“His slackening steps pause at the gate—Does she wake or sleep?—the time is late—Does she sleep now, or watch and wait?She has watched, she has waited long,Watching athwart the golden grateWith a patient song.”
“His slackening steps pause at the gate—Does she wake or sleep?—the time is late—Does she sleep now, or watch and wait?She has watched, she has waited long,Watching athwart the golden grateWith a patient song.”
“His slackening steps pause at the gate—
Does she wake or sleep?—the time is late—
Does she sleep now, or watch and wait?
She has watched, she has waited long,
Watching athwart the golden grate
With a patient song.”
A mad conceit—an insane fear. And yet—he bent, put a brief hoarse question to a passer-by and learnt the truth.
Her mother—dead some months now, as he knew. He breathed out a little laugh of relief, reckless, self-scornful, and pushed on his way. In so far, at least, the occasion was opportune; he might see her, and not be seen. It was for that very purpose he had taken advantage of the sudden armistice to hurry from Lusatia, while the fighting he had been engaged in was suspended, and speed these long leagues back to the Lombard plains. He had travelled day and night; he was war-worn and spent with weariness; yet he would think his pains well recompensed by one glimpse of the loved face. Only for one moment to stay the insatiable hunger of his heart—to acquire new nerve and resolution for the end that could not now be long delayed. He desired, he told himself, to learn that she was reconciled and happy; that the ruin with which he had threatened her young life was averted, and then he would leave her once more, this time never to return. And so men will go out of their way to lie to themselves, knowing that the truth stands steadfast to the good resolution which first inspired it.
He put up his horse, and, strolling out, mingled with the people. He was reckless of discovery, as one must be who is reckless of his life. He had timed his approach to the church so fortuitously that he could see, over the heads of the mob, the ducal cortège as it accompanied the carriages. The nearness of her presence—though, penned as he was within that living wall, he could distinguish nothing of it—made his veins throb between rapture and agony. And then he bent himself, as the pressure of the crowd relaxed, and it resigned itself to the long hour of waiting before the reappearance of the august mourners, to edging a passage to some nearer coign of vantage, where he might watch, himself unobserved.
His cool persistence—his military bearing and assurance, perhaps—gained him his purpose by degrees. When within two or three of the foremost row, under the shadow of a buttress he stopped and stood fast, abiding the mad moment.
The swell of the organ came to him; the sweet voices of the choir. Something seemed to rise in his heart, half-suffocating him. And then a magnetic thrill ran through the crowd, and he knew that he was to face the ordeal.
The ducal carriage already waited at the steps. There came out first from the great portal a little group of her Highness’s women, and he saw that one of them was Fanchette. At that very moment a surge of the crowd drove him forward and almost from his feet, so that to save himself he had to “rush” two or three of the steps, and to pause an instant to recover his balance before re-descending them. In that second, the girl, looking round, was aware of him, and bending immediately, as if to withdraw her skirts from his neighbourhood, whispered: “At four o’clock, on the Mezzo bridge.”
The next moment, hustled by the guards, he was down again, and near his former position. But the slight disturbance had attracted the attention of a young lady just issuing from the church on her father’s arm. One instant she turned her eyes and saw him; the next, with a little swerve, momentary, scarce perceptible, she was going down the steps to the carriage.
Withthe afternoon the town had resumed its normal aspect; the shops were re-opened; the stream of grave and frivolous circulated with its wonted restlessness and volubility. Only the ashes of a Lenten disposition seemed to have survived from the morning, the human traffic going sad-suited and with a mock attempt at seriousness in its demeanour. Still, the sky was blue, the little river sparkled, and the harnesses of the mules would not stop tinkling for all the enforced sobriety of the occasion.
A veiled young lady, coming from the direction of the Palazzo della Pilotta, hesitated an instant before setting foot on the crowded thoroughfare of the Ponte di Mezzo, and then made up her mind and went boldly forward. Half-way across, she just signed to a loiterer who stood leaning against the parapet, whereupon, detaching himself from his position, the man accompanied her footsteps, neither of them speaking a word. Making westward from the bridge—which continued across the water the main artery of traffic, that ancient Via Aemilia which exactly bisected the town—they presently reached a less frequented quarter; and, coming after a time to the open spaces neighbouring on the Barriera d’Azeglio, the girl at length, with a shrug of resignation, slackened her pace, and in the same moment invited her companion to speak.
“To have selected for a meeting place,” she exclaimed, “the most populous spot in the city! Bah! But I had no time to think.”
“What does it matter, Fanchette?”
She stopped, and looked at him, with a little fretful stamp of her foot.
“Are you tired of life that you say so?”
“Is my life in danger?”
“What do you suppose—here, in Parma?”
“I do not trouble myself to suppose anything.”
“You are too courageous to think of yourself, is it not? That would be very fine, if only sometimes you would think of other people.”
He looked at her meekly, without answering; nor did she speak for a little; but she had all the advantage of her veil in that mute inquisition.
“You are altered,” she said presently. “You look older and graver than you used.”
“I am both,” he said.
“Well, you have need to be serious. Also, I do not think you even as moderately good-looking as you were. But you are bronzed, which is something; and you have a scar on your temple. What have you been doing with yourself these eight months?”
“I have been helping to fight Austria’s enemies.”
“And have run away from them at last?”
“Yes—during a truce, while they are trying to negotiate terms of peace.”
“You have come to the wrong place for peace. You will soon find it so, unless you study more discretion. My God! the shock it was to me this morning to see you back again amongst us. What devil brought you? and why, having done wisely after all, couldn’t you let well alone?”
“I couldn’t, that is why—for no reason, I suppose, but just that I am my own weak illogical self. I wanted to make sure that I had done right—to find out——”
“What?”
“If she were happy.”
“Of course she is—that is to say as happy as it is proper for her to be under the circumstances. O, yes! it is quite consistent with your illogic, is it not, to give that sigh. If I had told you she was miserable, your face, no doubt, would have lighted up with a holy joy.”
“Is the wedding-day fixed?”
“It will be, sure and soon enough, when once we can cast our black. This misfortune—it is enough to make a saint blaspheme. But for its happening, it might likely have been fast-bind by this time; and then her felicity would have been her husband’s affair, and all would-be gallants might forego their tender concern—for her happiness, God preserve us!”
“If she is happy and contented, Fanchette, what makes you so angry over the postponement?”
“It aggravates me so to see you turn up again, when we had all thought you comfortably laid.”
“Ah-ha! Now we are revealing. Who are the ‘we’?”
“You are like to find out soon enough, unless you disappear as you came. I can tell you, monsieur, you went none too soon in the first instance.”
“I was beginning to realise myself that I was getting unpopular. And yet I was only too attentive to my task. Fanchette?”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to raise your veil.”
“Certainly I shall not.”
“You are afraid that your eyes might betray what your lips conceal.”
“O, indeed! And what is that?”
“That she is not happy at all. That she is miserable.”
“It is not true.”
“O, Fanchette! Is it not? You professed to be my friend once.”
“Am I not proving my friendship by meeting you like this—by running a hundred risks to save you from the consequences of your own madness?”
“I am indifferent to all consequences, so I may but see her.”
“Well, you have seen her; you have disturbed again the waters that had settled down so peacefully; and now I hope you are satisfied.”
“How can I say? She saw me, as I saw her; but with what result? Do you not know?”
“Never mind what I know.”
“That is as much as to confess that I have done harm in your opinion by coming.”
“Harm? My God, I should think you have done harm!”
He gave a little odd crowing laugh.
“You can’t help betraying the truth, you see, for all your efforts. But what does it matter? I have seen her face, and it is enough. Fanchette—” he touched the scar on his temple—“do you note this? It knocked me silly for the time being; and, while I lay insensible, I think my spirit left my body and flew to her. She was asleep; I could not wake her; and I turned to see how near the basil was to flowering. O, my God, girl! it was all shrunk and neglected; and I thought I took it in my hand and turned to her with wild reproach. But at that moment she opened her eyes, and, seeing the deathless sorrow in them, the words died upon my lips—and on the instant I awoke, to find someone staunching my wound. Tell me—does she keep the basil still—she has not forgotten it?”
Fanchette, like all fundamental worldlings, was helplessly superstitious. She stared and gasped behind her veil, hearing of this ghostly coincidence. How was she to dare henceforth, shrinking, conscious of her guilt, under the detective eyes of the unseen? She could only gulp and shake her head in answer.
He laughed again:
“And you pretend to me that she is happy!”
“O, monsieur!” said the girl, inclining at last towards the refuge of hysteria: “if she is not, have you any way to make her so? No way at all that is possible—that can conceivably end in anything but death to yourself and disaster to her. If she had not learned to forget, she had learned to be resigned; and now you come to undo again the work of months. It is cruel.”
“Is it not, Fanchette—a most damnable cruelty. But you do not know the full measure of my baseness. I promised the archduke himself that I would forbear, would withdraw myself from the temptation, would endeavour at the eleventh hour to vindicate my honour. But death was in the bargain; and, if in my despair I have broken it, it is the fault of Death, that would not come to me, however much I sought and called him. It is useless to threaten me with death.”
“O, in heaven’s name walk on! I shall betray myself.”
“Confess at once she is not happy, then.”
“There, I confess it. O, you have driven her mad!”
“Come on, Fanchette. Now, listen to me, and believe me. I had truly meant no more when I came than to see her, myself unsuspected—to comfort my eyes and my conscience with the assurance of her happiness—at least of her resignation—and then to go as silently as I had appeared. And what do I find?—a tragedy of unconquerable faith, that in its every look and gesture stabs me to the heart. Now you must tell me all—yes, all, all. She accepted my supposed desertion—how?”
“As you would have wished her to, no doubt.”
“She still believed in me?”
“Yes; and in your truth—even after she heard it reported you had gone to the wars.”
“God bless her—O, God bless her!”
“Will you not go away again now, monsieur?”
“Fanchette, are you not our friend—dear Fanchette?”
“It is madness, I say. I can do nothing. I will not listen.”
“Is she not happy since this morning? You will tell me that at least.”
“You will ruin her.”
“Ah! you do not know what we know. Ruin is in separation. Only to meet—to speak together once again!”
“Why should I help you to what I feel is not only wrong but useless? Likely, if I were to be found out,Ishould be given to the death you so despise.”
“You need never be discovered. Tell me no more than where to come upon her. Then she can dismiss me or not as she wills. I swear I will go, if she bids me.”
“And if she does not?”
“It would be out of your hands. Only it is just that the decision at last should rest with her. I feel that now as I have never felt it before—mad fool that I am, always to be so governed by impulse. What right had I to judge for her, to repudiate my trust, to banish myself unbidden? She gave me her first beautiful troth, long before that other had made up his mind, and it was for her, not me, to cancel the bond if she would. And though I yielded to him, I took no oath, I made no promise; I said only I would seek a solution of the impossible in death. I was faithful to that—and Death refused the test. He fled me, while I sought him everywhere. And then I knew. There can be no solution of the impossible in Death the destroyer, but only in Love the creator. From Love I must seek the final decision. If it had been evident in her happiness, I say I would have gone again as I came. But now I will go no more until she bids me.”
He ceased, on a note of deep emotion, but of inflexible resolve, and for a space they walked on together in silence. Then presently the girl spoke, in a cold restrained little voice, whose tone might have been meant to convey anything between acquiescence and defiance.
“You do me honour, monsieur, thus finally to throw off the mask before me—to favour me for the first time with your full confidence. If I notice an inconsistency here and there, why it is only natural in a lover; and——”
“What inconsistency, Fanchette?”
“Your cruelty to her Highness, for instance, which suddenly becomes consideration for her; your bad faith to monseigneur the archduke, which all in a moment becomes righteousness. But it is all one for the moral, which is your determination to have your way at any cost. I have no more to say, then—only this. I have warned you, and you will not be warned—therefore do not blame me for any consequences that may ensue. For me, I have my duty to my mistress, and that is enough. For you, if you are resolved to rush upon your doom, there is this piece of information, which is in truth open to all. Her Highness goes to-morrow to Colorno, whither the duke her father will follow her in the course of a few days. It is just possible, in the interval before he comes, that she may be tempted to visit Aquaviva’s gardens, of which she is so affolée—but I do not know. Au revoir, monsieur—I wish I could say adieu.”
He would have detained her, to protest, to explain, to pay a glowing tribute to her friendship and generosity—but she would have none of it.
“Thank me when you are out of the wood,” she said. “For the moment, if you value your own safety, hide deeper in it—that is my advice. We may be watched and observed at this instant, for all I know—” and, peremptorily bidding him stay where he was, she turned and hurried away.
Itis a mistake to suppose that it is the manly qualities in a man which invariably appeal most to women’s affections. Very often, indeed, it is their exact antitheses—indecision, dependence, helplessness—which excite in tender breasts the fondest response. Paradoxically, every woman is a mother before she is a virgin, else, save in foretasting the guerdon of love, could she never suffer the ordeal which is to qualify her for that reward. She becomes a mother by right of the test to which she has submitted, which is in truth the test of her capacity for cherishing the weakling, for nourishing, for protecting and for sympathising in all ways with its weakness. Wherefore, as she is the instinctive nurse of frailty, her affections turn more naturally to it than to the strength which is independent of her.
There are women, of course, who would always rather be coerced by a brutal husband than consulted by an irresolute one. There are women, also, of the manly, tailor-made type, to whom a sick dog or horse appeals with fifty times the force of an ailing child. But I make bold to think that they are in the minority, and that the mass of the sex is inclined to be attracted more by the weak than by the strong qualities in men. For weakness may be lovable, while strength is only admirable; and a woman defrauded in her helpful instinct is a woman deprived of her essential meaning.
If I have made it appear that Tiretta was a masterful character, I have sketched his portrait awry, and must revise it. He was, in truth, in many ways an entirely weak creature, impressionable, emotional, and lacking the first quality of decision. One sees how he had been persuaded to dance attendance on Fortune, lingering on in her ante-room in the vain hopes of that summons to her presence which a more resolute soul would have enforced. One sees how inconsistent he could be to his own self-sacrifices, when their fruits seemed to him to be unjustifiably delayed. He was full of passionate impulses and impotent remorses—a man in courage, a woman in regrets. Yet he had two qualities which were enough to redeem him utterly in all eyes that were truly feminine, and those were charm and lovableness. He was above all things lovable, and by virtue of that disposition alone might easily have captured and absorbed into his own a more guileful heart than that of the simple, affectionate child in whose soft bosom he had awakened the unconscious instincts of motherhood. Isabella startled to the knowledge of his reappearance with the mad rapture of a mother receiving back her long-lost child.
Now all would be well, her fluttering, unreasoning heart assured her; now all would be well, her illogical sex proclaimed. She could think of nothing but that he had returned, that the long, long days of doubt and anguish were ended, that the good reasons he had had for imposing them on her would be made lovingly clear. All the sorrows, the remorses, the dutiful resolutions of the past drear months took wing in a moment like doleful crows. For that, no doubt, her cruel disillusionment about her father was part to blame. Yet, all said, love, without question, would have had its way with her in the end. She had not the power to resist so dear an importunate; she was swayed in all things by affection, and she had no one trustworthy weapon in her soul’s armoury to oppose to it.
He had come back to her because he needed her—because they could not survive apart. To realise that was to forget all else—the danger once implied in her father’s half-veiled threats; Fanchette’s assurances that a certain one must sooner or later come to be convinced, and resigned to the thought, of his own impotence; the terror she herself had had that she had been cast off by him because she had been found wanting in the crucial test. If that had been so, his masculine resolution had been no proof against his need of her; and in proportion as he needed her his weakness was a thing for transport. It is characteristic of the needs of lovers that they appear insensible to the fear of, or the reasonable consideration for, any obligations whatsoever outside their own. Very dimly the thought of her engagement shadowed Isabella’s mind; it seemed like an illusion that change of circumstance had already half dissipated; she had a vague feeling that, were reference to the fact to be craftily avoided, the fact itself would gradually be overlooked and forgotten. She was like a punished child, dismissed back to her play, bearing, with the infinite pathos of childhood, no grudge against her unjust judges, happy only to be forgiven and thought no more about, while she revelled in the sunshine from which she had been so long debarred. She was happy—happy; laughter frolic’d in her eyes; a bird sang in her breast. She did not know how her crown of bliss was to realise itself; only somehow he would find a way; she was to see him, hear him, be loved by him once more.
All night her heart went dancing; it danced on to the joy of the morning, and awoke as if to a sense of wild reprieve. She kept her secret to herself—the secret of her knowledge of his return—but its fumes were in her brain, and she could not altogether hide the exhilaration they caused there. Fanchette, attending to her Highness’s toilette, was in a curiously silent mood—morose even, and uncommunicative. Her mistress sought, by every merry art, to coax the girl into a response to her own bright spirits. She laughed at and rallied her, she overflowed with kindness, she would not be denied for all the icy rebuffs she encountered. But without much avail, it seemed. In truth the camériste, perplexed and a little conscience-haunted, was in the last temper for welcoming such approaches. She could have wished rather for affront, impatience, inconsiderateness—anything that would have appeared to justify her in offence, to provoke her to retaliation. But this unassailable sweetness was so disarming that for the moment it confounded her.
In the afternoon she accompanied her mistress to Colorno; and, there in the carriage, urgency at last lent her desperation. She stiffened herself, and spoke:
“You are glad to be returning, mademoiselle?”
“O, how glad, Fanchette!”
To Colorno, with its unutterable memories; to paradise regained; to the gardens where the wild love-flower grew, which his lips, and hers, had kissed! That she was bidden on her way thither seemed like a tacit surrender by authority to the inevitable. It must have known what associations that restoration would awake.
All the journey hitherto she had lain back in a blissful trance, listening to the ponderous rolling of the wheels as they gathered up the reluctant miles, incessantly framing in her mind a picture of the reunion that was to be, with its joys, its tender reproaches, its loving reassurances. The past was to be resumed, as if no black winter of separation had ever interposed. And spring was coming—spring with its wakening birds, and the blossoms breaking in its orange-groves. Smiling, she looked at the faithful little basil-pot by her side, and secretly caressed its leaves, now long recovered from the neglect to which she had once in her cruelty committed them. She would have bent and kissed them but for Fanchette.
The maid, setting her lips resolutely, did not answer for awhile.
“Then,Iam not,” she said suddenly.
Isabella glanced at her, a little surprised.
“You do not like the country, Fanchette?”
“O! as for that,” said the girl, “the value of a place to me is the value of its company.”
“Well, you will have plenty in a little while.”
“Plenty, and to spare,” said Fanchette, drily.
“What do you mean, child?”
“I foresee just one too many for my peace of mind, that is all.”
“One! What one?”
“Cannot your Highness guess? Yet I saw very well that I was not the only one of us two to make note of somebody’s reappearance in Parma yesterday.”
Isabella gave a little gasp; but subterfuge was impossible to her. Only she sat silent, and breathing quickly, for a few moments.
“Well,” she said presently, with difficulty: “what if you were not? I do not see how your peace of mind is affected by M. Tiretta’s return.”
“Hush, I implore your Highness!” said Fanchette. “I would not betray the poor man, whatever distress his persistence may cause me. Possibly your Highness may have observed the recklessness of the act which brought us for that one instant together. I shuddered, I can tell you, for his safety—and it was all that he might whisper to me to meet him later on the Mezzo bridge.”
“And you met him?” There was soft eagerness, a restrained rapture, but no least suspicion in the fervid tone. Fanchette shrugged her shoulders perceptibly.
“What would you! One in the last extremity must take a bull by the horns. It is safer, at least, than to run away from him. Yes, I met him, mademoiselle.” She hardened herself to the passionate entreaty of the eyes, of the lips that mutely questioned her. “He had in truth,” she said, “been to the wars; and now, taking advantage of a truce, had come back like a roaring devil to renew his assault upon me.”
“To renew—what?”
“O, mademoiselle! I would have spared you; but you know you never would believe. Be assured, nevertheless, that I was not to be so harried from my honesty. I entreated him to release me for once and for all from his importunities; to abstain further from compromising me with one to whom my heart was given. Ah—bah! I might as well have appealed to a blood-thirsty tiger. And now I shall know what persecution to expect in this quiet place.”
Even as she ended, her voice faltered, as if in some instinctive misgiving, and she hung her head.
And Isabella? Incredulity, amazement, indignation—in turn each emotion flashed its light across the beautiful face, and quivered and passed—to be succeeded by scorn: scorn so sovereign, so consuming, that calumny, shrivelling in its overriding flame, died in an instant on those lying lips.
“Fanchette.”
“Yes, madame?”
“Fanchette, look at me.”
The girl obeyed, caught her breath with a start, and lowered her lids.
“Look at me, I say.”
Abject already in that revelation, the maid, half-whimpering, again essayed to lift her hang-dog eyes, and, in the very struggle to brazen out her falsehood, collapsed and burst into tears.
“Liar!” said Isabella softly. She was wrought beyond her gentle self: the wanton wickedness of the slander—never for one moment believed else by her incorruptible heart—had transformed her from a Hebe into a Megaera. “Are you not a liar?”
Fanchette, weeping hysterically, sought to gasp out an excuse:
“If I misunderstood his meaning——”
But lovely scorn swept the cowardly pretence aside:
“You misunderstood nothing. It is I who have misunderstood, who have been blind all this time to the true character of the despicable creature I have trusted. You vile thing, so to hire yourself out to traduce a noble name! Who urged you to it? In whose pay are you? Tell me, for I will know.”
She was translated, the sweet tolerant soul—stung to a passion the more deadly by reason of the sunshine and happiness from which she had been torn. Fanchette, completely cowed, sobbed and shivered in her corner. She had never even guessed at the existence of these slumbering fires, had never calculated on a faith so obstinate as to be utterly impervious to the assaults of jealousy. She was overwhelmed, terrified, not only by the crushing nature of the retort upon her, but by the particular insight which it revealed.
“O,—O!” she gasped and cried: “I will tell you, mademoiselle—I will tell you everything, if you will only give me a moment to recover.”
“You want time,” cried scorn, “to invent new lies. But you need not hope to deceive me again. I see it all at last—the hints, the cunning preparation of the ground, the snare you thought to lay for unsuspecting feet. And while I was confiding in you, resting on your sympathy, believing you my friend! O, shame upon such infamy! I will have you whipped, tortured, unless you confess to me at once that it was all a lie.”
Fanchette fell upon her knees in the coach with a suppressed scream. She knew enough to know that offended Spain, in so small a matter as the castigation of a servant, could find easy means to have its threats fulfilled to the letter, even in the face of obvious injustice. It would be the “question” first, and exoneration, if any, after. She shook with terror.
“I will confess,” she cried: “O, I will confess!”
“It was a lie?”
“Yes—yes.”
The Infanta’s red lip curled.
“Who urged you to it?—tell me.”
“O, mistress!”
“Tell me, I say.”
Fanchette choked and battled for breath, writhing her fingers about her face.
“Was it your own mean jealousy of one too noble to stoop to an understanding of your designs upon him? In that case——”
Again the camériste, too debased in her terror for resentment, cried out:
“No, no—mistress—listen to me: it was one—his Highness’s own favourite—he advised it.”
“He? Who?”
Fanchette writhed.
“My father’s friend? Who? I will know.”
“M. la Coque.”
“La Coque! that painted coxcomb!” Amazed, for all her scorn, the girl sat a moment dumbfounded. There was revealed here a knowledge, a conspiracy, she had never suspected.
Fanchette, frantic, once she had betrayed her lover, to exonerate him, went on half coherently:
“He—he is devoted to your Highness’s interests; he—he only wanted to save your Highness the consequences of a fatal step. It was our tr—true regard for your Highness that made us conspire to open your eyes to the real character of an adventurer.”
“To open my eyes—by a wicked lie!”
Still she sat, as if stupefied; then leaned forward, strangely quiet.
“You have opened my eyes, I think. This gentleman is your paramour, is he not?”
Fanchette was silent, hanging her head.
“Come, be bold, girl,” said the Infanta. “It is not your jealousy, is it, but the jealousy of that small and envious nature towards a nobility he can never reach that has bribed you to this baseness?” She leaned back, passing a hand across her forehead as if suddenly overcome. “That such as you,” she said, “should dare to sit in judgment on your betters.”
Some note of weariness, of shaken emotion, may have struck upon the acute intuitions of the culprit. She ceased crying, and, raising her head a little, dared a breathless retort:
“Not in judgment, but in sympathy, mademoiselle, since in imitating our betters we feel with them.”
“What is that you say?”
“No one should know better than your Highness how love intoxicates our reason.”
Isabella gazed at the speaker with eyes in which the indignation was slowly giving place to distress.
“Yes,” she said low.
“An intrigue is an intrigue,” said Fanchette, growing bolder as the other wavered. “If it is wrong, we look to high example to make it shameful to us. In the meantime one is powerless where one has given one’s heart away.”
“No doubt the blame is less yours than his,” said Isabella indistinctly.
“Ah!” said Fanchette—“if your Highness would only believe in the fondness of the intentions that actuated me. But since they are misunderstood, it is no good to dwell upon them. Only——”
“Only what, Fanchette?”
“Since our smallness, and envy, and painted coxcombry are not to your Highness’s taste, we had best retire, and leave you to your own devices. You will do what you will do; and I have done, in all disinterestedness, what I could. Perhaps you will believe me that, even while I was outraging my own feelings to try and safeguard your reputation, I was providing alternatively for the step from which I foresaw you would not be easily dissuaded.”
She spoke at last like an injured saint; but the venom in her heart, over that contumelious reference to her lover, was rankling and growing in bitter intensity as she recovered more and more her confidence.
“What step, Fanchette?” asked Isabella faintly.
The girl shrugged her shoulders slightly.
“Into the dark—that is all I can say—except that I know where someone is most likely to be found within the next few days.”
She knelt back, sniffing and mopping her eyes, while a silence of some minutes prevailed; and then a sad little voice came to her:
“Who shall throw the first stone? O, Fanchette, we are all sinners together!”
Bissyhad a lodger—strictly Bissy, be it understood. Grandfather Aquaviva had declined from the first to be mixed up in the affair, or to do more than subordinate, for the occasion, his own domestic authority to that of the self-sufficient imp, who was wiser than an owl in his precocious generation. To Bissy was due the happy thought, the conduct of the negotiations which followed, and the ultimate agreement. He accepted the guest, and any responsibility attaching to him—which, nevertheless, he did not anticipate would be serious. Report, in that detached province of horticulture, dealt mistily with reputations, and Bissy, while having his own clues to the stranger’s identity, had no reason to connect that with any definite scandal. In any case, where ignorance was cash, it was folly to be wise. Let the lodger call himself what he would—il Signor Talé, or by any other mocking pseudonym—the essential consideration was the ducats, of which he was not sparing. For the first time in his life Bissy enjoyed the gratification of realising handsomely on his own native shrewdness. Grandfather, always preoccupied and unsuspecting, was content to laugh, to shrug his shoulders, and secretly to admire the elfish self-importance which had so much worldly foresight in it. He had the same clues to identification as the limb himself, but they lay unnoticed by him. Men and women always passed him by like shadows. They were only to be regarded as coming between the sun and his flower-beds, and the sooner they were gone the better for his content.
As for the guest himself, he had flown upon them, by his own account, from distant battle-fields, arriving errantly in their midst, in a moment, like a fragment of spent shell. It was the happiest of accidents, he declared, which had deposited him where he fell, repose, after that long flight, being the thing of all things which he most needed, together with the opportunity for restful self-communion apart from his fellows. He said this to Bissy, whom he first of all encountered at work in the orange-grove. It seemed some instinct had drawn him there, though of course he was ignorant of the geography of the place. His assurance was astounding, petrifying, but quite captivatingly compelling. What sweeter spot, he declared, could have offered for his purpose than these fragrant ambushes, wherein one might bury and repose oneself as in the dreaming thickets of Avalon. Was it possible that Providence could have knowingly directed his footsteps to this haven of rare comfort, where he might hide himself away deliciously, unsuspected and undisturbed? In that case of a guiding Will, it was conceivable that search might reveal some adjacent bower ready to welcome the wanderer into its hospitable arms. Did the boy know of any such? He would be willing to pay handsomely for the boon of a temporary lodging, however primitive, however homely, which neighboured on these perfumed solitudes.
Bissy, gulping down his wonder in a toad-like obstupefaction, suddenly pricked up his ears at that. There was promise here of a golden salve for the tweaking they had once received; only, it seemed, discretion was to be the order. He betrayed, therefore, no sign of recognition, but then and there he had his inspiration, and acted upon it. There was only their own little house, he said, on the southern limit of the gardens. If the signor fancied he could accommodate himself to such simple quarters, he would go and ask his grandfather if he would be willing to take him in for a time—and, he was careful to add, for such a tempting consideration as the signor had suggested.
The signor was greatly obliged—and greatly amused.
“Despatch, my fine lad,” he said. “I am not going to haggle over the inestimable value of peace and privacy to a war-sick spirit.”
And so it came that il Signor Talé imposed himself charmingly on the oddly contrasted couple—only always, it was understood, as Bissy’s guest. Aquaviva, for his part, affected an entire detachment in the matter, as though he himself were an independent visitor in his own house. But, for all his somewhat caustic reserve, he too was not long in falling under the irresistible spell of the stranger’s personality.
The house—a mere plastered and whitewashed cottage—stood at the extremity of the grounds on the Parma side. Aquaviva, it seemed, believed in that ideal condition of happiness, a lodge in the wilderness. The gardens were the life; the living-place but an insignificant if necessary adjunct to the life. So nature teaches us the right proportions of things. The nest on the rock, the “form” in the grass, the hollow in the tree-trunk—what are these but trifling accessories to possessions which embrace the infinite seas, the open hills, the rolling forests? It is the fit way to regard the values of existence, I am sure. In these days an old railway-carriage and five acres of garden should, it sometimes seems to me, suffice a man for his true proportionate needs.
The house, then, was small; and it was moreover inconvenient and none too clean. It was, after all, only the principal feature in a tiny steading, which included sheds, a miniature fowl-run and a dove-cote. An Indian fig-tree grew untrimmed against its wall; the flags of its yard were broken and moss-grown; a stave of its water-butt was broken, and so on. But it was enough for its purpose, which was to serve as a simple shelter from the elements, a dining and a sleeping place—and now, in its enlarged scope, as a retreat and belvedere.
At dinner-time the pigeons would fly down from their cote, and, entering the house by its open door, strut, with bobbing heads, about the stone-paved floor, watching for scraps. They soon came to recognise in il Signor Talé a sympathetic spirit, and to congregate about his chair with a persistent confidence which delighted him. In other respects he found in his quarters a seasonableness which glorified all shortcomings. His humble bed smelt of rosemary; the sparkle of insect life in his ewer testified to the living freshness of the stream from which it was daily replenished; appetite lent to the homely cuisine an epicurean relish. Raw ham, salted sausage, macaroni, thin broth followed by thelesso, or anæmic meat boiled down to produce it, sometimes a cut ofmanzo, which was hobbledehoy calf, cabbage served alone, and alwaysricotta, a sort of buttermilk cheese—on such country fare he was enthusiastic to batten, and his enjoyment of all things was as convincing as it was captivating. He had not been established two days before everyone was in love with him—Annina, the deaf oldcontadinawho did the marketing and general housekeeping, solemn Bissy, whose particular property he was, even Aquaviva himself, whom his charm and virile interest in all things won from reticence to an astonishing horticultural communicativeness. They all succumbed to him and became his unconscious confederates and abettors, jealously guarding the privacy it was understood he desired, jealously possessing him and shutting the world from their knowledge.
Not that in that respect there was much need for finesse. The season was yet early, the spot isolated, the gardens not sufficiently advanced to attract visitors. Yet it had been a mild winter, and crops, for the time of year, were well forward. Everything was flushing green, not with the chill reluctance of a northern spring, but with a fearless confidence in the loving-kindness of a climate which was always a true bountiful mother to its nurslings. Here but to peep was to open and expand, and the growth of a day was the full measure of its trust in nature. It was seldom that that trust was abused by cold winds or belated blizzards; but, even when this happened, the sun was quick and sure to staunch all wounds inflicted, and to win back the earth to smiles and reassurance.
So Tiretta came actually to inhabit the beautiful haunted place so associated with his first enchantment. It was no fortuitous choice, of course, which had led him there, laden, for all his baggage, with one soldierly valise; yet he had hardly hoped at the first to realise so easily and so compactly his scheme of opportunism. Now, if she came, he would be always on the spot to greet her—in what way circumstance must decide. His life, his whole happiness, was bound up in that chance: but would she come? He had only Fanchette’s hint to go upon. It might have been wholly unwarranted; it might have been actually designed to confine him to a given place, whereby the risk of meeting him elsewhere should be avoided. The thought necessarily suggested another: wasshe, actively or negatively, in collusion with her maid to procure such a fiasco? He had again only Fanchette’s admission for comfort. But Fanchette was a liar—he knew that instinctively. Still the girl had obviously sought to get rid of him, and the truth had been drawn from her only with reluctance. She would not have conceded even so much, unless the pressure of facts had been too strong for her to resist. On the other hand, she might have suggested the compromise entirely on her own responsibility, and with the intent, having definitely disposed of him, to keep the knowledge of his whereabouts a secret from her mistress.
That would be a stultifying development—in the lack of any. Yet what could he do now to counter such a design, if it existed? He understood that for some reason Fanchette, always a capricious quantity, had joined the forces against him—at the instigation of what or whom—or by the tacit acquiescence of whom? Not of her: his whole soul, his whole knowledge, rejected the thought of such shallowness, such treachery, on the part of one proved so incorruptible. They were inseparable affinities, bound by that subconscious compact, whose roots were in the mystery of the past. And then, if confirmation were needed, his pathetic dream! This man of dreams, indeed, trusted their evidence beyond the most convincing that could be offered by any living witness. He had seen his love’s eyes, once in that trance, once on the steps of the Madonna della Steccata, and had read therein a message of deathless fidelity. It was enough: he could not be mistaken: he would not wrong her or himself again by the shadow of one suspicion.
And yet, watching the passage of the fruitless hours, he would sometimes grow despondent, or angry with his own irresolution, or with the easy way in which he lent himself to the designs of his enemies. Would she ever come? Then he would stand listening, as if he heard in the deep places of his heart the voice of his love crying to him to hasten and deliver her from the hostile forces by which she was watched and environed. That was the worst of all; for what was he to do, how escape from the mesh of uncertainty in which he had involved himself? To break from it now were to betray himself and her—to invite the very tragedy he had come here to avoid. Not to avoid for his own sake, for he was reckless; but he must be wonderfully tender and considerate in all things which touched upon her wellbeing. For himself, he held his life lightly, lacking the reassurance which alone could give it a purpose and a value. He did not seem to care much what happened to him; what precautions he took were really nominal. That Bissy should know him was of course inevitable; yet there seemed no object in confessing himself to the boy—no object in anything in particular, indeed. It was that very indifference which was his unconscious safeguard. Where there is no atmosphere of concealment nobody suspects. He was accepted, generally, on his own showing, and, specifically, on his own merits.
Those were characteristic and sufficient. His mental suspense, his perpetual soul-hunger, never seemed to affect his winning attitude towards his surroundings. Outwardly he appeared that lovable, interested, oddly humorous creature who, endearing himself, without effort or design, to all about him, seemed troubled by no sense of responsibility towards anybody or anything in the world. He could not help himself there; the faculty of ingratiation was native to him and quite unforced. But it is wrong to judge such qualities as necessarily superficial. Popularly, the sparkling surface speaks the shallow current: it is as true as to insist that beauty is only skin deep. There are many of these old saws that need re-casting. Is there no deep thinker who has his playful side? It was sage Harcourt, was it not, whose “half-awakened bards” so offended the poet? As to exteriority, one might say, with as true a proverbial sententiousness, that the pint bottle of champagne is not to be told from the magnum by its effervescence. The fact is that manner is no indication of matter, and that some men can jest under torture while others cannot. It is just a question of constitution. Think of Keats, confined in quarantine on his death journey, desperately summoning up more puns in a week than he had ever been guilty of in a year. So, as il Signor Talé loitered in the wakening gardens, asking innumerable questions, making innumerable impracticable suggestions, delightedly absorbed, to all appearance, in floricultural lore, no one might have guessed from those rising bubbles the darkness of the tragic deeps from which they ascended.
These, to be sure, with whom he lived were simple country folk, unsophisticated save in the one direction of their business, and little apt at reading character. They were quite ready to accept him for what he palpably was—a charming and profitable addition to theirménage—without puzzling their brains as to what he might be. Parma was almostterra incognitato them: it was ten miles away—it might have been a hundred, for any influence it bore upon their lives. The pulse-beats of it came to them like a sound of bells so distant as to seem no more than a pleasing rumour. They were indifferently interested in its events; hardly more so in its personalities. Once or twice the dead duchess was mentioned among them; but chiefly, it seemed, because she was associated with their local experience. Tiretta gathered that her memory was respected, though with some reserve due to the not yet forgotten resentment against the Spanish occupation. But with Isabella it was different. They all loved the young Infanta, so sweet, so natural, so prettily friendly. The visitor, cunning man, found no difficulty in “drawing” them on that subject, though, for net result, he learned no more of her than he knew already. They were quite uninformed as to the general march of events, knew nothing about the proposed Austrian alliance, were as unworldly disposed as though to their minds it was all wilderness outside this their garden of Eden. He could have found their pastoralnaïvetéwonderfully refreshing, had the ferment in his mind been more amenable to such soothing influences; as it was, he could at least endure it good-humouredly.
One day—it was the third after his arrival—he came upon Aquaviva busily employed over a number of little shrubs which he had just fetched out from their winter shelter. The sight brought a shock of colour to the visitor’s cheek, a rather wistful smile to his lips. What memory was here laid bare and bleeding? It was like the disinterment of still breathing hope.
For some moments he watched the old man in silence. It was whimsically wonderful to him that the handling of these things should awaken no associations in that abstracted mind. Yet so it seemed. Not once had Aquaviva appeared, nor did he appear now, to connect him with any figure of the past. Presently Tiretta spoke:
“What are those, mi’ amico?”
He waited intent on the unsuspicious answer:
“They are basil-thyme, signore—little boudoir delicacies, which we cultivate for their scent. They will be very popular with the ladies when they flower.”
“When will they flower?”
Aquaviva hunched his shoulders.
“Who can say? It may be this year or the next. They are capricious, and fastidious, but fat feeders when they like. Sometimes they like, and sometimes they do not. These have all had their christening.”
“How do you mean their christening?”
Aquaviva leered round, with puckered lids, as he stooped.
“Blood, signore—good bullock’s blood. They thrive on it.”
“Will they not flower without?”
“They will flower; but it is all the difference between the weed and the exotic. So it is with human folks. We talk of blood in a man. It signifies nothing but generations of meat-eating, as against the minestra, the cabbage-soup, which the many, the nameless, have had to be content with for the replenishing oftheirveins.”
“I see. It is the lord of many joints who is the lord of creation. And yet there is a virtue in blood. It can produce superior beauty as well as superior men.”
“Wherefore the basil, signore, whose appetite, like the human, grows fiercer with what it feeds on, till nothing but the blood of men will appease it.”
“Come, Aquaviva!”
“So it is said, signore—of murdered men.”
“Is that what your aristocrats here are delaying for?”
“O! they are young; their tastes are not formed; but I daresay a dose of it would facilitate their blossoming.”
Tiretta watched a little longer in silence, then turned and strolled away. It had been on his lips humorously to repeat a former challenge, to see if even that would succeed in evoking a response from a suddenly stimulated memory; but something had prevented him at the last—a quick-springing emotion which urged him into search of solitude for its indulgence.
Inevitably his steps led him towards the orange-grove. They were never long from wandering in that direction—and not only because of the magical associations of the place. Elsewhere the gardens were but lately rising and expanding from their sober winter levels, and they afforded as yet but little cover for a would-be solitary spirit. But, for “a green thought in a green shade” there was always the hushed welcome of this deep windless sanctuary, and it was therein that he looked to find a solution of the perplexities that beset his present condition. He knew very well what form that expectancy conjured up; it could not be but one in a spot so haunted. Here, if anywhere, he felt, the end would be decided.
The place was luminous now with young vivid gold and emerald; no sound broke its silences save the running footsteps of the little river beyond, whose unseen glitter seemed actually vocal, splintering the misty limits of the grove as with spars and points of iridescent laughter. Tiretta, entering but a little way into that enchanted solitude, stopped abruptly, and gave rein to the thought he had brought in with him.
Could it be that death waited on their reunion? He had only jested at the superstition on a former occasion: somehow now he did not feel inclined to jest at it. This pretty basil thing, which they had elected and consecrated for the symbol of their happiness! Its flowering was to be the sign; and when was it to flower? Not yet, nor remotely, if it was to be judged by these others; not even so soon as they, if Aquaviva had prophesied aright. And yet they had reached a crisis, whose solution, it seemed, must be a matter of days—of moments. The duke, if not arrived at Colorno already, was hourly expected. Why did she not come?
And, at that very instant, aware of a stealthy step behind him, he turned and saw Bissy.
There was something in the boy’s face, a suppressed emotion, a sort of furtive excitement, which startled and arrested him at once. Bissy carried a basket and a spud, with the latter of which, having deposited the former at a tree foot, he began to prod in an aimless way about the roots, obviously to give colour to some supposed business. Conscious of an odd unsteadiness in his feet, as if they had lost the sensation of contact with the ground, Tiretta approached the worker, and stood looking down.
“What is that for, Bissy?” he said. “To let in light and air?”
The boy did not answer for a moment; then suddenly ceased digging, and stood up, leaning on his spud like a perspiring goblin. Once or twice he gulped; and at last brought up resolution.
“To let in light and air—the signor has said it,” he answered.
Tiretta studied him, a strange smile on his lips.
“There is some mystery here,” he said low. “What is it, Bissy?”
“It is of your own making, signore. It has never been of mine. If you wish me still to respect it, I shall do so in all dutifulness, understanding that there is no reason in the world why il Signor Talé should be interested in the arrival this moment of someone in the gardens.”
“Of someone! Of whom, Bissy?” His voice did not seem to himself to belong to him.
“Of the owner of a little shoe I once pulled out of the mud, signore.”
“Bissy!”
He was as pale as death; he stood as if suddenly stricken mute. The boy, all honour to his elfin intelligence, showed his instant appreciation of the situation. He did not consider right or wrong; it was enough that these two, his dearest patrons, wished to meet—for whatever reason was their own business.
“Go through the grove, signore,” he whispered, “to the little sward by the river. I will fetch her to come and look at my oranges. She has thatcagnaFanchette with her, as sour and sullen as a duchess. But she shall not spy; I will see to that. Go, signore!”
And Tiretta obeyed—a mere pawn at last in the game of this conquering strategist. He put his hand one moment on the squat shoulder, then turned and passed to his destiny. Ecstasy filled the air; the voice of the little river rose jubilant to greet him; he paused at last on that embowered isthmus amid the inviolable trees. Minutes passed; his heart was beating to suffocation, and then—a quick light footfall—a quick febrile whisper:
“Bonbec!”
“Itis only for one hurried moment. I dare not stop. O, my heart beats so!”
He held her hands; he gazed as if he could never fill the hunger of his soul; for a minute he failed to speak. In all his passionate dreams he had never pictured her as returning to him like this—black clad—like an angel of death. The contrast between her lily complexion and the deep sadness of her robe was even startling. In his first glowing stupefaction, an odd thought hung like a mote in his mind—like a travelling speck under closed lids. It was a perplexed association of this mourning with something he had just been thinking about. With something—with what? Dead men and green things that blossomed! What was it? He expanded his chest over the idleness of the fancy, easing it away in a great rapturous sigh. And then it came to him. The dead mother! And he had been thinking only of dead love.
He drew her towards him without a word; and she made no resistance. She lifted her face to his as he bent, and conceded to him all that he wished.
“Now” he said deeply, “it is all as if it had never been—these dark disastrous months. Shut your eyes, my soul’s beloved, and listen. Hark! that was a bat that flew past: and do you hear the whispering wash of the moonlight against the trees, and the tiny crackle of the stars? What is all this talk about a parting, to us who have never moved from this balcony where to-night we put an everlasting seal upon our love? Have we been dreaming while we clung together? Though it were a dream, Isabel, tell me I was not forgotten in it.”
“They slandered you, dear love. Do you think I believed them?”
“No more, lady, than I believed that you were happy in my banishment.”
In a passion of emotion she clung about his neck, laying her soft cheek to his bronzed one.
“Let all the lies and the slanders go,” she whispered. “They are not worth one thought from us. O, cancel them with these cruel months! We have never left the balcony; we have never been parted. There is no explanation needed from either of us to the other.”
“Not one, Isabel. It was a dream.”
“We have awakened from it to find the truth.”
“Yes, awakened. Cling close, my soul, and whisper. Does the thought of to-morrow still terrify you?”
“How can I help it? O, my love, my love!”
“Will you come with me now, away from all the stress and sorrow, into the wild white places where we can hide and be forgotten?”
“Bonbec—not now; it is impossible.”
“To-morrow, then. I will have horses ready—I——”
“I must not stay. My gouvernante is waiting for me in the road. To-night——”
“Yes, to-night, Isabel?”
“After the gates are shut. Come to the little wicket in the eastern wall. My maid will let you in.”
“Fanchette?”
“Ah, yes! You know her.”
“Enough to mistrust her. But if she is our friend——?”
“She is always her own best friend, I think. But she will be there.”
“And I.”
“You know the way?”
He held her apart, questioning with impassioned eagerness the face which drooped a little from his, its lids half closed, its cheeks just tinged with flame; then bending, put his lips to the soft white rapture of the throat.
“Isabel! The little balcony above the myrtles?”
“It is secret there. I must go—I dare not stop to say more—Bonbec, let me go. We can talk there alone, and decide what is best to be done. But not now.”
Lingeringly, reluctantly, he let her slip from his arms. She put a finger to her lips.
“Stay here,” she whispered, with a radiant smile. And then once more she approached him, as if irresistibly, and looked with wistful ecstasy into his face.
“How thin and worn you are, dear love,” she said pitifully. “And yet, how can I wish you to have grieved less?”
Once more, moved beyond endurance, he caught her to his heart, and shamed the rosy colour to her lips and neck, until, gently upbraiding him, she broke away.
“Until to-night, soul of my soul,” he said.
The faithful Bissy was waiting for her in the grove. She kept him blithely chatting a little while, and then, hoping the best for her face, went on to rejoin her maid.
Fanchette acknowledged her reappearance as tart as crabs.
“I’m sure I wish,” she said, “thatIcould find in those trees the delight your Highness seems to borrow from them. Your Highness looks quite another person since making the little excursion.”
And in what, after all, had their enemies succeeded against these lovers? Surely was never such an impregnable perversity as their faith.
“Thebalcony whence our Juliet leaned to whisper to her Romeo.” Do you recall how it was mentioned earlier, with wondering if in these days lunatics still came there to gibber to the moon? I say “still,” for if passion is the reverse of reason, then is not love a sort of madness? And were not these two demented things, to think that, in a chief province of despotism, love would be allowed to override all distinctions of rank and fortune? Or did they really think so, or think that disgrace and ostracism were the worst alternatives they had to face? What does it matter what they thought, or failed to think; their need was not in thinking; the fire of immortality is in the transcendent passions which take no thought, and of their seed is born all that beauty which redeems the ignoble materialism of the world.
At night all the eastern side of the palace, where it faced upon the sunk gardens, was veiled in deep shadow. Only in one place, above a secluded myrtle-grown terrace, a faintly luminous oblong showed where secret wakefulness kept still its vigil in a lighted room.
The hangings in the window parted, revealing momentarily a running shaft of gold, and a man stepped forth, paused an instant on the balcony, then climbed its stone parapet and dropped to the turf beneath. Even as he alighted, another form, that of a “slim, enamoured, sweet-fleshed girl,” appeared, catching light draperies about its neck and bosom, in the opening, and, letting the curtains fall to behind it, stood, ghostly-pale in the darkness, leaning down.
“O, love! You are not hurt?”
He laughed, low and musical. As she leaned, he could reach even up to her shoulders with his hands.
“Only in my vanity.”
“O! why?”
“That I should have outstayed my welcome.”
“Sweet, not your welcome, but my terror.”
“Then, if I’ve outstayed it, your terror’s gone?”
“Alas, no! This night has made it tenfold. It increases with every minute that you linger.”
“Why, Isabel, what’s to fear? All the world’s asleep.”
“Is there nothing to fear indeed?”
“Nothing, on my soul.”
“Will you not go, dear love?”
“Not while you ask me. See how your voice holds me in its silken leash.”
“I will not speak, then.”
“So I shall know you weary of me? Well, I will go.”
“No, stay a little. I cannot spare you to the dark. There is something fearful in it. The trees look as if they were watching us. Everything seems as if it draws near.”
It was one of those crystal-clear nights which give the impression as of an unnaturally close approach of all objects, earthly and celestial. There was no moon, but every star was like a sharp splint of light cut upon a background of purple glass. Austere, immense, the inky masses of the ilexes seemed, in their apparent contiguity, as if their very shadows had taken root, filling the vacant spaces of the lawn between with menacing growth. A night when all things seemed to stop and listen, as in the deep-midmost of sleep when breathing almost ceases, and the soul hangs at the neutral poise between life and death.
“Even the stars,” he said—“and most that beautiful bright one that stoops to guide us on our way. Look to the North, faint heart.”
She caught his two wandering hands in hers, and, imprisoning them, brushed them with kisses as soft as flowers.
“Home,” she whispered—“‘where the strange thing is’—where we can love and be good. O, sweet! I would you could sing to me!”
“Shall I sing?”
“It is not the time of nightingales. No, I dare not let you.”
“As well, perhaps. I have been out of tune of late.”
“Ah me! Were you so sick at heart?”
“Have I not told you?”
“Tell it me all again a thousand times; and a thousand times my tears shall drop like hot rain upon that winter, until not a speck of frost is left to upbraid me.”
“It is already melted in your arms. O, love! am I not a villain?”
“If you are, I love a villain.”
“Isabel?”
“My dear lord?”
“Think always well of that other.”
“I obey my lord.”
“He is a noble heart—princely, magnanimous. He deserves you more than I.”
“Well, he has his deserts to keep him.”
“His claim was open, palpable: mine, only visionary.”
“I will think well of him—when I think of him. Look, when you turn that way, the stars make little babies in your eyes.”
“Isabel, if it were not I, I think I could say, Makehimhappy.”
“What do you mean, if it were not you? O, God! what have I done to forfeit my love?”
“Toforfeit, child?”
“Have I been too forward, too complying—cheapening in myself the thing you held so dear? Will you give me to him, as one having too easily betrayed her easy nature? I am not like that—not fickle—indeed, indeed I am not. I will be cold, forbidding, if it please you; more maidenly; chary of my favours; no smiles, no kisses—Ah, no, I cannot! It is too late. In pity do not despise and cast me off!”
“You very woman! Come, bend lower. Give me your lips, I say.”
“How can I help it when you bid me?”
“My gentle slave! What reprisals your fond loveliness does invite! I could almost wound you just to taste that lust of dear submission. And yet, I did not mean to wound you, girl; but only to say, were I to die, atone as best you can.”
“As best I can, then. Shall I promise to marry him?”
“Promise what you like.”
“Ah! now I hear you set your teeth, as if clinched on some secret pain. And I am happy once more. If you were to die, did you say?”
“Yes, my own love.”
“Look! you cannot forbear the truth. Give him the empty husk, you mean, so long as the sweet kernel remains your own. You called me your own love.”
“Are you not?”
“By every fibre of my soul that clings to yours. How could I live, then, if you were dead?”
“Make room. I must come up to you again.”
“No, no—you shall not. I am content at last in everything but your safety. Hush—O, hush! What was that noise?”
“I heard none. Where is Fanchette?”
“She is waiting within to take you to the gate. Stop, while I fetch her.”
“Not yet. Let me listen at your heart. Child, how it beats.”
“It is your own caged bird. It beats to get at you.”
“Come into my hand, dear bird, and lie warm and rest. There is a long flight waits you on the morrow.”
“O, I die to think of it!”
“What?—of fear or rapture?”
“Of rapture that is fear. Listen—Bonbec!”
“It is midnight striking—the hour of sweet augury. You will not fail me, will you, by a minute—here, at the window?”
“I will put the clock forward.”
“If we can reach the mountains, and thence make by way of Zurich across the German border, and so northward.”
“To the wild green gardens! O, heaven speed us!”
“Never doubt it will. Think of my mascot.”
“What mascot?”
“That to which I owe my immortality—Cinderella’s slipper.”
Two arms came lovingly about his neck, and the tiniest cooing laugh was smothered there.