“Where the sea and sky meet,Kissing far away,O, come, love! O, come, love,Daring salt and spray!There join earth and heaven,Each fulfilled in bliss.O, northward, love, come northward,Where the strange thing is!“Where the storm-bow’s shiningStandeth where God stood,O, set thy little foot, love,Safe from wreck and flood!Dim and far in the rainingLights gleam mystical.O, northward, love, come northward,Where strange things befall!”
“Where the sea and sky meet,Kissing far away,O, come, love! O, come, love,Daring salt and spray!There join earth and heaven,Each fulfilled in bliss.O, northward, love, come northward,Where the strange thing is!“Where the storm-bow’s shiningStandeth where God stood,O, set thy little foot, love,Safe from wreck and flood!Dim and far in the rainingLights gleam mystical.O, northward, love, come northward,Where strange things befall!”
“Where the sea and sky meet,
Kissing far away,
O, come, love! O, come, love,
Daring salt and spray!
There join earth and heaven,
Each fulfilled in bliss.
O, northward, love, come northward,
Where the strange thing is!
“Where the storm-bow’s shining
Standeth where God stood,
O, set thy little foot, love,
Safe from wreck and flood!
Dim and far in the raining
Lights gleam mystical.
O, northward, love, come northward,
Where strange things befall!”
Hetalked, having a willing listener—she laughed at him for a chatterbox. He had long fits of silence—she tried to enter into his dreams. Sometimes he was moody and troubled; and she knew why, and blamed herself for his self-reproach; sometimes, and that most often, they drifted soul to soul on a halcyon tide, and let the world go, and forgot everything but themselves and the rapture of living.
And they met and met; and still were faithful to their platonic compact. It was pretty to mark their idyll; but Nature, while she hung them with flowers, was for ever a little impatient of their content.
Nobody interfered with them; their intimacy was encouraged rather than suspected; the world conspired for their ruin. They were so little put to it to practise any duplicity, that their consciences almost came to acquit them of the necessity for it. In company they were called upon to display no greater decorum than good taste would have imposed upon a betrothed couple; and elsewhere, on the strength of that mutual understanding, they could consort in honest seeming, as if no guilty thought were at their hearts.
And, indeed, there was none in Isabella’s—a child of seventeen, and in love. Guilt is for criminals, who work the other way and through hate of their kind. Fanchette’s soul should have been the guilty one.
One day Tiretta took a queer object from his pocket. It was down in the deep gardens, and they were alone together again.
“Do you see that?” he said. It was a little white slipper, woefully grubby.
“If you please, Bonbec,” she answered. It was her name for him, quaint in its underlying confidence, but betraying nothing to chance ears.
“Well, do you not recognise it?”
“No. Stay——” she laughed and flushed. “Is it really the recovered relic of that day?”
“Relic?—indeed it is.”
“Horrible dirty little thing!”
“May I keep it?”
“O, Bonbec!”
“That and the flower—a priceless pair.”
“Priceless, indeed. What presents I make you!”
“I gave Bissy gold for this.”
“O, then, it is invaluable!”
“Lady, I have slept with it every night under my pillow.”
“I should at least have pulled off the heel if I had been you.”
“Tell me, may I keep it?”
“I wish I might give you something worth your taking, Bonbec.”
“Saving yourself, I could wish no dearer gifts. They speak heaven to me—yes, the little soiled slipper and the little crumpled flower. So much so that, in fairness, I want to make you as inestimable a gift in return. Isabel, will you take my pot of basil, and cherish it for me?”
“I will love to—dearly I will.”
“It is so inconsiderable a thing, it would pass for a mere compliment. I have a strange feeling about it—now do not wonder why, or whence it comes—that its flowering will coincide with our loves’ triumph; that it waits to be the symbol of our bridal. Is not that an odd superstition—irrational, meaningless; and yet somehow I cannot shake it off.”
He smiled; but his eyes were serious. She answered as movingly:
“If love can make it flower, dear my heart, that day shall come quickly.”
“So I feel it,” he said. “Tend it; touch it; breathe on it—no more will be needed. It will think the spring is in its green veins; it will open its little smiling eyes, like a waking infant, to you its mother. Fancy it our sleeping baby, Isabel.”
They were silent for awhile, the girl looking down with flushed cheeks. Presently she said:
“Will Bissy wonder, do you think?”
“Bissy?”
“Why you gave him gold for it—that other?”
“Ah-ha! Bissy is astute, a shrewd calculating elfin. He will not kill his goose with the golden eggs. The mine is not emptied of its possibilities for him. Trust him to be silent; and perish all scruples!”
He deprecated meeting trouble half-way; he bade her just drift and be happy. He was in one of his irresponsible moods, indolent and garrulous. Sometimes, he told her, he felt like a warm mass of animated jelly, afloat on a tropic sea, and just dreamily conscious of the sun and the soft swaying of the water. If only he could roll lazily round, and feel the contact of his lady radiate, and with her drift on for ever through the glassy silences!
“But I think there would be two sides to that,” responded Isabella very sensibly; “and only one would be turned to the sun. Picture the black abysses underneath, and what might rise up from them.”
He laughed:
“Then we will be two birds floating on tranced wings through the limitless blue.”
“And the storms, Bonbec?”
“Then two angels, it must be; and think of another side to that if you can.”
“I can only think of God, Bonbec.”
He looked at her, and laughed again; but suddenly was silent.
That night Fanchette, preparing her mistress for bed, made an impromptu statement, quite innocently:
“I have put the pot of basil in your Highness’s chambre-à-coucher.”
Isabella, guilty of an involuntary start, paused a moment to recover her self-possession.
“What pot of basil, girl?”
“O! I thought your Highness would know. It was delivered as from M. le chevalier, with his respectful compliments.”
“I recollect now. M. Tiretta, uncertain of his movements, begged me to hold the stakes, as it were, between himself and Aquaviva. You remember the challenge?”
Indeed, that explanation of his gift had been offered to the Infanta by M. Tiretta himself; and not as a contingent one. If there was to be any question of subterfuge, the guilt should rest with him.
Fanchette remembered very distinctly.
“I think then, with your Highness’s permission, it is well placed where it is,” she said.
Isabella, her colour a little heightened, found a difficulty in asking why.
“O, I have a sentiment about these things,” said Fanchette. “Warm thoughts will make the flowers in one’s bosom open prematurely—I have noticed that.”
“Are you proposing to me,” said Isabella, “to wear this entire bush as a posy?”
“Well, warm dreams, then,” said the maid. “They will make a very forcing-house of one’s bedroom—mademoiselle will see, if she has any love for this plant. It will come to blossom while she slumbers. Or perhaps she would rather I removed it. It is not good, say some people, to breathe in sleep the same air with flowers. They are like sweet-tongued suitors, best shut the other side of the door.”
“That will do, Fanchette. You are allowing your tongue too much freedom.”
“O, I did not mean to imply anything,” quoth injured innocence. “Your Highness, if you please, is so ready to think the worst of Fanchette. Only what I will venture to say is that, if you are not on the side of M. Tiretta in this business, it will be sensible of you to let me put the basil-pot elsewhere.”
“I am not, however, the least troubled with these scruples,” said Isabella courageously. “As you have put it there, it may remain, since its leaves at least smell sweet. And if I find I suffer from its neighbourhood, it will be simple to remove it.”
“O, if you ask me, I do not think you will suffer from it!” said the maid, airily pert.
“Good-night, Fanchette!”
“Good-night, your Highness, and fruitful dreams.”
The alcove where the Infanta slept had in it a little dim hanging lamp, which burnt all night. It was enough and no more to betray in shadowy contour the half-visionary sweetness of the face upon the pillow, the rounded shoulder, the waxen hand. She lay, on this night, so still, she hardly seemed to breathe. She was listening, her lips just parted, to the sounds in the great house dying away in the distance one by one. The last door boomed its remote thunder; the step of a sentry passed beneath her window, and attenuated and ceased; a profound stillness reigned everywhere. Then, sitting up, she sat thrilling a moment, and slid softly from her bed. Listening again, as if half fearful of what her own longing might bring upon her, she crept barefooted, in her ghostly night-robe, to the table where her treasure lay, and knelt, and put her arms about it, and buried her face in the fragrant leaves.
“My baby,” she whispered—“open, open your pretty eyes, and make me happy. Did I deny you? It was for love’s sake and your father’s, most dear. He would tell you so if he were here.”
SomewhereI have read or heard of a marine invertebrate, which, when its stomach disturbs it, throws the oppressive thing away and gets a new one. It is a beautifully simple solution of the problem of life—which problem unquestionably has its centre in those regions—and as triumphant in its utter banality as the method of Columbus with his egg or of Alexander with his Gordian knot. Without doubt, if man had been constructed on that principle, his history would have needed not a thousandth part of the apology which is now a necessary accompaniment of its recital. The myriad ills attendant on digestion, the brutalities, the tremors and the hallucinations, would have entirely lacked their excuse. Conceive the practical humour of the statement that one had no stomach for an enterprise; conceive such a solution of the saturnalian difficulty as Vitellius never dreamed. A permanent and undetachable stomach was certainly the actual curse which Satan inflicted on mankind.
The nearest approach to this impossibly beatific condition consists, as popularised by the Catholic and Universal Church, in throwing away one’s conscience and getting a new one. The priest conducts the process, and the medium is the confessional. Therein the distressing load may be cast, and therefrom the patient be discharged re-equipped. It has all the efficacy of the other, though at the same time hardly its simplicity. For one thing, one cannot do it alone by oneself; for another, a dose of penance is conditional on the treatment—usually a trifle, but sufficient to leave a taste in one’s mouth. However, it is a useful alternative.
Fanchette’s conscience did not often oppress her; but, on the rare occasions when it did, there was always this means at hand to rid herself of its burden. She would go to the little church in the village, ring up Father Leone, and empty her reservoir of sins upon that good man’s devoted head. Then, cleansed and chastened, she would come forth in a rare condition for fresh frolics, the first taste whereof would be comparable with that of a cigarette after a Turkish bath.
These moral “drenchings,” however, though easeful in their results, were painful enough in their process to make a resort to them unwelcome. Fanchette had a constitutional dislike to confessing herself guilty of anything—except of the best intentions; and it was only the recognised destination of those abstract virtues which drove her from time to time to appeal to Providence in the matter of their better understanding, so far as she was concerned. It was in some ways, in this connection, a convenience that Father Leone was both old and deaf; that he was, moreover, an absorbed herbalist, and, if the truth must be spoken, far more interested in vegetable physiology than in Christian ethics. Yet again, to accuse oneself to dull ears had its drawbacks, since the self-exposure necessitated could command no consolation of sympathy to ameliorate its own ugly nakedness. On the whole, perhaps, she would have preferred an intent and properly responsive listener; but, since that was not to be had, she must put up with what was. After all, to confess was the thing; and, if the priest was deaf, it was no business of hers to question Providence as to its selection or affliction of its own ministers.
Fanchette’s conscience had been troubling her, and one afternoon Fanchette went across to the church to renew it. She went very staid and unapproachable, paying no heed to the jests of rude men or the quizzings of gossips. A cavalier, walking up the street, espied the demure figure at a distance away, and dodged behind a corner to avoid recognition by it. Peeping thence, he saw the young woman approach the church, and disappear within its portals, when, convinced of her mission, he immediately came forth and followed in pursuit.
The church of Santa Maria was a dull little edifice, and had been rendered duller by the former duke, Don Philip’s elder brother, who, on his promotion to the crown of Naples, had transferred everything of value from it to his new capital. Without, it was a mere whited sepulchre; within, its necessary appointments exhibited just what decency demanded and no more. Don Carlos had fairly pillaged the building, in fact, and the dross of plate and pinchbeck which remained was hardly worth the considering. From its tinselled high altar to its little paper-petticoated Virgin in an alcove near the door, it was all cheap and tawdry. There were some depressing “stations of the cross” on the walls, and, in a dark place under a painted window, a single confessional box, having a stall for the priest in the middle, and on either side a curtained recess for penitents. When one of these latter desired relief, he or she must pull a little bell-handle in the wall near the altar-rails, the sound caused by which summoned the sacristan, who in his turn summoned the priest from his presbytery hard by.
The cavalier, passing the church portals, went straight up to this presbytery and knocked on its door. He was a little pinchbeck in seeming, like the candlesticks—eloquent somehow of polish without and cheap metal within. He was rather short than tall, neatly built, with very black eyebrows, and in his face a pert insolence suggestive of a popularcafé-chanteur’s. Perfumed, self-assured, and brilliantly veneered, M. la Coque was able to pass with the vulgar for a very complete gentleman. Women, who alone in nature exceed their lords in the gorgeousness of their plumage, found his fine colouring vastly attractive: Fanchette, we know, found it irresistible.
After a short interval the door was opened by Gaspare, the sacristan, who was also general servitor to the meagre household. He was a snuffy old fellow, hoarse-spoken, and with a leery acquisitive eye. He greeted the visitor, with an air as of being on a footing of sly pleasantry with him.
“Ha, signore! What plenary indulgence now for what mischief? Is the market closed to your worship in Parma, that you must come all the way here to get relief?”
La Coque pushed the old man within and closed the door after them.
“Coquin!” he whispered: “be quiet! The indulgence I ask is at your disposal and worth to you just a silver ducat. Come along now. Is his reverence safe bestowed?”
“What wickedness is forward? I don’t budge until I know.”
“Hark to that chink, Gaspare! A double silver ducat to line your old breeches withal! Where is his reverence, I say?”
“Where the last trump wouldn’t disturb him. In the garden, reading.”
“Excellent. When the bell rings for confession I will go and be his substitute.”
The sacristan fairly gasped in his breath.
“What, you will! Do you understand that at the first word the devil will pull you down by the legs through the floor?”
“O, the devil loves a jest, Gaspare, as much as you do!”
“O! A jest is it?”
“Of course—what else. Quick—there goes the bell! Find me a hood and cassock.”
“Who is it?”
“Well, there is no harm in confessing. Mademoiselle Becquet.”
“Ah-ha!” The old rascal’s face puckered like a monkey’s. “An assignation?” He shook his head and waved his hands in rebukeful protest; then turned, and shuffled before, sighing, sighing:
“It is sacrilege; I wash my hands of it; you will pay in advance, signore?”
Fanchette, kneeling in the church alone, gabbled little prayers, and reviewed her programme between whiles. Then she rose, rang the bell, summoned the sacristan, stated her requirements, and withdrew to the confessional-box, where she disposed herself on her knees behind one of the curtains. Shortly she heard the altar rail click, a slow step approach, and her view through the grating towards the chancel was suddenly obscured by the interposition of a bowed, scarce distinguishable head. She settled herself for the ordeal.
“Please, father, give me absolution for what I am about to confess.”
“A timore inimici eripe animam tuam,” responded the seated figure, in a low, mumbling voice. “Deliver yourself, my daughter.”
The penitent hesitated a moment, as if calling up her nerve; bit her lower lip, and began:
“I have to accuse myself, first and foremost, of infidelity.”
“That is bad. Is it spiritual or secular infidelity to which you refer, my child?”
“Infidelity to my lover, father.”
A sudden cough seemed to catch the listener; he crowed a little as he answered:
“To be sure. There will be some good reason for this apostacy, no doubt.”
“It is to be found, father, in my own conscience, which shrinks from the load he would have put upon it.”
“What load? Be specific, child. Has he tempted you to wrong?”
“Not in that way—he knows better. But he desired to use me as his instrument in the ruin of a man he hated.”
“It is admitted, my daughter, that it is lawful sometimes to do evil that good may come of it. Possibly this lover of yours may have seen in his enemy one of those human abnormalities whose destruction, though demanded by every moral law, can only be compassed by craft. In that case you would be doing a positively pious work in helping him. But, as to this infidelity: the word implies, according to my reading of it, a positive no less than a negative sentiment; an attraction as well as a repulsion.”
“Yes, father.”
“May it conceivably be hinted, then, that you have turned not so muchfromone lover astowardsanother, his rival in your fleeting affections?”
The penitent did not answer.
“Speak, daughter,” said the confessor, rather violently clearing his throat.
“I cannot, with confidence,” answered Fanchette, thus adjured, with an air of distressed hesitancy. “Certainly I have felt pity for the man; and I have heard it said that pity excites in one a feeling of fondness for the pitied—but I do not know.”
“You do not? This is not confession, but equivocation. Tell me the truth at once, if you would be absolved.”
“How unsparing you are, father! What if I do love him—a little? It is the fault of the first one for imposing such a task on me. He knew my tender heart—he might have foreseen the inevitable result.”
“I think he might indeed.”
“Besides, though the first one is a musical-box, the second is a nightingale.”
“Damnation!” said the confessor.
“Father! What do you mean?”
“I mean that you may go to the devil, Mademoiselle Fanchette Becquet.”
“After you, if you please, M. Charles la Coque.”
“What! you know me?”
“I saw you first in the street; I saw you afterwards through this grating as you approached. Could I mistake you, you wicked wretch? May you be cursed to all eternity for your profanation of this sacred office!”
La Coque sank back a little into the shadows, then bent forward again, and spoke softly:
“Do you know, Fanchette, I think I am coming out to strangle you.”
The young lady, now verging on hysteria, answered with a scornful gasp:
“It would be worthy of a man who could commit such an unutterable meanness—and without a shadow of excuse.”
“O, I had my excuse! I was uncertain of your fidelity; and you see how I was justified in my doubt. Then this opportunity offered, and I couldn’t resist taking it.”
“It was Gaspare, I suppose. You corrupt everybody and everything you touch. Well, you know now I hate you.”
“All’s one for that. It’s not your hate but your love that we’ve got to reckon with. A nightingale, forsooth! That hired automaton—that painted jackdaw mimicking his betters! You shall answer for the insult.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I told you.”
Actually, with the words, he unbuttoned the hatch and stepped forth. She crouched away from him, huddled within the curtain, her breath coming quick. The church was quite empty and silent.
“Come to my loving arms, Fanchette.”
She uttered a little whimper.
“If you were not such a vain fool you would understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That, knowing who you were, I should not so have betrayed myself, if it had been true.”
“It is not true, then?”
“It is true Idopity him—and her.”
“Pity excites a fonder feeling. You have said it.”
She hesitated, saw no way out of theimpasse, and took refuge in the long-threatened collapse. He succumbed at once.
“O, hush, girl, for heaven’s sake! All the world will hear you.”
“O—O! I don’t care. To be so doubted and put upon; to have served this man as I have; stifled my better feelings for his sake; sought to ruin a mistress, who has never shown me anything but kindness; as good as offered to be the chevalier’s abettor and their go-between—and then to be treated as if I were a perfide and a wanton! I will never give my heart to anyone again; I will beg admission into a convent and end my days a spouse of heaven! O—O!”
He was terrified. He knelt down by the struggling figure, and crushed it within his arms, seeking to suffocate its outcries.
“Fanchette—you are betraying us—for God’s sake compose yourself! There, there, girl—I did not mean it. I believe you, on my soul, to be true to me. We must make our compact binding—indissoluble—never to be questioned from this time by either of us. Come with me—through the sacristy. Gaspare is always my friend—he will be my friend again—and the priest is safe elsewhere. Any moment may bring discovery upon us. Come, lovely and adorable—let us kiss and forgive. Fanchette!”
Little by little, coaxing and caressing, he got her to her feet and away with him. Father Leone, pacing his garden, was left undisturbed to his vegetable meditations, and Fanchette’s conscience had to defer its unloading to a more convenient opportunity.
Surprisedand beset in that moment of unguarded emotionalism, Fanchette had capitulated; and there was an end to her scruples as a reluctant confederate. With the sacrifice of her self-respect went her last feeling of charity towards hard-pressed virtue. She regarded that now, with the eyes of the qualifiedchère-amie, as an hypocrisy to be derided and shown up. Thenceforth she was in all things her showy tyrant’s most devoted auxiliary, to be cursed or fondled, to be used and abused, to be dragged by him by the hair of her head, should he please—and so to revile him and spit at him, and turn with raking fingers on any humane champion who should come to her aid. That is to speak conditionally of Fanchette, but not of the type to which she belonged, and to which she would sooner or later conform. Not that jimp figure of hers, in its striped sarsenet frock with the slim waist, not that demure smile and young mealy complexion, would save her presently from the fate of the termagant, swollen of feature and foul of tongue, to which she was destined. There was in her that seed of Xantippe which is wont, once quickened, to sprout and increase and burst into riotous blossom in a night. She was of the substance of the true virago—vulgar, incorruptible, animal; rending the lust she has provoked; ready to die whether to spite or to save the object of her desire; ecstatically courting her own destruction at the hands of the rage she has wantonly excited—and all to prove her utter devotion to and absorption in the one. Such was Fanchette in promise—a sufficient foil, even so undeveloped, to the nobler passion she was called upon to assist in betraying.
That idyllic love should lie at the mercy of such coarse understandings! But so is it decreed in this paradoxical world of ours, where the myriad inanities sit in judgment on the sapient few, where the rabble overrules the senate, the dunce the scholar, the loud illiterate voice the cultured wit.
La Coque stood for the vulgar majority in this case. His hatred of a finer spirit was simply the expression of an envious and ignoble mind. He was avid to ruin Tiretta, and indifferent as to what other fair fames he besmirched in the process. At the beginning he had had no least grounds, save his own inventive malice, for the scandal at which he had obscurely hinted. Later, when he came to learn that appearances were at least beginning to give colour to his fiction, his joy waxed great and fierce. He began then seriously to contemplate the means and methods by which he might bring this belauded cockerel to his knees. He set Fanchette to watch and to report.
Enough was soon gathered to give him a clue to his policy. He aimed at nothing more at the outset than the disgrace and recall of his detested rival, as he chose to consider him—an end, nevertheless, which must be effected without compromising the Infanta. He was sharp enough to see that any mistake in that direction might involve himself in ruin. It would be sufficient for his purpose could Tiretta be led, somehow and definitely, into an amorous self-betrayal, armed with the evidences of which it would be easy for anyone to procure the reptile’s dismissal. He instructed Fanchette to affect sympathy, to worm herself into the chevalier’s confidence, to inveigle him if possible into a pretended intrigue with herself, on the score that it would at once cover his real design and afford him particular opportunities for prosecuting it. He instructed her so to manage appearances, in fine, that at the right moment M. Tiretta could be represented to the duke for the traitor he actually was, and to the Infanta as having been secretly prosecuting all this time a discreditableaffairewith her own serving maid.
And to this pretty programme, Fanchette, a procuress for love’s sake, was amiably prepared to subscribe—even though she might endanger her own emotions in the process. For she certainly found a fearful joy in playing with the fire kindled for another’s consuming.
As material for the plot, that little scene in the corridor had had its timely uses. It had put her and her gentleman on a confidential footing, which that later whispered colloquy had encouraged and his own indecision confirmed. Thereafter he must suffer her secret intelligences meekly, and little by little cease of any pretence at misreading them. In truth, poor fool, in the torment of self-reproach he must endure, the solace of a sympathetic ally was hardly to be refused. Somehow it seemed to make him feel less guilty.
Not that he frankly countenanced Fanchette’s partisanship, or ever appeared to assume an inner meaning from it. But, like the artless receivers of stolen goods we hear of, he accepted its fruits unquestioning, and, when she made profitable opportunities for him, took them with the most ingenuous air possible. He thought, in truth, she was a friend, and so played in all things into her hands.
The main thing was, for his greater exposure and degradation, to discredit him in Isabella’s eyes. Fanchette took a peculiar pleasure in that moiety of her task. One day, having manœuvred to come upon him alone in the grounds, she met him point blank with a question which brought him up aghast:
“Are you in love with me, monsieur?”
He stared a moment, and then bungled out a monosyllable:
“Why?”
“O!” she said; “it is a fair challenge, is it not? Tell me—do you think me pretty?”
He was beginning to recover his self-possession.
“Yes, certainly I do, Fanchette,” he said.
“Do you take an obvious pleasure in my company?”
“If it is obvious, it is obvious,” he answered evasively.
“I will put it another way,” she said. “Is it for my sake that you seek it so often?”
“Do I seek it often?”
She put up her face quite close to his, and said mockingly:
“Would you like to kiss me now, monsieur?”
He drew back, with a smiling shake of the head.
“I honour your good fame too well, Fanchette.”
She broke into a shrill little laugh.
“O, the darling, the Joseph! And yet he cannot be happy apart from me. Why, I wonder. He will never say—wherefore it behoves the poor rejected one to give him a morsel of advice.” She came close again, and perked her chin at him. “Do not think for a moment, monsieur, that I want your love; and as for my good fame, it can look after itself. But, for my company, that is another matter from the point of view of your own interests; and, if you follow my advice, you will continue to pretend to take pleasure in it, if you do not feel any.”
“But I do feel pleasure, girl.”
“That is well, then; and I say, let your pleasure be as obvious to others as it is to yourself.”
He looked his bewilderment, and she derided him:
“How slow of comprehension you are! Why, for the reason that they may think this no more than an intrigue with a femme de chambre, and so spare you the gossiping and eavesdropping which might otherwise work you mischief. O, understand me, monsieur! It is friendship which suggests this—not inclination. I do not propose to you to do more than pretend.”
He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an abyss.
A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love—an outrage and a shame. But it embodied aquasi-revelation which was even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally, for the guilty sham it was. He positively blushed like a child detected in a lie.
Was it a fact, too, that gossip was beginning to whisper? He had been so absorbed in his dream, had held it in truth so sacred from the world, that he had never so much as imagined that danger from without. Not while the dream lasted—the mad impossible beatitude. And was it already threatening to an end? He would not believe it—so perfect and so uplifted, risen above the reach of mortal hurts. These shadows were but conditions of its brightness.
After all, what had he done but follow the path appointed him, and if by the way he had wandered into paradise, that chance was in the itinerary. He had not abused his paradise; he had simply turned its inspiration into song. In appearance, at least, there was nothing to convict him.
And so he ended with derision for that monstrous suggestion, and a determination utterly to discard it. Yet the thing being always in his mind may have given him thenceforth in Fanchette’s company an air of self-consciousness, which the vicious might interpret if they would into a secret understanding.
Let all that pass for the moment. Our theme is still of Isabel and her “young palmer in love’s eye” wandering, yet unchallenged, in their unsoiled Eden.
Now June with these bewitched lovers drifted down a golden haze into July, and July itself burned stilly on towards harvest-time. It was the midsummer of their happiness—all the world one soundless tide of light on which their dreaming hearts, like the fairy nautilus, made rainbow sail by mystic strands, and silent moon-drenched gardens, and paths of rippling flame which ran into the sunset. All time was rapture to them, and most when they were silent and together; for speech is but the sorry change of thought, and cannot for all its volume match one golden maxim of the soul. What they felt, each to the other, was better understood unspoken; in sleep alone it found the perfect utterance.
One day, loitering so rapt, they came upon a terrace-corner by the house where, at a man’s height above the ground, was a window with a little balcony looking towards the lower gardens. Here were myrtle bushes growing and loading the air with their scent. Beyond, the turf shelved down to meet the leafy margin of the thickets, which enshrined the flowery walks and lily ponds dear to the girl’s heart. She paused and pointed to the window.
“Did you know,” she asked, “that was my bower, my oratory?”
He shook his head, smiling.
“It is,” she said. “Have I not a beautiful altar to worship at?”
He understood:
“This view? the green dale of quietude, with all its lovely secrets. I like best, Madonna, the lilies of your altar-piece.”
“Ah, if one could but see them!”
“It is enough to know they are there, as I know the love that is in your heart. It is sweet, I think, in hiding. But some day it will be sweeter to go down and drown among my lilies. Is the basil in bud yet?”
“Not yet.”
She called him by the name it was only hers to know. He sighed.
“It is shyer than these myrtles. Why did we not make them the symbol of our bridal? They have the better right. I wonder what it waits for?—my life’s blood, perhaps, Aquaviva would say.”
She cried “Bonbec!” and looked at him with such a white piteousness that his heart smote him.
“Beloved,” he whispered: “That was a senseless and a wicked thought. Forgive me for it. But I wish the basil would blossom. Where do you keep it—in that same dear bower?”
He stood on tiptoe to peep, but could catch no more than a glimpse of daintily flowered silks and hangings, and gilded mirrors, and a sheen ofmarqueterieand ormolu, all in the richly fragile fashion of the day.
“No,” she said, still pale and troubled: “In my bedroom, which is above.”
He wafted a kiss to that lily sanctuary.
“Could you not, unsuspected, come down from it,” he whispered—“just to the little balcony—and speak with me when all the house is silent? To be alone together in the night, my beautiful!”
Her cheek had turned from pale to pink; but she looked at him with unfaltering eyes.
“I will do anything you tell me to,” she said.
“Even if it were that, Isabel?”
“It would not be wrong if you told me.”
Much moved, he touched her hand, and bade her sleep undisturbed for him. “And speak for me in your prayers,” he said.
“Every night,” she answered, “when I kneel to our unknown God, Bonbec, and pray that some day we may find the print of His footsteps under the rainbow.”
It was his song that was in her mind—that had become, indeed, her new faith’s inspiration. That “passion of the past” of which he had spoken, and into whose ghostly texture her own life seemed woven; those “long far lands of home” towards whose unutterable rest and understanding his spirit sought to convey her—to what more soothing wings of mysticism could she confide her burden of fearful joys and apprehensions? Northward: the world’s unfathomed mystery of the pointing finger: the threshold of the great wonder; and home—not home new made, but home recovered! That was the ecstasy of the thought. They had been wanderers apart these long centuries, and now at last were come together again upon the starry track.
Fond nonsense, was it not? And yet so strangely real to them, that that flight together up the white staircase of the world for ever took them in fancy homewards. When they thought of escape—not spoke, for that had not come yet—those little outpost islands in the cold seas were always their mental refuge and first breathing-place.
But these transcendent moods were not for every occasion. They had their living Eden to engage them, and it was sweet to tread all day on flowers, and hear the drowsy doves murmur, and take the sun into their hearts. And so fate allowed it until the golden cup was brimming.
One night—long cause had Tiretta to remember that night with rapture and with grief—the Gonzalès left the two alone together in thesalonwhither the chevalier had been invited to improvise sweet ditties for the ladies’ behoof. He had not perhaps acquitted himself very well; he seldom did under compulsion; and the marquise had shown signs of boredom. She was overfed, she was sleepy, she was cross; moreover she had an indescribable air as of resenting the lagging close of an entertainment which had lost its point and its motive. There was patronage in her manner to the soldier; there was even a hint of insolence. At last she said, with rude impatience: “Well, minstrels stale, I find, like other sweetmeats, and there comes a time when we wonder why we cloyed ourselves with them. After all they only appear at the feast to prove how well we could have done without them.”
She had gorged herself at dessert onmarrons-glacés, the old pig, and no doubt spoke feelingly. Yet there seemed a motive behind her ill-manners, too.
“I have sung badly,” said Tiretta good-humouredly. “I admit it.”
“Eh bien!” said madame; “it does not matter in the least. You have done your best, and there is an end of it.”
She got up almost immediately, having delivered herself, though with a hurried manner, as if she doubted having gone too far, and, saying she had an appointment to keep and would be back in a minute, waddled out of the room.
“To sleep,” whispered Isabella. “She will say to herself it is only to shut her eyes for a moment; but it will be an hour.”
“She will expect to find me gone when she returns,” said Tiretta. “It was a very palpable hint.”
He stood before the girl. She rose, and they looked at one another. Their hearts were somehow conscious of a vague foreboding. Then she moved, and made a sign to him to follow her to the window. Together they stepped out upon the balcony which overlooked the dreaming grounds.
It was a night for love and lovers. The moon burned large behind a film of mist, whose gauze just veiled the barren spaces of the dark, and charmed the sleeping trees, and shook within its tissue a spangled star or two, caught like fireflies in a web. Deep and shadowy below them lay the gardens, their far solitary sentinels two dim and grey colossi, Hercules and a satyr, whose hugeness alone had in past days saved them from the hands of the despoiler. Now, mere unsubstantial phantoms of the mist, they seemed to move and palpitate, as if some antique spirit in the night stirred in their stony veins. Here and there low down a light twinkled from a distant lodge or villa. Not a sound broke the utter stillness, save now and again the drowsy burr of a cricket, or the swish of a bat’s wings as its shadow dipped and fled.
Silent in that breathing trance of things, the two stood together and drank in the beauty of the scene. Their pulses throbbed in unison to its sensuous appeal; they touched, and did not draw apart. Never before had he seemed so dear or she so fair in the other’s eyes. He marvelled how he could ever have dared to lift his to this white miracle of girlhood—to dream of possessing it. As she stood near him, the sense of her proud young loveliness, so submissive to his love, of all that maiden treasure, and he the chosen master of its sweets and secrets, swelled in his heart until he scarce could bear its rapture. Mad thoughts were surging in his brain; he felt that he was losing command of himself, when suddenly she turned and spoke to him, a tense emotion in her voice:
“Whatever happens, keep me in your heart.”
“Isabel!” he breathed.
He held out his arms; and she came instantly into them, and gave her lips to him, yielding herself utterly with just one sigh like a dreaming child’s. All discretion, all good resolutions were forgotten in the passionate stress of that moment. He strained her to his breast with a fierce tyranny of possession; and, her face lifted close to his, she whispered out her soul.
“I shall not be false, even though—O, you will believe me, you will believe me, will you not?”
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to fear?”
“I do not know,” she sighed.
“Not the cryptic utterances of that rude old woman?”
“Your mind, too, is troubled. How can I be so close to you and not feel it. Bonbec, I am afraid of to-morrow.”
“Come away with me then—here, to-night. I will get horses, and we will fly northwards—Isabel—to the unknown Eros! He gave us to one another—O, long long past in the beautiful gardens!—and I cannot live without you, beloved. Duty, honour, reason—throw them all to the wolves, so that our love alone remain to us.”
She clasped her white arms about his neck, and with one soft hand caressed the hair from his forehead.
“Would it remain, dear my lord? Or would you not come to grudge the price you paid for it? And yet I love you so that I must risk it; but not till every other hope is gone.”
“What hope, Isabel?”
“Ah! I do not know. But give me that plea of desperation for my pretext. Then, at last, if you call to me I will come.”
“My princess; my true heart!”
“Not your princess, but your slave, Bonbec.”
“My bird, then.”
“O, yes, indeed—caught captive by a song, and trembling in your hand.”
Some noise, real or imaginary, startled them. He stirred; but she would not let him go.
“Yet one moment, beloved.”
“Is it she returning?” he said. “Well, let her find us. To die for you, Isabel—what a little thing it sounds beside my love! Just to change this mortal suit for one more meet to await our nuptials in! Yet how sweet the body clings to sweet!”
She struggled to free herself—to push him from her.
“No, go,” she said. “For pity’s sake, Bonbec! O, you kill my heart with fear!”
“One last kiss to comfort it.”
She tore herself from him, and he left her, going gaily through the empty room.
All that night he slept on roses, and all the following day he walked on air, his brain drugged with an exultant ecstasy which bore him far above the world of common thoughts and common apprehensions. Some instinct holding him from presuming too soon on a transcendent favour, he took horse and rode far into the country, returning only to the palace when night was falling. And presently, hardly knowing what to hope or what to fear from it, the summons reached him to attend the ladies in thesalle-d’audience.
She was not there when he entered it; only the old marquise, who rose with unwonted condescension and alacrity to greet him.
“Ah, monsieur!” she said; “you are to congratulate us and yourself on the happy termination of your labours.”
There was a sort of leery jubilance in her manner, sufficiently significant in the context of late forebodings. He looked at her stupidly.
“I do not understand,” he said.
“What!” she cried. “You have not heard?”
“Heard what? I have been absent all day.”
“And no advice has reached this amorous proxy from his indulgent principal? Eh well, monsieur! Wonders will never cease. It was for us to suppose that your periodical reports to the archduke were lately of such a favourable nature as to decide his Highness upon thus bringing matters to a head. And he has not informed you of his decision?”
“No, madame.”
“That I, then, should be the first to enlighten you!”
“If you please, madame.”
“It is only, monsieur, that her Imperial Majesty has despatched an ambassador to Parma to request for her son Joseph the hand of the Infanta. Such, you may consider if you like, is the fruit of your fond advocacy.”
If he was staggered, he took the blow standing and like a soldier. No hint of what he felt must betray itself here. Even the old lady was half imposed upon by his manner.
“And her Highness herself?” he said, in a voice whose very desperation lent it coolness. “She is reconciled?”
“Hoity-toity!” cried the marquise. “A fine expression to apply to her.”
“Else,” said the chevalier, “why shouldIbe here?”
“Well,” answered madame: “that is true enough; but it was not diplomatic. Judged by the alacrity with which she obeyed her father’s summons to court, I should say she was very well reconciled indeed.”
“She has gone to Parma?”
“To receive the betrothal ring, monsieur. And so your task is ended. Henceforth, so long as you favour us with your company here, you are free to command your own time and your own inclinations. I can appreciate, believe me, the relief it will be to us all.”
Itwas a very impressive ceremony, this betrothal by ring—conventual, almost sacramental in its character. The ambassador’s face had been flushed, his voice hushed, as he had presented this visible symbol of what was to him but something less than a hypostatic union, in which he himself modestly represented the third figure in the trinity. Whereafter, not as bride of Christ, but of Christ’s more confident vicegerent, the heir of Austria, stood Isabella, pledged by token of the shining gem half slipping from her listless finger.
The words were spoken, the gage hung there in witness of their numbing actuality; she was left alone with the duke her father. Its first heat of transport had faded from Don Philip’s cheek, and been succeeded by a rather rigid pallor, a look of hardness, both furtive and resentful. He uttered a little sardonic laugh—the most extreme expression of humour to be allowed himself by an Infant of Spain—and, pacing an aimless step or two, turned with a sudden violence on his child.
“Well?” he barked.
She shook her hand; and the ring dropped from it—fell and bounded on the carpet.
“It is too big for me,” she said piteously.
He stood transfixed a moment; then forgot his dignity so far as to dive and recover the desecrated trinket.
“God in heaven!” he began; then checked himself and choked down his fury. “A defect soon remedied,” he said, his voice quite hoarse.
“But not my unfitness to wear it,” she answered. “O, father, have pity on me!”
He went off like a madman, flinging back and forth the length of the room, and ended by stopping suddenly, his fists raised and clinched, to apostrophise space:
“That our dearest hopes should have come to be realised—and for this! That we should have devoted our love, our diplomacy, our peace of mind to the welfare of this monster of inconsistency and ingratitude!”
She cried out: “O, no, no! O, lord and father, not either!”
He came round, actually grinding his teeth:
“I foresaw this. I read indifference and rebellion in your reception of his Highness’s plenipotentiary. But I tell you that your protests will be of no avail; that we refuse to listen for an instant to any one of the fancied scruples which would deprive us, in the very fruition of our hopes, of the reward of so much disinterested self-sacrifice.”
She let the storm pass, waiting with bowed head; and presently, with an effort to command himself, he put a question to her:
“What is your unfitness? Speak!”
She looked up, then, the tears brimming in her eyes.
“I do not think I was born for a throne,” she said—so movingly, that his heart should have been touched a little. “Its grandeur frightens me.”
He waved that absurdity aside withhauteur. To scratch his pride was to find the cold, inflexible Spaniard.
“You were born your father’s daughter,” he said, with a brevity which was final. Then he bent his eyes searchingly on her. “Is there nothing else—no romantic folly of a young and foolish brain?”
For one moment, so temperate his tone had fallen, she had a mad impulse to tell him the truth, to throw herself upon his mercy and his love. But the thought of whom she might endanger thereby came to her, in time to stay the confession on her lips.
“I am so young, father,” she said. “If it is romance to want to keep my youth a little longer, and then to yield it to a humbler state than this, I am guilty of it, I suppose. But I do so love the simple things of life; and I am not heroic in the least.”
“What need of heroism here, you fool?”
“O, much, much! To throw away all that is dear to me to be an empress!”
Still he searched her young innocence with that frowning stare. At length, stirring, and setting his lips grimly, he made to close the colloquy:
“All folly and madness, as you must know. The step is taken; it is irrevocable; and you must reconcile yourself to the position imposed upon you.”
“Imposed—imposed!” She wrung her pretty hands, and, writhing, pressed them to her mouth. “O, that is it—no choice for me—to give myself away from all I love!”
She ran and threw herself at the duke’s feet, and caught at his hands, and wept to him:
“In mercy, father, do not make me do this thing!”
He sought to free himself from her; in his fury he even dragged her as she knelt, so that she almost fell before him.
“I think you are mad,” he said.
“Yes, mad,” she answered—“I am mad. You must not wed a mad woman to an emperor’s son.”
He was frightened a little over the vehemence of her despair. Whatever was to account for it, it was not to be laid, it seemed, by coercion. He must try other means, a different appeal. If a startled suspicion had risen in his heart, he must not betray it; his pride, indeed, prevented him. He passed a hand across his forehead, and forced himself to address her in calmer tones.
“Come,” he said; “control yourself, and try to be reasonable. Why, consider, my little Isabelita, what it is you ask of me—how utterly wild and impossible. You have not been ignorant of our plans for you, or of the steps by which they have reached at last this triumphant consummation. And all this time you have shown no sign of revolt, of anything but a tacit conforming to our wishes. What has suddenly changed you?” His face darkened in spite of himself.
“I think,” she said, “there are no slaves in all the world like princesses. It is not for me, as with the free and happy, to say to my father, ‘I have tried with all my heart because you desired it, and yet I cannot, and I know it would be wrong to give myself rather with aversion than with regard.’ It is enough with more fortunate girls to say ‘I do not love him.’ But what does that avail with us?”
“Aversion!”—he breathed the word in deep scorn—“when you have not even met him?”
“O, father! you have said it. I have not even met him.”
“What, then?” He burst out again, in spite of all his efforts at self-control. “Have you no sense of decency—of what your rank demands of you? There should be loftier motives than mere personal feeling behind these great alliances. But I will hear no more. My patience is exhausted.”
“I will not marry him.”
He stared at her in amazement.
“Sullen and obdurate!” he said. “You will not? We will see. O, I knew very well you had started with an insane prejudice—the mere peevish humour of an unreasonable child. But, beware! Kingdoms are not to be bandied on such terms of spoilt caprice. What or who has instigated you to this rebellion, I say? If any has abused his trust to do so, let him look well to the consequences of his daring.”
She was scared in her turn now—so scared, that her heart for an instant seemed to stop.
“I am a woman, father,” she said faintly; “why should you look for anything beyond a woman’s natural repugnance to being pledged against her choice or will?”
He did not answer for a minute; and then in a softened, more persuasive tone he said:
“A woman, child? To be sure; and I had thought it enough to appeal to the woman in you; the daughter first of all. How we had laboured for this alliance, prayed for it, rejoiced at last in its reality—ah, mon Dieu, you cannot know! And yet you should know. It has been the hope of our maturity; our comfort and solace in our days of bitter trial. It was to set us right with the world, to relieve us of our embarrassments, to enable us to do justice at last to the many poor souls long devoted to our fortunes. And with you it rested to be the almoner to all these pathetic needs.”
“Father—no! You kill me with your words!”
“Kill you? Ah, child, what if it kill your mother, in the frail state she is in, to learn of this final blow to her hopes?”
She had thrown her arms, as she knelt, across a chair, and now laid her face on them, abandoned to hopeless grief.
“Am I to speak her death-sentence then?” asked the duke, in a broken whisper.
Her face still hidden, she held out her poor left hand. Understanding, he slipped the ring upon the quivering finger, and, wise in the resolve to let well alone, went softly from the room, and left her to her despair.
In the corridor outside he came upon M. la Coque, who scanned his agitated face with a furtive curiosity. The duke motioned his favourite to follow him, and led the way into his private closet, where he threw himself into a chair, and began to fan his brow exhaustedly with his handkerchief.
“Charlot,” he said presently, looking up from under languid lids: “is the door shut?”
“It is fast, monseigneur.”
The duke signed to him to come nearer.
“You were witness of her reception of the pledge?”
“Of the Infanta’s?”
“Now who else? The Infanta’s, of course. Well, how did it strike you?”
“That mademoiselle, perhaps, made a little light of the gift.”
The duke dabbed his forehead, and sat up suddenly, with a sigh.
“Charlot?”
“Your Highness?”
“What was that you once hinted to me about someone’s art with a little a?”
“Your Highness thought fit at the time—very properly, I am sure—to reprove me for what was merely an idle speculation.”
“Very likely. You declined to state your authority, if I remember. Do you still?”
“That must be conditional.”
“On what?”
“On your condonation of a certain liaison.”
“Well, well. Who is the other party to it, Charlot?”
“I must crave your Highness’s absolution.”
“You have it, coquin.”
“It is Fanchette Becquet, then—the Infanta’s first femme de confiance.”
“Ah, rogue!” The duke frowned—then sighed again. “That is to bring corruption very near the fount of innocence.”
“Not corruption, monsieur, but salvation. If I have sacrificed myself to serve your Highness——”
“O—la—la! O to be sure! You are a very disinterested scamp. But that sort of sacrifice will never get you into heaven. And what was innocence doing to risk its salvation, my friend?”
“Has your Highness formed no opinion?”
The duke shrugged his shoulders, pettishly, wearifully.
“You smile, and hint, and shuffle round the truth, as if you would seek to have me understand it without compromise to yourself. Why the devil can’t you speak out?”
“What encouragement have I, when my motives are misconstrued into spite and jealousy? I was told once how this envious spirit of mine might get me into trouble. With deference, monseigneur, I think you sometimes hardly recognise your true friends.”
“Maybe, Charlot; and maybe I did you wrong. Only, if you are one and the best of them, as I do now incline to believe, in honesty speak out and prove it. Be candid as the day: I bid you; I beg you, Charlot my friend.”
“Well, then, I start on this: you sneer at my disinterestedness, as illustrated by this little affaire; but I will tell you I have a true passion for this girl; I desire to monopolise her affections; and yet I have bidden her so to contrive as that she shall fall under suspicion of an intrigue with the chevalier Tiretta.”
“O, just under suspicion? That will not harm you.”
“Monseigneur well knows that what is begun in play will often end in earnest. I risk that—and why? Out of devotion to your interests. Here is a case—which I will put so far specifically. A lover sends a friend to plead his cause for him—a mad thing to do, and the madder the more persuasive the friend. We know the proper advocate lives in his part; the cause is just worth him and no more; if he wins he takes the credit—and the fees. But supposing there are those among us who, having recognised the danger, are decided that the advocate must be foiled in his design at whatever cost. There is nothing for us then but so to brand his character that he will be forced to withdraw prematurely from the case. Your Highness smokes me?”
“Par exemple. That is where your little cocotte comes in.”
“That is where Fanchette comes in—and with what result as regards the subject of the real intrigue? Why that she learns at last with indignation that what is offered her is but the reversion of a passion she believed so single to herself; that a thirst she deemed divine is content to slake itself in the common ditch——”
“You flatter your Fanchette and your own taste, Charlot——”
“That, in short, her god of gold is revealed a god of brass, I thank your Highness. So this M. Tiretta, if I have judged aright, falls from his estate of perfection. After all, a woman wears a lover as she does a robe—exclusively, that is to say; a thing for her sole possession. Fashions grow out of fashion when the lesser ape them.”
The duke, meditating darkly awhile, rose from his chair, and went pacing frowningly to and fro.
“So,” said he, stopping suddenly in his walk, “I am to understand that you have taken these means on your own responsibility, and that you consider yourself justified in taking them. Why?”
“Because, in doing so, I believe myself to be acting as your Highness’s true friend.”
“But why, man, why? In what lies your justification? That is what I want to know.”
“In my little friend’s reports.”
“Of an intrigue?”
“Of an intrigue in the making, at least.”
“And now nipped in the bud?”
“If you authorise the process.”
“She knows nothing as yet of this amiable scheme to disenchant her?”
“Nothing. But the ground is all prepared.”
“You do not, sir, imply for a moment that my daughter——”
“Mademoiselle is as guiltless as the angels. I stake my soul on it.”
“I should have preferred something of more value. But let that pass.”
“You approve the scheme, then?”
“If necessary. But I trust that folly is ended; that all will be well henceforth. Nevertheless I applaud your true vigilance, my friend.”
“Upon my conscience, monseigneur, I think you should. Admit that I have manœuvred well both to circumvent scandal, and to make his own treachery recoil on the head of the betrayer.”
“That I could hold that forfeit. But the charge is too shadowy; and he is the archduke’s protégé. Still, the time may come. Now, the man must be got rid of—and without delay.”
“You will see to that, I think.”
“And in the meanwhile the Infanta remains with us, here at Parma.”
“Under watch, if I might suggest.”
“Charlot?”
“Your Highness?”
“I think, perhaps, it would be as well to put your scheme at once to the proof.”
“I will instruct Fanchette forthwith, sir.”
“Yes, that is right. It will, perhaps, relieve the situation.”
His mind cleared, he hummed a little stave, and turned roguishly on the other:
“I hope you will not find that the little cocotte, like your other advocate, has accommodated herself too realistically to her part. That were a cursed return for your trust in her.”
“I took it into the reckoning, sir. If she has, my own with her will come as soon as she has ceased to be of use, that is all.”
“O, shocking, shocking! Come, go call la Roque, and we will forget all this tedious stuff over a game at ombre.”