“What tickles you, you rogue?”
“I do not know. It was either that or crying, and the laugh came first. Shall we not exchange talismans? My lord, will you give me your jack-boot to keep?”
“So you will wear it in your bosom. In very truth, Isabel, I should have died but for it.”
“I believe—I am sure. Yet it did not save you this.” Very pitifully her fingers fluttered over the scar on his temple. “Ah, love!” she sighed, “how could you leave me so?”
For a minute she held him close, with little murmurs like a dove; then looked up fearfully:
“The trees draw nearer. Is it not deadly still? Indeed you must be going.”
“Well,” he said: “shall we begin to speak good-bye?”
“O, no! the briefest parting. Must it not be so?”
“’Tis for you to say.”
“I say it then. Bonbec?”
“Good-bye, lady!”
“One moment. There was something—one last thing I had to say. What was it? It has slipped my mind.”
“Consider on it, while I hold you.”
“It will come in a minute——”
“Or ten, or twenty.”
“No; you must go. How prettily your hair grows from your forehead.”
“Was that it?”
“Wait! It is always on the tip of my tongue—yet it will not come.”
“The basil-flower, perchance?”
“No. But let that serve. Was it not a strange dream of ours?”
“Not strange that I should come to you in dreams. It had been my practice, had you known. Shall I come again to-night? Sweetheart, do you call the basil by the name I told you?”
“Yes, Bonbec.”
“A tiny whisper, faith! I’ll whisper back. Isabel, we’ll make the pretty darling flower between us yet.”
So they lingered out their parting, postponing and always postponing the dread moment that was to separate them—to what issue? By ways of bliss and pain they had reached this supreme crisis, whence, if they would, the blind ecstatic plunge. Now, aware in truth that he must delay his going no longer, the man closed fast his arms about their enamoured burden, and spoke his last words very low and impassioned:
“Isabel—before I go—there is a thing to say. It is as a woman—do you realise it—that you lie here?”
“I would be anything, so to lie here for ever.”
“So to lie and dream? But dreams must wake to reality, when childhood ends, as with the dropping of the flower comes the fruit. Are you prepared?”
“For what?”
“For what’s to come?”
“Tell me what is to come.”
“God knows! Only, for what it cannot be, think of all you must forego—name, honour, luxury—an empire.”
“I thought them all shadows. Are they the realities?”
“Think, before you decide. The whole world against a sentiment.”
“Is it only that, indeed, to you?”
“Ah! to me! But I lose nothing and gain all.”
“An empty gain, when I shall have lost my all.”
“It is the gain of the deathless, child. What is the value of the mortal residue to that?”
“So, after all, you think I cannot love like you?”
“O, I would prove my love, no more than that—even to this last renunciation! Do you fear? Then, I say, it is not too late yet to draw back.”
She gave a little gasp, and would have withdrawn from him; but he caught at her hands and held them fast.
“Isabel!”
“O!” she said despairingly, “after all that has been between us.”
“Listen to me. It is only to free you if you will, so that free you can choose.”
“How can you hurt me so, when you say you love me? I would not be so cruel to my love.”
“O, child, child! cannot you understand?”
She gazed at him a moment with impassioned eyes; then let herself slip once more into his arms.
“I cannot lose you, Bonbec. No, not for all the world.”
“Now,” he said deeply, “the last is said; and we are one and inseparable to eternity.”
“Yes, to eternity!”
“That I could have doubted you! O, my soul, forgive me!”
Presently she stirred, and, the starlight shining on her wet lashes, yielded herself to one last long kiss; then gently put him from her.
“Good-bye, beloved—O, good-bye, good-bye!”
“It is like death to leave you, Isabel.”
“Then do not go. Come back—here, into my room—only till the day breaks. There is something fearful in the night. I feel as if, once we were parted, it will never give you to me again.”
He laughed, whispering away her terrors.
“The dark is my true friend. How but for it could I creep back into hiding?”
“The long, long way! O, go warily, for fear of hateful things!”
“Be comforted. I hold my life too dear. Send Fanchette to the little door. Remember—at midnight. The horses will be waiting.”
“Bonbec?”
“Yes, dearest?”
“Call me your slave.”
“My gentle, pretty slave, good-night: kiss the basil for us both.”
“O, yes, yes!”
Thenorthernmost of the five gates of Parma discharged direct upon the highway that led to Colorno. At intervals from thisembouchurecame shooting as it were thedisjecta membraof a disrupted State. Bodies of high functionaries, coach-loads of subsidiary officials, staffs civil and military, clerks, grooms, secretaries—mounted, perched in dancing carrioles, or drawn heavily behind teams of ponderous Flanders mares, these and their like appeared issuing intermittingly all day from the open culvert, whence they rolled leisurely on their way towards that crystal oasis in the plains ten miles distant. The duke, in short, was changing house, and this anticipatory exodus, which looked like the decimation of his capital, represented no more after all than the adequate personnel of a great lord retiring upon a favoured sylvan retreat. So do our needs enlarge with our state, until, so far as self-help goes, we reach the condition of the paralytic. To Don Philip a fifth and sixthvalet de chambrewould have appeared more indispensable than a single knife and boot boy might appear to us.
At Colorno itself, connected with the city by this scattered procession of men and vehicles, the business of preparation was being pushed forward as assiduously as though the duke were visiting his summer residence for the first time. Everyone was in a state of agitation, and either tetchy or nervous, or both. Cook, lackey, chambermaid and the rest—they seemed all overtaken, as those roused ones in the sleeping palace might have been, by a vague sense of guilt, and a feverish desire to make up by haste for something unaccountably lost—was it a minute or a hundred years? A general air of rush and panic pervaded the place, extending itself from garret to basement, and affecting the marquise in hersalonno less than the little mop-squeezer whitening the boards in her attic. They felt the change in their blood like the first irritating processes of a tonic drug.
Madame herself was as obstreperous and intolerable as, in their excitement, she found her young charges. She waxed shrilly voluble over the information that Isabella was confined to her rooms with a headache. It was monstrous, unnatural, she cried, thus to shut herself away in the face of this imminent arrival, to dissociate herself from the atmosphere of general rejoicing that prevailed. Her relations with the Infanta had long been strained; she was never so gratified as when she could cite evidence of unnaturalness against this natural soul. It is always for such as she to suspect hypocrisy in what is purely genuine.
“Like mistress like Nan.” Amongst those rendered especially captious by the coming event was to be numbered, it seemed, Mademoiselle Becquet. Fanchette bristled with spines; it was dangerous to touch her—almost to approach. Propitiation only appeared to feed her choler, as oil fire. She screamed at her inferiors; was insolent and defiant towards authority, defending her mistress against the charge of undutifulness with a fury which ended by actually routing that formidable autocrat, the utterer of the slander. She was in that state, it appeared, to which we are all, whether Fanchettes or otherwise, occasionally subject, when our whole nervous system seems transferred, like Hartley Coleridge’s fantastic skeleton, to the outside of us, for every breath, however softly sympathetic, to gall. Now a tempest of voice and whisking petticoats, now a white rush of tears into solitudes which gave no relief, she was eternally on the move, and eternally inviting retort for the sake of retaliating on it tooth and claw. She left her mark, indeed, on one overconfident gallant, who derisively offered to confess and absolve her for the nominal penance of a kiss. Her nails ploughed a furrow in his cheek which it would take a month to obliterate. As he stood cursing and ruefully laughing, the sight of the running blood appeared for the first time to sober her. She stood gazing at it fascinated; then suddenly, putting her hands to her face, turned and ran. Whither she disappeared none cared to know or enquire; it was comfort enough that the wildcat had retreated for the time being to its fastnesses.
She did not issue from them again until late in the afternoon, and then only upon receipt of a private communication from a correspondent, which was put into her hand by an emissary sent to seek her for the purpose. She was in the Infanta’s rooms, but not with her mistress, when the message that someone awaited her without, on particular business, reached her. The shrinking page who delivered it could not but observe how her cheeks blenched at the word. He could not but marvel, moreover, after recent storms, at the apparent tranquillity with which she accepted it. She asked him, with an affectation of carelessness, where the messenger was to be found, and, learning that it was at that door into the corridor where she had once before encountered Tiretta, dismissed him with a smile and a prettyvifs remercimentsthat made his heart throb. Then, when he was well gone, she rose—a little unsteadily.
A wave of blood seemed to sweep through her brain, making her momentarily giddy. She put out a hand to a chair-back, and stood supporting herself. It had come—but only what she had expected, looked for. She was desperately pledged to the issue, and there was no escape from it at this last. It was even a relief to her to be called from the horrible suspense of inaction. Suddenly the memory of that crimson streak she had torn upon the insolent face returned to her. A red light came to her eyes; the blood-ensign of “women who love brave men,” in Bissy’s creed. She was not going to falter now, or be untrue to her ideal of manliness. Besides, the end justified the means. Taking herself forcibly in hand, she went down the stairs to the door into the corridor.
This was a deserted part of the building, and now even unwontedly quiet by reason of the Infanta’s desire for repose. Thus, and for such purpose, to take advantage of its abandonment might have seemed a double treachery to some people. Such moral niceties were beyond Fanchette’s appreciation. She descended softly and found a man at the door.
He was a strong truculent-looking fellow, unknown to her—swagger in his attitude, an inhuman animalism in his small sunken eyes and bushy-bearded face, on which a thick smear of lip stood prominent. She had had no personal intercourse with his kind; but the hall-mark of theassassino-prezzolatowas stamped on his every feature. He was well enough dressed to pass for afanfaron; but she knew, without seeing them, what there was under his cloak to point the moral of his trade. Face to face with the loathly thing she had helped to call into being, a revulsion against her own bestial weapons seized her. This brute to hold a fine destiny in his hands! Her narrow lips went up, as in the presence of something physically offensive. She had no fear for herself—not an atom.
The man swept off his hat with a leer, that in its suggestion of hidden confidences was fulsome. He produced and handed to her a little folded tuck of paper.
“Un’ lettera amorosa, signora,” he said, in rather guttural Italian, his nose wrinkling. “The sender awaits a reply.”
She plucked the thing apart, and, barely glancing at its message, crumpled it in her hand, and answered:
“Tell him I will come.”
He grinned, saluted her again, and swaggered off. She could have called upon heaven then and there to strike him dead. That her nature must be thus subdued to what it worked in, not like the “dyer’s” but like the butcher’s hand—be claimed to an affinity with this abomination! It was horrible. Yet so her own compliance had decreed it. Henceforth and for all time he was her loathed confederate, and by reason of that understanding her master. Her hands might be purely white and her little feet as playful as a lamb’s: for all that lay hidden between she was the foul bondslave of blood.
Now, a conscious corruption, the vindictive termagant to her own debasement, she did not hesitate, but, having hurriedly veiled herself, went off to the assignation demanded. She repudiated all responsibility for what was to follow. She had done all that was humanly possible to warn a madman away from the certain consequences of his rashness, and, as he would not be warned, she had no choice but to fulfil her own destiny as a contributor to those consequences. She let herself go as the devil listed.
Her way lay to the presbytery, as seemed fitting to the unities of this tragedy, which had first claimed her there to be its victim and tool. The streets were full of the bustle and animation of returning life, but the precincts of the church were deserted. She mounted the steps to the silent house, and knocked on the door, which was opened almost immediately by Gaspare.
The old rascal peered at her curiously a moment; then, putting out a lean hand, drew her swiftly within.
“His reverence?” she muttered, half choking.
He sniggered. “He is out visiting the sick. But—non importa: you will discover all you need in the parlour.”
He motioned her thither, opened the door, pushed her in, and, closing the latch, retreated. He was too deaf to make eavesdropping profitable.
The room was sombre and almost empty of furniture and other appointments. Its most noticeable feature was a crucifix of ebony and ivory standing in the middle of the one bare table. A melancholy shaft of light, falling through the dusty window, touched the white figure on the cross with a startling radiance. Fanchette shrunk back.
“Why did you bring me here?” she whispered.
La Coque, stealing from the shadows, stood before her.
“I did not wish my coming to be known. What is to be done must be done with promptitude and in secrecy. We are playing a part, do you understand, and the actors in it must not appear on the stage until the eventful moment? Else, suspecting the plot, those antagonistic to it may cause its miscarriage.”
Hearing a little gasp come from her, he bent as if to look searchingly in her face, and put a hand towards her shoulder; but she repulsed him.
“Why should I be dragged into it?” she said.
“Dragged!” He drew himself up, as if realising timely what he had to encounter. “Were you not the first to volunteer?”
“I told you he had returned, that was all.”
“Was that all?”
“That he was in hiding in the neighbourhood.”
“Yes: go on.”
“There is no more.”
“Not that they met in the gardens of Aquaviva: not that last night you let him in and out of the wicket in the eastern wall: not that he will come again this night—with what purpose—but it will never be fulfilled?”
“My God! How do you know?”
“Simple deduction, my Fanchette. You know the proverb, ‘A nod for a wise man and a rod for a fool.’ I have had my instruments at work since the first hint. There are horses ordered for to-night. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“I do not doubt you. Let her thank providence, that’s all, that she has sharper wits plotting to save her.”
“Save her, then, but spare him.”
“Do you say it? Why do you want him spared?”
“For her sake only. What harm has she ever done me?”
“There are some growths—infatuation, for example—that can only be treated with the surgeon’s knife.”
“O, my God!”
“You cannot reduce them so long as the root cause remains. Do you realise where we stand in this? At the fork of two roads—disgrace or an empire. A life, one mean poor life, must count for nothing in the decision.”
“You always hated him.”
“If I did, it was because of you.”
“Yet you do not consider me in your vengeance. If it must be, why do you not act alone?”
“Because, only with your help can we save the face of things.”
“Go on. I am listening.”
“Very well. You will let him in at the wicket, and I shall come upon you together.”
“I see. A quarrel between you two about your mistress.”
“You are sharp enough when you will.”
“So you gamble with my good name, which is after all nothing to you.”
“On the contrary. His blood shall prove its particular value.”
“Blood!” She seemed to gulp; then whispered on hoarsely: “will there be much blood?”
“You need not wait to see.”
For some moments she stood silent, staring at him as if fascinated.
“Charlot,” she said, “if I do what you want, will you marry me?”
“We will see.”
“I think there is good cause.”
“Very well, we will see.”
“I shall be ruined with my mistress.”
“The duke will find you compensation.”
“The duke! Does he know?”
“He knows, and approves.”
“Approves?”
“Thunder of God! How do you suppose he regards this outrage to his pride, this abuse of his love? A common adventurer, a mere tavern-thrummer, without voice or standing—and to practise his damned arts on the very soil of a newly-turned grave! Whatever tolerance was shown him once is over and done with. He stands sentenced like a poaching dog. O, be sure the duke is in it!”
“What if it be too late?”
“Too late?” He made a step, and gripped her arm. “They are not gone already?”
“Not that. But for an hour they were alone together last night.”
He gave a deep sigh, and dropped his hold.
“It is never too late there. But I trust the vestal in her—and his own discretion. An hour is nothing. You must besiege these shy fortresses a week before they surrender.”
“Then I will not be a party to his murder.”
“You will not?”
“What harm has he done that cannot be mended?”
“Alive, he’ll do it yet.”
“I’ll not help to hurt him.”
“You’ll do better to think again.”
“Why, better?”
“Lest you be made to take his place.”
“What! You’ll kill me!”
“Not I, unless I kill my love with kindness. But I cannot save you now your knowledge of another’s secret. Be sure, if your scruples refuse a part in it, means will be taken to keep it fast in you.”
“The duke will have me poisoned?”
“Who said the duke?”
“O, how I hate you all!”
From the first he had foreseen what must come, and had been prepared for it. He saw imminent at last the hysterical collapse long threatened, and the look of the dog came to his face. His teeth showed; tight puckers gathered over his eyebrows; he held her with a glare as he moved on her. With a little sob, half terror, half defiance, she struck out at him—and on the instant he had her in his grip. His sinews, for all his slight build, were like thongs of steel; her mad struggles availed nothing against their vicious devilry. She made no tumult, uttered no scream; but in silence fought and writhed, biting at his hands, at his clothes, at anything, until, falling upon her knees, he had her, torn and dishevelled, at his mercy. He showed her none. Seizing her by the ears, by her tumbled hair, he forced her head back, and, snarling, put his knee against her throat. Presently her struggles weakened, grew spasmodic, and a desperate imploring look came to her eyes. Then—for he knew his lady—relaxing the pressure, and releasing his right hand, he felt on the table behind him for a riding switch he had laid there, and, holding her down with his left, applied it furiously to her shoulders. One of them had been wrenched bare in the tussle; he did not spare the naked flesh for that, but rather lusted to see it quiver and crimson under his blows. And all the time she made no outcry—that was the strange thing—but only writhed and shrunk away, with now and then a panting sob or a quicker gasp when a crueller cut went home. And at the end, when, his fury spent, he ceased, looking, with hard breathing, down upon her—lo and behold, she flung convulsive arms about his knees, and, with the released tears running down her cheeks, put her head against him, like a poor conscience-guilty dog begging pardon. Surely the immortal thing in woman’s love is its illogicalness.
La Coque knew his lady, I say; he took the satisfaction of a tyrant in making her know him. He did not spurn her now, but he stood unmoved and unmoving.
“Get to your feet,” he said: “do you hear?”
She obeyed and stood before him, a woeful girl, streaked and torn by his brutality, waiting breathless on his word.
“Have you come to your senses?” he demanded.
“Yes—Charlot.” Her voice still caught in sobs, though she tried to command it.
“Will you do what I tell you?”
“Yes.”
“That is well at last. Now mark your instructions. Come here—bend your head to me. There will be two of us; we shall be waiting in the sunk garden, in the shadows of the trees below the terrace, but not in sight of it. Lead him that way from the wicket; it is very private. Before you pass, I shall step out and challenge you both. There will be an altercation between us, as much to take him off his guard as for the benefit of the witness lurking in the background. It is he, you understand, who is brought to testify to the real cause of quarrel—such as he thinks it already—a dispute about you. He will do what he is hired to do while we wrangle; but by then, if you wish it, you may have escaped. Is it all clear?”
“Yes, quite.”
“And you will not fail me?”
“No.”
He searched her quivering face, with its heavy eyelids, all wet and swollen, intently for a little; then softly touched one of the poor ears he had so cruelly ill-used.
“Ma pauvre petite!” he said pitifully: “ma pauvre petite!”
The sobs came faster and thicker; he drew her gently towards him, and whispered:
“Why would you rouse the devil in me? Did it hurt so much?”
She clung about his neck.
“Come,” he said: “let’s sit yonder. There’s no one in the house but Gaspare.” With lips like salve he touched the wounded flesh. “Chère amie—Fanchette—no, I’ll not loose you!”
Over his shoulder the white figure on the cross blazed in her opened eyes.
“Not here,” she whispered, hurried and febrile—“not here. Take me where he cannot see us.”
Theclocks were pointing near to midnight; the village was long silent; the flurry of the day had subsided everywhere, and sleep and quiet had usurped throughout the palace the place of tumult. Only in that one remote corner above the terrace, where the bridal myrtles grew, was a shrouded light still burning, unquenchable, it seemed, as the steadfast spark that glows before a shrine. And there was the young wakeful postulant for Love’s service, awaiting, half rapt, half fearful, the mystic call.
Somewhere in the shadows there was a watch ticking. Its tiny pulse beat out the seconds in a fury to outstrip the lagging hours; for it had been worn near its mistress’s heart, and the throb of its hairspring had fallen into time with the fever of impatience it had touched there. But at length the end was in sight, and the round of long-drawn minutes rolled up to the starward-pointing hands. Isabella’s own hands were cold, as she lifted for the last time the little restless engine to consult it.
All day she had lived for this moment that was near. Truthful as she could not but be, her headache had served her for no guileful pretext; but it had served her nevertheless, since it was solitude she craved. She had some things to do—not many, but essential: to write a letter to her father was one of them. And she wrote it from her simple heart—a little plea so pathetic, so impossible, that it might well have wrung a colder breast than his. Perhaps it affected him when he came to read it; for he was not uncompassionate when the end was gained. But of that we have no knowledge.
There were some jewels she would take with her—indisputably her own. She would not come to her lover empty-handed, to be a burden on his charity. But the part of Jessica was impossible to her, and she robbed no one.
At this last she had only herself, for all vital purposes, to depend on. Fanchette, whom alone it had once been possible to take into her confidence—Fanchette, the fallen and unclean in her eyes, was no longer an auxiliary to be trusted with other than the material aids to these meetings. For the purer, finer sympathies she was necessarily disqualified. Isabella blamed herself for this judgment, for what was she herself better than Fanchette, save in the constitution of her passion? Yet surely that alone redeemed her; for love to her was nine-tenths a spiritual ecstasy, and only the little residue the mortal drug to achieve it. For all the best it meant to her, she could have been content to play St. Catherine to the pure divinity in love.
Well, we may doubt; but she was chaste, at least—chaste in the sense of utter truth to one supreme ideal. This man was her God, to whom she had given herself body and soul; and if earthly passion was a detail of that surrender, there is no use or profit in calculating its proportion to the whole.
Now, all things prepared, she set herself to abide, with what patience she might, the weariful interval. But first she took off her betrothal ring, and looking at it remorsefully a moment, placed it gently with the letter on her dressing-table. Often during the long day she would caress her basil, and speak to it as if it were a sentient thing, and chide it for its too tardy blossoming. It was not keeping faith, she said; for surely now the longed-for hour of their union was approaching, and yet its stubborn little twigs remained tight-closed. All day she would hear, faint and afar, the low thunder of life returning to deserted rooms and echoing corridors; and, listening, was conscious of an already strange sense of detachment from the world of her knowledge. She could think of it tenderly, kindly, but without one emotion of regret for its loss. There had never been that in common between them which a first glimpse of the eternal truth of things could not dissipate; and truth had come to her, when it did, in a transcendent form. Her soul stood on tiptoe, foreseeing only the moment when love was to call it to the starry altitudes.
Night, when it fell at last, came with a little moaning wind, which ever seemed to grow in fitful spasms as silence deep and deeper settled on the house. Listening, she seemed to hear without a sound of small voluble voices, and little footsteps running like pattering leaves, and giggling laughter that caught at her heart with fear. But it was nothing—only the mad spirits of the dark taking toll of the unrest which served to cover their antics. In the pauses of the wind they would all stop as still as mice; and then again, when the blast rose high, star its shrill volume with their bodiless cries.
They were nothing; but to over-tense nerves the voices of nothingness are the sounds most ill to endure. And so poor Isabel found them—terrifying, inscrutable, until she could bear to be alone no longer. Better the company of the restless night itself than this vigil of haunted loneliness behind enshrouding curtains. As the great castle clock chimed eleven, she left her upper chambers, and stole down soft-footed to the fateful room whence she was to make her flight.
She had only to wait and bide the moment—only to wait! But Fanchette had had her sure instructions, and what else was there for her herself to do? Only to wait. She extinguished the solitary light, and, putting aside the hangings, stood looking out into the darkness.
It was profound among the masses of the ilex trees; yet overhead there was still a cold shine of stars. The wind came on in heavy gusts, swaying the black-heaped shadows, so that they seemed to distort themselves, mouthing and mowing like chaotic giants. She did not dread them as she had the unreal voices, not even when their movement seemed momentarily to betray the presence of odd white-faced things crouched within their glooms. But these were tangible, at least—tricks of fancy that one could grapple and defy. Gradually all sense of them faded as she stood, and she lost herself in glowing dreams.
The striking of the third quarter brought her with a shock to herself. Even as the resonant jangle ceased on the instant, cut off by a swooping blast, she could have thought she heard through the tumult a faint sound of wrangling voices, very distant, inarticulate, not to be detached from the general confusion; but it ceased as the wind fell; and she told herself that her fancy had again deceived her. But not for long now. Her whole soul thrilled in the thought of the rapturous reality that second by second must be approaching to claim her for its own.
Suddenly an intense feeling of awe came over her—a thrill of hushed expectancy, as in that solemn moment of the Mass when the Host is elevated above the bowed and death-still congregation. Her eyes were on the velvet spaces—out of their silences dripped a sudden star, which, descending slowly, disappeared behind the trees.
And on the instant there came a woman’s scream, harrowing, heart-piercing, rending the darkness. Once, and fainter, it was repeated; and then the wind took up the tale of fear and swept it onwards into obliteration.
The watcher stood as if stricken into stone, all the blood in her body draining back upon her heart. No fancy—there could be none, in that horrible cry. Who had uttered it—and whence? It had come from the direction of the trees, down by the garden edge—O, God! O, God!—his time, his path!
She leapt as one from the brink of the grave, called back to the solace of some infinite pain. He was there; he needed her. Without an instant’s hesitation she climbed the little balcony, and falling anyhow upon the turf beneath, rose to her feet and ran. She ran down the terrace, across the sloping sward, a small white spectre against the towering blackness of the trees. Her feet sparkled in the inky pools; the wind charged at her, and tore loose a wild strand of hair; it was a figure to haunt those glades for evermore. She ran and ran, making straight in the direction of the sound. As she skirted the plantation edge, she seemed conscious of shadowy forms swiftly glimpsing and disappearing among the trees. She heeded nothing of them, of their flittings and sibilations. Real or unreal, of what importance were they any longer in this context of death? For it was death, and the end of all things. She never doubted it; it was in her soul as she ran. That scream had shattered at one blow the whole rainbow fabric of their love’s illusion. It could not be, it could never have been, by human consent. Only by way of this agony was it possible for the heaven of their dreams to come true. Down among the flowery paths she stopped suddenly, and fell upon her knees beside him.
He was lying crushed into the green border—there, in that very place where the love-in-a-mist was wont to grow so thickly. It was quiet in this sunken spot—no sound but the bubbling, it seemed, of a low spring. It came from his lungs, God pity her, and ran over his lips. “Beloved!” she sighed in a little voice; but all hopeless heart-break was in it.
With the intense vision of subconsciousness she could distinguish, as surely as if it were daylight, every detail of his face. His eyes were closed; but she knew he was not dead. Would he die without recognising her? She put an arm beneath his head and tried to lift it to her bosom.
“Not without one word!” she said, with a small wooing moan. “It is only you and I.”
And at that, struggling back from the shadows, he raised leaden lids, and knowing her, faintly smiled. She tore a handkerchief from her breast, a little perfumed scrap of lace and cambric, and with it tried to staunch the gushing life. And then she bent her face, to catch the gasping words:
“What is it, most dear, most dear?”
“Believe nothing—only my deathless love.”
“And mine—O, and mine!”
His left arm crooked feebly a moment, and then fell. A spasm of scorn twitched his dying features:
“In the back—there were three of them—and one a woman.”
Again the murmur tailed off and ceased. In a numb agony she spoke the name that was only hers. “Take me with you,” she whispered, with a quivering sigh: “O, take me, take me with you!”
And then suddenly and strongly he rose in her arms, and an unearthly light, great and triumphant, was in his eyes, and he spoke with a clear voice:
“Sweet—in the North—in the beautiful gardens—we shall meet in three——”
The blood rushed from his mouth; a slight convulsion shook him; he fell back. They found her—they, the shameful ones, when they slunk presently from their ghastly ambush—clinging insensible to the lifeless body.
“And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,And she forgot the blue above the trees,And she forgot the dells where waters run,And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;She had no knowledge when the day was done,And the new moon she saw not: but in peaceHung over her sweet basil ever more,And moistened it with tears unto the core.”
“And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,And she forgot the blue above the trees,And she forgot the dells where waters run,And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;She had no knowledge when the day was done,And the new moon she saw not: but in peaceHung over her sweet basil ever more,And moistened it with tears unto the core.”
“And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new moon she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet basil ever more,
And moistened it with tears unto the core.”
Inthat strange long sleep of swoons and haunted wakings there was a dream she had. Something had always troubled her—a sense of something left undone, on the fulfilment of which a rapturous tryst depended. It was associated with a promise, which yet was a promise conditional on something to be performed. At first, in her half-lucid intervals, she had been content to lie quite still and resigned, secure in the thought that no more than the third day was needed to see her broken heart made whole in the transport of a swift re-union; but the day came and passed, and she was still lying unreleased in the quiet room. Why was it so? She had made so sure of the promise, and yet the sign had been withheld. Weak tears dropped from her eyes. If not three days, then what? Soon it must be, in this state of bodily and mental prostration into which she was fallen. But when? O, death had been cruel to cut short and confound that message in the very moment of its utterance! If only she could know, she could endure.
And then came the dream—or so it seemed. She thought that once, quite suddenly and blissfully enlightened, she rose in the sweet clear morning, when all her watchers were asleep, and, descending the stairs softly, passed out into the gardens by way of a door that had been strangely left unlocked. Then swiftly her bare feet were on the dewy grass, and she was running. She ran down by the trees to that place of delirious memory, and there were the crushed flowers and the trampled ground to convince her of the truth of what had been. The spot, it seemed, had been avoided since, and only a hurried attempt had been made to obliterate the traces of the tragedy. But deep in the bushes she saw half-hidden what she had come to seek—what she had never doubted that she should find—a little blood-soaked handkerchief. She had cast it from her when she had clasped him at the last.
Hurriedly she secured her prize, and, kissing it, hid it in her bosom. The blood had dried upon it, and it left no mark upon her lips. She turned and ran again.
She thought, then, that she was back undiscovered in her room; and that she went to her basil pot, and with little labour coaxing the sweet thing whole from its nest, laid the handkerchief in the void and therein replaced the plant, burying her secret out of sight. And so, dropping tears upon its leaves, she went again to lie in her bed, trembling in a very ecstasy of reassurance. She had solved the heart-haunting mystery. It would blossom now.
When they came to wait upon her she was asleep. She slept as she had not done as yet. The burden of that riddle once lifted, nature must have its way with her. When she awoke at last, it was to a sense of peace such as she had not known for days.
She was convalescent. The grave physicians said so, congratulating her discreetly on her recovery. From what? Something malarial, or tertian, probably. Her constitution had been tried by the strain of recent events—the obsequies, and so on. And so on. What did it matter if they knew—if anybody knew? She was only in a fever to substantiate her dream; and the moment she was left alone, she rose to do so.
She was very weak; her eyes were unearthly bright; there was a pain upon her heart. Those were all very well, and dearly well, if only her dream would yield the thing she prayed of it. When she was convinced it was there, she wept for very joy. It was truly there, indeed—no need to trouble how it was brought, whether in a dreaming or a waking trance. The end was assured, and the promise would be fulfilled.
Thenceforth, physically, indeed, she was restored. The restfulness engendered by that assurance helped her body’s healing. She felt it so herself, but without uneasiness for the result. What was to be was written, and no fretting could either alter or anticipate the end. In the meantime, untrammelled by material pains and weaknesses, her spirit was free to soar into those regions where life and love awaited it. This lower state had ceased of any meaning for her; like the dying poet of that other Isabella, she felt conscious somehow of leading a posthumous existence—as if her real self were elsewhere, blissfully sleeping out the hours, like the dead Adonis, until the appointed moment when Love should wake it.
This sense of detachment was so absolute as to deceive her father into a belief in her complete resignation to what had happened and was destined to happen. She had been mad and was sane; but being so, he had no desire to torture a point which, with her convalescence, had ceased to be material. She awoke one morning to see him standing at her bed-foot. He stood stiff-necked, immovable, searching her face with his inquisitional Spanish eyes.
Presently he stirred, and coming round the bed, lifted the pale slender hand that lay upon the coverlet, and, slipping a ring upon its betrothal finger, stood, retaining his hold, silently looking down.
She smiled at him, then, and spoke, a little faintly:
“Si, mio padre. It shall remain there.”
No mention of the letter: none of the crisis that had produced it. The act and the look were sufficient in themselves to cover the whole of the situation—regret for a stern necessity, forgiveness for an unspeakable offence, assurance that thenceforth all would be overlooked and forgotten in the promise of reparation. He might have gone then, satisfied; but in some redeeming impulse of emotion he put the little fingers to his lips before he replaced them gently on the coverlet. And, as he went, Isabella turned her face to the wall, and wept. She felt no resentment towards him for what he had done, or caused to be done, but only an infinite pity. He did not know; he could never know. Her reparation was only nominal; for what had she to give at last other than the mere mechanism of a being which his own act had deprived of its essential meaning, and which must soon perish for lack of that vitalising principle? Her soul was already with her love; only her body remained for insensible submission to those brief mortal uses which men might desire of it.
She came downstairs after that, and resumed her formal existence. There was something gone from her, but it was of too subtle an essence to affect the common mind with a sense of definite loss. What suspicion of the truth was abroad she did not know or care to know. She was like one regarding in herself the unfamiliar antics of a stranger. They did not much concern or interest her, either introspectively or in their visible relations to their surroundings. But she was very sweet and gentle with all; for the habit of kindness remained to the desolated heart, the scent of the roses still clung round the broken vase. Only the old spirit of merriment seemed to have deserted her for ever. No laugh was once again heard on her lips.
Regarding so little of the past, it was not strange that she never referred to her vanished chieffemme de confiance, or appeared to notice that she was deprived of her services. It is even possible that Fanchette might have resumed her place at her side without exciting any repulsion in her. She seemed to bear no one a grudge for what had been, or to discriminate between this and the other in the ruin which had befallen her. She may have surmised who were the chief instruments in that tragedy; she never betrayed by word or look her knowledge of them. It was not their guilt which was the poignant thing; it was the irreparable loss it had entailed on humanity. One did not condemn a viper because it achieved its nature as much in biting the heel of a saint as of a sinner. That all-sweet absence of the spirit of revenge; that utter absorption in the effects of the deed and noble contempt for its perpetrators, should have been felt by base minds as more crushing than any retaliation. Perhaps it was. Neither la Coque nor Mademoiselle Becquet was to be found at Colorno in these days.
And the mortal body of her tragedy? She never learnt or tried to learn where they had laid it. What did it signify? That poor broken prison was no more concerned now with the ideals which had once made it animate and beautiful than was her own body with the little mortal lusts and policies which contended over its brief possession. To all that its life-tribute meant to her at last the basil contained the clue.
It was there alone her real being centred and became volitional. Alone with it, her soul seemed to return into her from the spaces where it had hung aloof, and to become articulate with a remembered ecstasy. She would dream with the green thing, and talk softly with it, as if it were he himself, recalling a hundred little secrets of love and loving converse. “She had no knowledge when the day was done,” but only that the darkness meant the joyful nearing of her basil-time. And always and for ever she prayed it wooingly to flower, growing more pathetic in her sweet entreaties as the third month from that night drew to its close. But still the stubborn sprays showed no sign of breaking—not for all her tender plaints and bedewing tears.
Alas, it was not to be yet!