. I have never been false to you by 
 deed, or word, or thought. But, all the same, your life is 
 lost through me ; and in me you see the daughter of your 
 vilest foe, of the man who shot you down with a brigand's 
 murder and a coward's secrecy. Yes; I! I! I! who 
 believed no empress never had wider reign; who have treated 
 men as dogs beneath my feet ; who have told you the legends 
 that gave me heroes' and sovereigns' blood in my veins, I 
 have greater shame upon me than the poorest serf that ever 
 crawled to take bread at my gates. I am the associate and 
 the accomplice of an assassin ; I am the daughter of Conrad 
 Phaulcon.' 
 
 He heard ; and the words carried their way to his mind, 
 that had been delirious with the weight, and DOW was giddy 
 with the release, of pain. He heard ; and the violence of 
 the hatred he had borne this man shook him afresh, as 
 tempests shake strong trees. He breathed slowly and 
 heavily. With the rich liberty of his arisen joy came a 
 deadly and heart-sick oppression ; with the sweet daylight 
 of his renewed faith came the poison-mists of a dead crime. 
 
 ' My God ! how you must have suffered ! ' 
 
 The suffering that such a tie as this had cost her was his 
 first thought, before all other. 
 
 ' You think of me and for me still still ! * 
 
 ' "When I shall have ceased to fliink of you I shall have 
 ceased to live.' 
 
 Burning tears fell from her eyes upon his hands. She 
 wonJd not let him raise her nearer him, but knelt there 
 \\here the faint and golden-hued light of the dying lamp 
 
 2 N 
 
546 ID ALIA. 
 
 strayed softly to her, and fell upon her head like a halo of 
 martyrdom in the pictures of old masters. He stooped to 
 her. 
 
 ' Tell me all.' 
 
 1 All my shame?' 
 
 ' Not yours ; you had no share in it, or you would not 
 kneel there to-night. 1 
 
 ' Yes, mine ; for the shame of one man is the shame of 
 his race,, and the evil that is shielded is shared.' 
 
 She felt him shudder for one moment from her. 
 
 ' Stay ! You were never leagued with that infamy ? ' 
 
 ' Against your life ? No. I suspected I feared ; but 
 they dreaded me, and hid it from me. Once I brought it 
 against him ; and he swore by the memory of my mother 
 that he was innocent. This one oath he had used to hold 
 sacred. By it he duped me that once.' 
 
 A hate, unforgiving and deadly, ran through the thrill of 
 the words. In the sight of her fearless eyes the one un- 
 pardonable guilt was the dastardly guilt of a lie. 
 
 1 Tell you all ? ' she pursued, while her voice rose swifter, 
 and gathered the fluent eloquence which was natural to 
 her as its warmth to the sun. ' In years I could not tell 
 the torture of that companionship I have endured so long. 
 Ah, you must paint it to yourself; no words of mine could 
 give it. Look ! I am brave, I am born linked with a 
 coward ; I am proud, I have been bound to a man who 
 never knew what it was to wince under the lash of dis- 
 honour ; I am ambitious, and I have been leashed with an 
 adventurer whom the whole continent brands as a knave ; 
 I have loved truth and the peoples' rights it is all that has 
 redeemed me and I have been fastened hand and foot to 
 the baseness of intrigue, the venality of mock patriotism, 
 the criminal craft of secret societies. Look ! That man 
 could hear what you called me and deemed me a few hours 
 ago ; and he could hold his peace and laugh, and never 
 breathe one word or strike one blow to defend my honour, 
 to redeem my name. That will tell you what his life has 
 been.' 
 
 A bitter curse moved his lips as he heard. 
 
 '"Why did you stay me when my hand was on his 
 throat?' 
 
 ' Could his guilt annul his tie to ine ? By that one bond 
 
'I WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS /' 54? 
 
 lie has claimed his immunity, and enforced my forbearance, 
 through all the evil of his years.' 
 ' Yet, why not have told me ? ' 
 
 4 Because I was bound to silence by my oath. Look ! I 
 told you how my early life was spent ; but I could not tell 
 you the influence Conrad Phaulcon had on it. My mother 
 died while I was in infancy. She was the love of his youth, 
 and she had passed away from him ere she had worn that 
 love out. There are green places which never wither in 
 the hearts that are searest ; such was her memory to him, 
 but her race he hated with a reckless hatred. He had 
 looked to share their dominion when he wedded her ; but 
 there was feud between him and Julian. And Julian read 
 him aright, and held him in distrust, and none of their 
 wealth came to him, and he hated their greatness with a 
 bitter envy. I have had him curse my face because it was 
 like the Byzantine line; yet, on the whole, he loved, and 
 was gentle, to me. And I I thought him a god, a hero, a 
 patriot. He was a communist, an agitator, an adventurer ; 
 but I knew none of those names. I thought mankind was 
 divided into the oppressors and the oppressed, into the haters 
 and the lovers of liberty ; and I revered him as a Gracchus, 
 a Drusus, an Aristogiton, stoned by the nation's ingratitude. 
 Once he was proscribed, and I knew where he lay hid, 
 though I was but a few summers old, and they took and 
 starved me to make me speak. Because the food would 
 not tempt me, they tried blows ; and when I still kept silent 
 they wondered, and at last let me go, because one of their 
 patriarchs reproved them, saying I was more faithful to 
 man than they were to Grod.' 
 
 And he knew that you, his young child, suffered that 
 for him ? ' 
 
 ' Surely he knew it later in Athens.' 
 
 ' And it failed to make you sacred in his sight.' 
 
 ' Nay ; it only showed him that I was perhaps of the 
 
 steel that would furnish him forth a choice weapon. I was 
 
 proud to suffer for him ; I adored him then ; and chiefly of 
 
 all because I believed him sworn to the peoples' good, and 
 
 a martyr for the sake of freedom. While I was still so 
 
 young those things were still so close at my heart ! And 
 
 he loved me in answer then, though I saw him seldom, and 
 
 might have lived on charity but for Julian Vassalis ; then 
 
 2^2 
 
548 ID ALT A. 
 
 and until the time came when, there being no male of the 
 great Byzantine race left, I succeeded to the whole of its 
 splendour, and, by the will of the dead chief, bore its name. 
 From that moment the hate his foiled ambition and his 
 cheated avarice bore against the Vassalis line blent against 
 me with the old tenderness that he bore me, and from that 
 moment he saw in me only his prey.' 
 
 She felt his hands clench ; she heard his breath catch on 
 passionate words of imprecation. 
 
 f Ah, peace, peace ! ' she murmured to him. ' Aid me 
 rather to forgive, if I can. My own wrongs I might ; but 
 yours ' 
 
 c Nay, mine are but of the hour ; yours are lifelong. 
 Tell me all all.' 
 
 ' I could not if I spoke for years. A brave nature bound 
 to a coward ; a proud one leashed with dishonour that is 
 an agony that lies beyond words. When he saw me thus, 
 so young, given this wealth and this power he had so vainly 
 desired, a desire of vengeance entered him against me ; and 
 also, with the craft of his school, he saw in me a fitting in- 
 strument for his many schemes. Well he knew his sway 
 over me ; Julian dead, there remained none to counteract 
 it. A revolutionist ere I could reason, and ambitious with 
 an ambition far outleaping all the goals of the modern 
 world ; a child still in my ignorance of actual things and 
 my belief in the omnipotence of truth, yet already mistress 
 of what seemed to me the magnificence and the dominion 
 of a Cleopatra, I came to his snare as a bird to the fowler's. 
 I would have gone to martyrdom to have liberated the 
 nations ; I would have sold my soul to have reached the 
 sovereignty of a Semiramis. By these twain my strength 
 and my weakness he ruled me. And through them, in all 
 that glorious faith of my youth, he bound me by oath to 
 himself and his cause. That oath I have never broken.' 
 
 There was silence for many moments. Then she spoke 
 again, while the dying lamp sunk lower and lower, and the 
 halo ceased to fall upon her brow. 
 
 1 Many besides me, unseen of men, wear those secret fet- 
 ters of political oaths sworn in the rashness of their youth 
 and faith to what they believed the cause of freedom to 
 what too late they know an inexorable and extortionate 
 tyranny that through all their after-lives will never spare. 
 
' / WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY' SOUL FOR THIS ! ' 549 
 
 While I thought myself an empress they were fastened 
 round me, and made me a slave. Ah ! I cannot travel back 
 over that waste of years ! It is enough that I swore fealty 
 to his cause and obedience to his order that I swore, 
 moreover, adhesion with him in all things, and secrecy upon 
 the tie he bore me. This last thing I vowed because he 
 willed it it was easy to maintain. His marriage had long 
 been concealed from fear of the VassahV wrath ; and when 
 the world knew me, I bore another title than his. Too 
 Jate I learned what this fatal exaction cost me. Had I 
 been known as his daughter, the evil notoriety he had 
 gained would have sufficed to blemish rny own repute. As 
 it was, I might as well have come forth from a lazar-honse 
 or a felon's cell. None knew his tie to me, except, of late 
 years, the traitor who taught you to see ^n him my lover, 
 my accomplice. True, my riches, my youth, my ancient 
 name, my brilliancy and extravagance of life other gifts 
 that men saw in me all brought me celebrity, notoriety, 
 triumphs, such as they were. But from the first to the 
 last companioned by him they were darkened by falsehood. 
 And he ah, you may well ask if a man's heart ever beat, 
 if a man's blood ever glowed in him ! knew it; knew it 
 long ere ever I dreamt it, and let the shadow of his own 
 evil fame be upon me, because through it his schemes were 
 best served ; because by it lie could best secure what no 
 other should ever share with him the wealth that I held 
 and he coveted. He feared that I might one day break from 
 him, that I might one day give the love I give you. So he 
 desired men to think me worthless as they would, and his 
 presence beside me sufficed to fulfil his desire. No, no ! do 
 not pour on me those noble words ; I am not worthy of 
 them ! Though sinned against, I am not sinless. When 
 too late, I saw what my fatal promise had wrought for me. 
 I was in love with the dangers, the victories, the sway, the 
 intoleration I had plunged into ; 1 had drunk so deep and 
 so freshly of the draught of Power, I could not have laid 
 down the cup though I had known there was death in it. 
 And under scorn and hate, and all the unutterable misery 
 that came to me when I saw myself betrayed by him my 
 very nature changed. I grew hardened, reckless, pitiless. 
 My loyalty to liberty, to truth, to the peoples, never altered ; 
 but that was all the better thing left in uie, JL remained 
 
550 IDALIA. 
 
 faithful, even to a traitor. But the world and I were for 
 ever at war. I cared not how I struck, so that I only 
 struck home, Evil had been spoken against me falsely, and 
 I lived in such fashion that they should know one woman 
 at least breathed whose neck could not be bent, nor whose 
 spirit bowed by calumny. Men came about me, mad for 
 the smile of my lips, but not true enough in themselves, as 
 you were true, to pierce to the truth in me, and I gave 
 them a bitter chastisement for their blindness : I slew them 
 with their own steel. But O God! what avail to tell you 
 this ? I can tell you how that which was spoken against me 
 has, in part, been truth deserved, and, in part, the malignant 
 coifiage of envy. I can tell you that at dawn to-day I had 
 no choice but to leave myself a traitress in your sight, or 
 see you slaughtered by him as the issue of my love. I can 
 tell you this but what avail ? You perish through me, 
 for me, by me ! What use that you should hold me faithful 
 to you ? I am none the less your murderess because I 
 would give my life for yours, my love, my love, my love ! ' 
 
 Her voice, that had been sustained and eloquent with 
 the vital strength of remembered wrongs, failed her over 
 the last words. The memory of the martyrdom which he 
 had borne for her ; the memory of the destruction of all 
 his future, which through her befell him ; the memory of 
 the only existence that could ever now be his dragged out 
 beneath the galley-chains and companioned by the worst of 
 criminals, alone remained with her. G-uilty or guiltless, 
 faithless or faithful, having cleaved to him or having for- 
 saken him, what mattered it ? Wherein could it serve 
 him ? He was lost through her. 
 
 But this thought never came to him. His eyes looked 
 down on her through the heavy shadow with a light in 
 them that had the sweetness of release, the glory of victory 
 through all the infinite pain and hopelessness of their fated 
 love. 
 
 ' What avail ? ' he answered her. ' Do you know me yet 
 so little? Do you not know that I could lie down and die 
 content, since I have heard that you are sinless ? J 
 
 ' I know, I know ! You would have died for .me when 
 you thought me vile with the vice that I cherished, branded 
 with the kisses of shame, And yet is there no doubt 
 with you now?' 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS!' 551 
 
 ' Doubt ? Did ever I harbour it save at your own bid. 
 ding?' 
 
 1 Yet what have you but my word, the word which that 
 Iscariot told you was only a dulcet lie, soft and false on 
 every ear?' 
 
 She felt the tremor of his passion run through all his 
 limbs. 
 
 ' Were I free but for one hour ' 
 
 * Be at peace. I have given him to vengeance.' 
 
 Her voice had in it that strong immutable merciless ven- 
 geance that came to her with her eastern blood ; that smote 
 rarely, but when it smote, never wavered and never failed. 
 Then her voice fell, hot tears dropped from her aching 
 eyes, and she refused to be lifted to his heart, she shrank 
 from his hand as though unworthy of its touch. 
 
 ' Vengeance ! ' she moaned, ' what use is it to me ? You 
 are lost through me lost for ever ! You pity, honour, 
 love me still ! I could better bear your curse ! ' 
 
 In the darkness that was about them, she rather felt 
 than saw the infinite tenderness of his eyes as they gazed 
 down on her. 
 
 1 Hush ! Would you wrong me still ? Can you not 
 think one hour that lays your heart bare to me thus, 
 and brings me thus the surety of your sinlessness, is worth 
 to me a lifetime of common joy and soulless pleasure? 
 Let its cost be what it will it is well bought/ 
 
 She knew he held it so ; and for this, that he loved her 
 with this exceeding holiness of love ; for this, that the re- 
 storation of her nobility and honour in his sight was price- 
 less to him, as no paradise purchased by her crime could 
 ever have been ; for this, the woe that she had wrought 
 him, eat like iron into her soul. 
 
 ' Well bought ! It will be bought by a living agony of 
 endless years ! Manhood, pride, peace, joy, all killed in 
 you ; your very name lost, your very fate forgotten, till 
 your hair is white with sorrow and your eyes are blind with 
 age ! Ah, God ! what matter what I be ! It is I who 
 have condemned you to this ! It is I who have been your 
 ruin ! ' 
 
 His arms drew her upward, close against the heart that 
 only beat for her ; his hot lips quivered on her own j in 
 the night-silence and the darkness that was on tkena lug 
 
552 IDALIA. 
 
 voice thrilled through her * sweet as remembered kisses 
 after death.' 
 
 4 Do you think they shall ever part us now ? Death 
 shall unite us, if Life cannot.' 
 
 The hours passed, and they were left in solitude. As 
 they had forgot all other life save their own, so by it they 
 seemed 'forgotten. Through the heavy masonry of the 
 iron-bound walls, no echo of the world without came to 
 them ; on the hush and the gloom of the chamber there 
 was no sound, save only the soft gliding of a night-bird's 
 restless wing. "Whatever fate rose for them with the 
 dawn, this night at least was theirs : there is no love like 
 that which lives victorious even beneath the shadow of 
 death ; there is no joy like that which finds its paradise 
 even amid the cruelty of pain, the fierce long struggle of 
 despair. 
 
 Never is the voluptuous glory of the sun so deep, so 
 rich, as when its last excess of li$ht burns above the 
 purple edge of the tempest-cloud that soars upward to 
 cover and devour it. 
 
 The hours passed, and the rays of the morning slowly 
 stole inward through the narrow casement, bedded high 
 above in the granite blocks, while with the coming of the day 
 the birds of the night returned from their outward flight, 
 and nestled in their dark haunts with their eyes hid be- 
 neath their wings. As the first light touched her brow 
 and the dawn came not there till the day was full-risen 
 for the earth without she smiled in his eyes, and loosened 
 from her bosom the slender steel blade, scarce broader than 
 a needle's width, that had rested there so long. 
 
 'Take it. You have said they shall not part us now.' 
 
 Kis hand closed on it while his smile answered hers. 
 
 ' i will find strength enough for that ; it shall give us 
 eternal liberty, eternal union.' 
 
 Once before he had pledged this promise to her. And 
 as she had known then, so she knew now, that he would 
 find strength to deliver her from dishonour and himself 
 from captivity ; strength to be true to her, even to the 
 last thing of all. 
 
 Having reached the supreme ecstasy and the hiipreir-o 
 anguish of life, death was to them, as to tl;o races of the 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS! ' 553 
 
 young world, the god of deep benignant eyes, whose touch 
 was release, and whose kingdom was freedom, on whose face 
 was light, and in whose hands was balm. 
 
 Even as the words left his lips, on the quiet of the air a 
 single shot rang. 
 
 The first sunbeam had slanted through the slender chink 
 above ; the stillness was intense ; far below the measured 
 Btep of the sentinel fell muffled on the turf, and the liquid 
 stealing music of water, that fell down through thick acan- 
 thus foliage without, alone was dimly heard. At that mo- 
 ment, as the brightness of the day reached high enough to 
 enter the vaulted chamber of the upper story of the gra- 
 nary, the stillness was thus broken. There was a stifled 
 cry ; then silence reigned again ; and on that silence there 
 was heard no more the monotonous tread to and fro of the 
 soldier on guard. 
 
 He started to his feet, his hand on the Venetian steel ho 
 had just grasped. 
 
 1 The man is shot ! ' 
 
 His voice was low and rapid, his eyes turned on hers 
 with the same thought which came to both alike. There 
 were those in that world they had lost who would have 
 done all that courage and true friendship could in their 
 service had they known of their extremity ; there were 
 men by the score who would have let there lives be mowed 
 down like the millet sheaves around them in her cause, 
 had they had power to reach her from the grip of priest 
 and king. 
 
 Hope had been dead in them. 
 
 In the lowest depths of woe the oblivion of passion had 
 made them senseless to all else senseless even to the fate 
 that must await them with the awakening of the dawn. 
 Bat no thought of deliverance had ever come to them. It 
 had seemed meet that their lives should end, once having 
 reached the deepest joy that life could hold; joy taken 
 from the very jaws of the grave ; joy burning through the 
 frozen dullness of despair. 
 
 Yet now, when hope, vague as remembered dreams, once 
 touched them, they felt drunk with it as with the fumes of 
 wine. 
 
 They listened, as none ever listened save those on whose 
 straining ear the first sound that falls will bring the mes- 
 sage of death or life* 
 
554 IDALIA. 
 
 For a moment that hushed stillness lasted, unbroken now 
 .by even the treading of the soldier's feet. Then there 
 broke forth the loud rejoicing bay of a hound loosed on 
 to his quarry ; shot answered shot, steel clashed on steel : 
 the din of tumult filled the soft peace of the early day ; 
 the old-remembered rallying words that had so often 
 floated, to her ear above the din of conflict, vibrated on it 
 now ' Italia ! ' ' Idalia ! ' the two names blent in one. 
 
 As she heard, she rose erect ; her whole frame seemed to 
 strain upward to the sun that glanced through the high 
 bars of their prison-room ; there were fire in her eyes, 
 light on her lips, the glow of liberty on all her face and 
 form. She was the living symbol of Italy unchained. 
 
 ' Do you hear? Do you hear?' she cried to him. 'She 
 is free ! ' 
 
 Before her own freedom even before his the libera- 
 tion of the nation, so long enslaved, came to her heart first ; 
 then, while the great tears coursed down her cheeks, she 
 clung to him, trembling with a terror that had never 
 touched her fearless life the terror lest for him, as for 
 the land for which she had so long endured and suffered, 
 this hope only dawned again to die out in endless night. 
 
 ' Ah, G-od ! give them strength courage victory ? ' she 
 prayed, as she lifted her face to the sun. ' My love, my 
 love ! listen for me, listen ! I cannot' hear. Hope kills 
 me hope for you ! ' 
 
 They stood there, barred in, in the shadows which that 
 ray of wandering sunlight on high alone parted, while be- 
 neath them unseen raged the struggle on which their lives 
 hung. Confused, broken, indistinct, the echoes of the con- 
 test came strangely through the hushed prison-chamber. 
 The bitter riot of war tossed to and fro the fate of their 
 coming years ; the balance of chance swung, holding their 
 destiny, and they could not tell to which side the scale 
 was swaying ; the measure of blood would be the purchase 
 coin of their ransom, or the price of their bondage, and 
 they could not know whether foe or friend now claimed it. 
 They stood, locked in, in solitude, with but a hand's- 
 breadth of the morning sky through the grating above 
 their heads, the only thing visible of all the living world 
 without, and heard the tumult striving far beneath upon 
 whose issue all thexr future hung. 
 
'/ WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS/' 555 
 
 The time was very brief ; a little bird upon an ivy-coil 
 outside the window-bars had lifted its voice in daylight- 
 song as the first shots were fired, and still was singing 
 softly and joyously, untired ; but to them the moments 
 seemed as years. At last, loud and rejoicing on the sum- 
 mer air, wild vivas broke the bitter noise of conflict, and 
 crossed the moans of fallen men; the dropping shots 
 grew fewer and fewer. Upon the stone stairway the rapid 
 upward rush of feet came near ; the bolts were drawn back, 
 the door was flung aside ; with his flanks white with foam, 
 and his mighty jaws crimson with gore, the great dog 
 sprang on her with a single bound ; behind him, upon the 
 threshold, stood Conrad Phaulcon. 
 
 His eyes met theirs one instant ; then headlong at her 
 feet he fell, a deep slow stream of blood staining the gray 
 stone of the floor. 
 
 Thus at last he met his foe. Thus at last his foe looked 
 on him after the weary search of baffled vengeance, long 
 and hot as tiger's thirst. 
 
 As he fell his hands caught the hem of her dress. 
 
 'Idalia! Idalia! ' 
 
 The word died as his head smote the granite, and the 
 broken sword he had pressed into his side to lend him 
 strength for a moment pierced farther, driven in by the 
 weight of the fall. 
 
 Erceldoune staggered forward and raised him. 
 
 ' He is dying ! ' he said, as he looked at her. There came 
 upon him a strange awe as he saw the death that at dawn 
 he had so nearly dealt, smite thus, as another day broke on 
 the world, the man from whom he had fled, as David from 
 the sight of Saul, lest murder should be upon his head if 
 longer he lingered where his enemy lay. 
 
 She never spoke, but sank on her knees beside her father 
 where he had fallen, held up in the arms that a score of 
 hours before had flung him upward like some worthless 
 driftwood to be cast into the flames. Her eyes were fas- 
 tened on his flashed and haggard face, that still had so much 
 left of the old bright classic beauty, 
 
 ' You have saved us ! You ! ' 
 
 She doubted her own senses ! she thought she dreamt as 
 madly as though she were dreaming that the heavens 
 opened and the angela and archangels of mediaeval story 
 
556 JDALIA. 
 
 descended with the sword of Michael, with the spear of 
 Ithuriel, to their rescue. 
 
 He drew his breath with a great sigh , and his voice came 
 in broken whispers. 
 
 ' You said right there are things gods would not par- 
 don, your wrongs are of them. You stung me at last ! * 
 
 She did not answer ; she gazed at him with blind tear- 
 less eyes that saw his face, but only saw it as in the mists 
 of dreams. 
 
 He pressed the sword that had broken off in his loins 
 closer and harder to staunch the blood, while his voice rose 
 ringing and resonant. 
 
 * Our day has come ! They have Palermo ; Naples must 
 follow. The king has enough to do to think of his capital. 
 They fear the news should get to the populace. We have 
 done a bold stroke to-day ; they have been hunting us down 
 like wolves, but we have turned and torn them. The sen- 
 tinel killed, the rest was easy. Ah ! look you, there is 
 vengeance for you too. That white-faced Northerner be- 
 trayed you to Griulio Villaflor. "Well, the boy Berto 
 caught him in his own toils. They hold him safe ; they 
 will kill him like a cur at your word. Ah, Christ ! how the 
 steel pierces ! I would not die if I could help it. Not 
 just now not till I have seen that traitor's face. It is 
 hard hard hard. He has cut and galled me so often ; to 
 die just when I could pay him all ! ' 
 
 The ferocious words gave way as his breath caught them ; 
 he moved restlessly, driving the blade in still, so that by 
 this means he might yet gain a moment's force. As his 
 wandering glazing eyes glanced upward he saw whose arms 
 supported him ; and the old relentless hate glowed in them 
 dark and deathless. 
 
 * So ! he has his vengeance, and I am balked of mine ! 
 Lay me down, signore. I would sooner die a minute earlier 
 than gain the minute by your help.' 
 
 The old savage tiger lust was in the words. Erceldoune 
 never heeded them, he rested the Greek's head on his own 
 breast, and held him upward with gentleness and in silence. 
 
 Idalia hung over him with one prayer .only on her lips, 
 one command only in her voice. 
 
 * Tell him tell him ! If you would atone for your sin 
 if you would redeem your infamy if you have ever 
 remorse bear me witness what you are to me J ' 
 
' / WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THIS /' 557 
 
 The evil faded off his face ; a softer look came back 
 there. 
 
 6 Late latelate ! ' he sighed : yet he lifted his head 
 and made the sign of the cross with that latent superstition 
 which lingered in him even while he made reckless jest of 
 Deity, and denied with flippant laughter man's dreaming 
 hope of Grod. 
 
 'By her mother's memory I swear, Idalia Vassalis is 
 my daughter. To her most bitter calamity. Those who 
 have spoken evil against her have lied. I have been a 
 coward, a traitor, a shame, and a darkness for ever on her 
 path ; but she has ever been loyal to me. She never 
 feared, and she was never faithless ; I loved her for that ; 
 but for that too I hated her.' 
 
 As the words, more vivid in the southern tongue he 
 used, left his lips firmly and distinctly, her eyes filled 
 slowly with tears, and across the stricken form of the 
 wounded man, met those which had seen her aright through 
 all the mists of calumny, which had looked down through 
 the shadows of doubt, and read, despite them, the veiled 
 truth of her life. The faith in him had been sore tried ; 
 but at length, after many days, his reward came. 
 
 Neither spoke. That one look uttered all between them. 
 Conrad Phaulcon pressed his hand closer yet upon the 
 jagged steel that for a few brief moments still could thus 
 hold life in him. Something of his old laugh hovered on 
 his lips. 
 
 ' Look ! I make a fair ending. Pity there is no priest 
 to crow above me. Death-bed repentance! there is no 
 coin like it ; you sell the game you have lost already, and 
 you buy such a fine aroma for nothing ' 
 
 She shivered at the awful mirth as she stooped to him, 
 and passed her hand over his forehead. 
 
 ' Silence ! Live rather to repent. He will forgive ; 
 and I you have tried my mercy long ; you need not fear 
 it now.' 
 
 ' No,' he muttered more huskily, more faintly. * If you 
 had been willing to take your vengeance you could long 
 ago ; you knew what would have sent me to the galleys. 
 But you were true to your word. Strange, strange enough ! 
 You were so bold, so careless, so proud, so reckless ; but 
 ;>ne could hold you in a bridle of iron if once you had given 
 your word.' 
 
55 8 IDALIA. 
 
 t 
 
 His sight, that was beginning to fail him, sought her face 
 with a wondering baffled glance ; through whole life this 
 loyalty to her pledged honour had bewildered him, even while 
 by it he had found so merciless a power to bind and to drive 
 one whom fear could never have swayed, nor force have 
 moved. As she heard, she lost remembrance of the deadly 
 wrongs done against her by the man who should have been 
 her foremost guard, her surest friend ; all the long years 
 through which he had persecuted and poisoned her freedom 
 and her fame fell from her. Lying in his last hour at her 
 feet, having thus at last, however late, however slightly, 
 redeemed the cruelty of his past against her, he brought 
 to her but one memory: that of a long-perished time, 
 when on her childish ear his voice had come like music, 
 breathing the poetry and the heroism of the world's dead 
 youth. 
 
 ' Be more just to us both,' she murmured, while the salt 
 drops fell from her eyes upon his brow. ' What I remembered 
 always was what you at last remember too : the love you 
 bore my mother, the love she gave to you. Let it bring 
 peace at last between us.' 
 
 He shuddered as she spoke. 
 
 ' G-od ! If priests' and women's tales be true, and she 
 lives in another life ! I would go to hell, if a hell there were, 
 sooner than see her face ; sooner than hear her ask of you 
 at my hands.' 
 
 1 Hush ! Have I not said / forgive ? ' 
 
 The soft and solemn cadence of the mournful words 
 seemed to fall upon his ear with a deep calm he dared not, 
 or cared not to break ; he lay silent some moments, 
 breathing heavily, while his drooped lids hung as though 
 in sleep ; then with a sudden upleaping of the vivid life 
 within him he raised himself once more, while the careless 
 melody of his sweet laugh echoed with its old chime 
 through the air. 
 
 * I have been a coward all my life. "Well, I will die like 
 a hero. They will make me a martyr when I am gone. 
 Why not ? Let my epitaph lie as it will, it cannot lie like 
 a priest's or a king's. So this is the end of it all ; the drama 
 is not worth the playing. They have taken Palermo, I tell 
 you, Well, they revile us ; but, after all, we have truth in 
 us ; the people will see that one day. The capital is all in 
 
' / WOULD HAVE GIVEN MY SOUL FOR THtS /' 559 
 
 confusion. They could only leave you a half-dozen guards. 
 Lousada and Veni, and a few others, thought we could do 
 something if we struck well; they have got a brigantine 
 too. If you fly at once you will be safe/ 
 
 The incoherent fragments of speech were panted rapidly 
 out. Scarce pausing for breath, he looked once more upward 
 at Erceldoune, with the old unquenched hatred still burning 
 dark in his glance. 
 
 ' You will have the Vassalis' -fief. Ah, that cuts harder 
 than the sabre ! I would give you twenty lives now to keep 
 you asunder from her. But she stung my memory ; con- 
 science fools call it. I could not free her without freeing 
 you, or I would have done. You hate me ? ' 
 
 1 1 pity you beyond all words.' 
 
 c Because I lie here like a shot cur ? ' 
 
 ' No. Because you wronged her.' 
 
 There was a meaning in the grave and weary answer 
 that checked the fretting and galled passions of the dying 
 man. 
 
 1 Yes ; 1 wronged her. It was for Julian's wealth that I 
 hated her. Sir, you swore to deal me my mortal stroke. 
 Keep your oath. Pluck that broken steel out of my loins ; 
 I shall not live a minute. * You will not ? Why, you 
 break your vow ! God ! how the pain burns ! Look here, 
 then ! ' 
 
 With a sudden movement he drew the blade out from the 
 wound in which it was bedded ; the pent-up blood, let 
 loose, poured from it. He smiled. It seemed as though in 
 that hour the courage of his Achaean fathers flowed into the 
 veins that were fast changing to ice beneath the throes of 
 dissolution. 
 
 * My life has disgraced you ; my death will not,' he said, 
 as his heavy eyes were lifted to hers. * Can you forgive 
 all?' 
 
 ' God is my witness all.' 
 
 ' Ah, you were ever generous ! Idalia ' 
 
 And with her name thus latest upon his utterance, as it 
 had been the latest utterance of sa many, his head fell back 
 upon her bosom, and through his parted lips the lingering 
 breath came in one long deep-drawn sigh. 
 
 When that sigh ceased to quiver in the silence he lay 
 dead in the morning light. 
 
560 ID ALIA. 
 
 The low aark entrance Lad filled in that moment with 
 armed men. Their weapons dropped blood; their faces 
 were hot with the heat of war and of victory ; their passions 
 were at white heat with the madness of joy ; they were of 
 that nature which long before showed its southern grandeur 
 in the midnight charge of the Aurelian trench, and made 
 the five hundred of the Legion pierce their way through the 
 dense and hostile host at Mazzarene. At their head was 
 the young boy Berto, all bis slender limbs quivering with 
 the glory of triumph, and his fair face, with the yellow 
 hair flung back, transfigured like the face of some angel of 
 vengeance. He came eagerly through the gloom of the 
 porchway, followed by the Italians, who obeyed him as 
 though he were a god. He had received the baptism of 
 blood when his mother had been shot down by the Papal 
 troops ; he was the son of a great patriot, who had fallen at 
 the gates of Borne ; and while yet in the first years of his 
 infancy he had stood at the knee of the Liberator, and 
 laughed to see the balls pour down upon the Savarelli roof 
 around them ; the hands of Ugo Bassi had been laid in 
 benediction upon the golden curls of the young child of 
 liberty. His word was the law, his sword was the sceptre, 
 of the men who came with him now. 
 
 Breathless, covered with dust, bruised, wounded, but 
 with a marvellous luminance beaming through the calm un- 
 changed repose of his colourless face, he came to her in the 
 flush of his triumph. 
 
 ' Eccellenza, we bring you the best gifts of life ! we 
 bring you liberty ; we bring you vengeance.' 
 
 Then, as he saw the dead man lying there, his proud and 
 glad voice dropped, he made a soft, backward movement of 
 his hand, signing his followers to pause upon the threshold, 
 he bent his delicate head in reverence. 
 
 i He has won higher guerdon than we,' he said gravely ; 
 1 he has died for you.' 
 
 For he had no knowledge that this one hour of .remorse 
 had been the single, narrow thread of gold unravelled from 
 the long, twisted, tangled, poisoned web of a lifetime of 
 wrong. 
 
'LOST IN TPIE NIGHT: 561 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 LOST IN THE NIGHT, AND THE LIGHT OF THE SEA.' 
 
 AROUND the high-leaping flames of a fresh pile of piiie- 
 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 whose 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. Eage 
 against a prisoner set in their inidst, 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 silence 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 Yiolet Crown. "With his arms bound 
 behind him, while 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 GKulio Villaflor. 
 
 To this end had his high ambitions come. 
 
 He had known that, soon or late, his sin ot treachery 
 would almost surely^find him out ; would reach him though 
 he were housed within kings' palaces ; would strike him down 
 even amid 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 
 
 2 o 
 
562 IDALIA. 
 
 this vengeance, in the oversight of that intelligence which 
 deemed itself safe enough and sure enough to play with all, 
 and remain true to none, Victor Yane had held lightly. 
 Balers 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. But 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 barbarian 
 warfare ; by these he had been baffled, checked, vanquished, 
 meshed in the intricate 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 bring 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 deep hush of the silence ; so deep 
 that through the cavern the lar-off chiming of the waters on 
 the shore could be faintly 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 in- 
 numerable ages, like the unfathomable lustre of the eyes that 
 poets give to Cleopatra ; her mouth was grave and weary as 
 
'LOST IN THE NIGHT* 563 
 
 with the languor 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 and 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 sucli reproach as this which that one unvarying 
 gaze spoke to him; and there was soul enough left in him 
 to make him know its deeoest meaning, and taste 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 Iscariot. 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 his 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 multi- 
 tudes who grasp at gold, at power, at the sweetness of las- 
 civious ease, and at the wide fools' paradise of lies. 
 
 The Italians 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 
 shrill echo. 
 
 * His sentence, Eccellemn * 
 
564 IDALIA. 
 
 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 
 ibear 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 re- 
 proach, with that passionless scorn, and with that passion- 
 less pity on her face, she looked to him like the avenging 
 shape of the honour he had sold, of the land he had be- 
 trayed, of the freedom he had surrendered, of the cause he 
 had forsaken. The rebuke of her gaze 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 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 fire of the same demand ran afresh through 
 the revolutionists around him. 
 
 1 His sentence, Eccellenza ! ' 
 
 He never heard. He had passed through all the bitter- 
 ness 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. 
 
 ' JE traditore ! e traditore ! ' 
 
 By his crime they claimed their justice. 
 
 A heavy sigh parted her lips ; then the full sweet melody 
 of her voice came on the clamour like music that moves 
 men to tears. 
 
 'A traitor; yea! And for that you would deal him 
 
'LOST IN THE NIGHTS 565 
 
 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 - 7 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 light, and stooped and severed the bonds that 
 bound him> and left him free ; and none dared touch that 
 
566 IDALIA. 
 
 which she had made sacred, but stood mute, and afraid, as 
 
 those who stand in the presence of a soul that is greater 
 
 than their own. 
 
 And the man who had sinned against her, fell at her 
 
 feet. 
 
 ' O God ! If I had known you as I know you now ! ' 
 ' You never had betrayed me. No I 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 light ; 
 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 unmea- 
 sured 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. 
 
 1 My kingdom is here I 
 
 And the ship swept on through the stillness of the 
 hushed hours, through the glory of the light, to glide out 
 tli rough the eternal sea-gates of the old Roman world, and 
 pass into the cloudless glow of eastern skies, where already 
 through the voluptuous night the star of morning rose. 
 
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