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Title: The pot of basil

Author: Bernard Capes

Release Date: March 11, 2023 [eBook #70265]

Language: English

Produced by: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POT OF BASIL ***






 THE POT OF BASIL

 BY
 BERNARD CAPES
 AUTHOR OF
 “A JAY OF ITALY,” “BAG AND BAGGAGE,” “JESSIE BAZLEY.”


 LONDON
 CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
 1913




 NOTE

For the attempt here made to endue with life and circumstance a
little tragic romance of the past, the motive is to be referred to a
recently published book of memoirs, in whose pages is incidentally
made public for the first time the brief legend of which this is an
amplification. The author hopes that he will not be thought to have
dealt profanely with the spirit of a little tale, so old, so new, and
yet so touching in its eternal simplicity.




 CONTENTS

 I. The Nixie
 II. Aquaviva
 III. The Compact
 IV. Love’s Ambassador
 V. Il Trovatore
 VI. Non Dolce far Niente
 VII. Love-in-a-Mist
 VIII. Correspondence
 IX. The Decoy
 X. The Orange Grove
 XI. Sweet Basil
 XII. Paolo and Francesca
 XIII. Tokens
 XIV. Confession
 XV. A Bolt from the Blue
 XVI. Fast bind, Fast find
 XVII. The Lost Presence
 XVIII. An Interview
 XIX. “Mariana”
 XX. The Face in the Crowd
 XXI. Across the Bridge
 XXII. Anticipation
 XXIII. “In the Silent Woody Places”
 XXIV. Rapture
 XXV. Delirium
 XXVI. Within the Presbytery
 XXVII. The Cry in the Garden
 XXVIII. A Posthumous Existence
 XXIX. At Rest




 THE POT OF BASIL

 “Fair Isabel: poor simple Isabel.”

 CHAPTER I.
 THE NIXIE

It was a very hot day in Colorno, the petty Versailles of the Dukes
of Parma. The little channels irrigating the plains all about, and
drawn every one from the near depleted basin of the small river which
a few miles northward ran into the Po, were spun as thin as silver
wire. The effect from a distance was as of a network of snail-tracks,
stiffened in a dry morning, and all making for the oasis of the
village, where was to be found at least the shade of trees and
gardens. Elsewhere there was little. The domains of Don Philip, wrote
the Minister Maulevrier, _à propos_ some hounds “de toute beauté”
presented to the duke by his devoted father-in-law, Louis XV., were no
huntsman’s paradise, since they possessed “ni bois, ni fauve.” The
country was like a green tray, rimmed by the low blue ramparts of the
Alps and Apennines far distant. In the midst stood Colorno, a dainty
confection, as it were, of puff paste and sugar. It lay basking in the
sunlight, very white, very sleepy, very empty. Its duke and court were
at the capital, ten miles southward, Madame Louise-Elizabeth, its
restless scheming duchess, was hastening towards her cruel end at
Versailles--she was to die, like her father, like her husband, like
her son, like many another relation, of the common scourge, “la petite
vérole”--and only the three children of the marriage remained
ensconced, for purposes of health and education, at the “résidence
d’été.”

This country house, “élégante et spacieuse,” this Colorno itself,
are very meet in these days to point the moral of vainglory. The
palace, where the “Well-beloved’s” eldest and only married daughter
wasted her heart and her brains in the persistent endeavour to find
kingdoms for her offspring, as lesser mothers try to find “situations”
for theirs, the despised home, where “ne cesse de parcourir la carte
d’Europe,” chasing this or that crown to its imaginary resting-place
on the head of husband or child, has been transformed into a lunatic
asylum; the balcony, whence our Juliet leaned to whisper honeyed
phrases to her Romeo, is either gone, or witnesses to the rhapsodies
of a baser madness; the contiguous houses, where officers and
ministers and envoys plenipotentiary kept their state, the lodgings
where the smaller fry of parasites and courtiers worried out their
little excited lives of intrigue and scandal--all are delivered in
this twentieth century to the dry prose of commerce, and only the gilt
tracery on a wall here and there, or the sombre emblazonment of a
ceiling, testifies to the romance which once glowed and fevered there
until it perished consumed in its own heart-burnings.

The palace has achieved, one might say, its logical destiny; it
survives, but in a bad state of repair mental and material. The ducal
gardens also survive, but for the benefit of the “people.” Everywhere,
since those days, the flood of democracy has broken through the social
dam, and robbed exclusiveness of its most picturesque privileges. It
was predestined, it was inevitable; but I prefer, I confess, for my
part, to think of Colorno as it lay slumbering, before the vulgarising
cataclysm, on that sultry June morning in the year 1759.

There came lumbering up the high road from Florence a great travelling
carriage drawn by four bays, with a sober-suited postilion to each
pair, and a couple of travellers, no more, within. One might have
known that the younger of these men--though plainly enough dressed in
a suit of black velvet, with his head in a powdered bag-wig and a
simple black beaver set on it--was, from the very serene authority of
his expression, a person of particular distinction. He was, in fact,
the Archduke Joseph of Austria, heir-apparent to God knew what
dominions (the Seven Years’ War was then in the fourth of its
perennial stages), and on his way home from a minor diplomatic
mission--with which, despite his youth, he had been entrusted--to the
Court of Rome. He travelled incognito as the Comte de Falckenstein,
and, for the moment, had elected to eschew display. His entourage, his
personal equipage, had preceded him on the road; he himself desired to
lag a little for purposes of observation. For he was always observing,
was Archduke Joseph, and provisionally amending the scheme of things
after a process, despotically philosophic, which was all his own.

The archduke, _aetat._ 18, concluded a pretty prolonged silence with
an aphorism:--

“The last acquirement of ambitious minds, my good Tiretta, is
simplicity.”

The gentleman at his side, a humorous, interesting-looking young man
of twenty-six or so, heaved a profound sigh.

“At last!” he said. “I may talk, then, again?”

Joseph sniggered. His own lean young face was not without humour, but
intrinsically of the pedantic order. He was precociously inclined to
that form of superior banter, best described as scholastic jocosity,
which consists in demanding subservient laughter from the unamused.
That was largely the misfortune of his state. He was a serious,
well-intentioned young prince; but since no one might question his
conclusions, they were forced to be their own single support. He had
Platonic ideals of state, but the individual liberty they embraced
included no right to question his personal dictation of them. He would
make men tolerant by intolerance, which was exactly what the Jacobins,
by savager methods, came to attempt; and necessarily like them he
failed. He meant very well, and, under the circumstances, did not do
so badly in the end; but he died, after all, in the van of pathetic
failure, seeing all his hopes of a world converted by force to reason
overthrown. That, however, belongs to another story.

The archduke’s aphorism had capped some discussion, terminated by
himself, on the notorious dandyism of the Duke of Parma, through whose
territories they were then passing.

“You may talk, Tiretta,” he said. “Why not?”

“God and your Highness know,” answered the young gentleman. “I would
rather go without food than speech any day. And yet you impose silence
on me; and yet you condescend to call me your friend.”

He was a romantic-looking fellow, for all the character he gave
himself--slender, shapely, with dusk mournful eyes and well-knit
features. His mouth was peculiarly expressive, whether in smile or
sobriety, and the voice, whose freedom he so coveted, was low-toned
and caressing. He wore the nondescript military harness of his day,
scarcely to be called a uniform, consisting prominently of a dark blue
coat with white facings, high jack-boots, and a heavy sword at his
side. His natural hair, of a deep brown and slightly grizzled with
powder, was tied into a knot at the nape with a broad black ribbon,
and on his head was a hat like his companion’s, but adorned with a
pert black cockade.

“I am your friend, Tiretta,” said the prince. “That is why I will not
let you talk too much. You will profit by it some day, when I have
inured you to a wise reticence. The man of many words empties his
heart of thoughts.”

“I could plead,” answered Tiretta, with a little curious amused glance
at his companion, “that thoughts, like pea-blossom, throng the thicker
being culled; only I fear----”

“Fear what?”

“That you would wish to think it over.”

Joseph laughed. “Well,” said he, “deliver yourself.”

“I can be reticent,” said Tiretta. “I will talk your Highness an hour
by the clock to prove it; and all the time you will never guess the
secret I am keeping from you.”

“What is that?”

“That you have a smut on your nose.”

The prince instinctively rubbed that august feature; then, his lips a
little stiff, sat looking out of the window. Certainly his indulgence
had brought this on himself. He had met and attached this Tiretta to
his interests in Rome, where the stranger was known socially as _il
Trovatore_. Already and always a student of humanity, there was
something about the man, a mystery, a charm, which had curiously
puzzled and attracted the royal young metaphysician. Not that Tiretta
had made any mystery about himself. If he was a soldier of fortune, he
was still a soldier and a gentleman. He had fought with distinction,
on the Spanish side, in the wars of the Austrian succession; he had
been present at the battle of Piacenza. It was nothing, in that
“general post” of kingdoms and dynasties, that he should find himself
presently hobnobbing on friendly terms with a scion of the house whose
claims he had helped to contest. The European arena was all a welter
of Habsburgs and Bourbons, crossing, interlacing, intermarrying, and
having no particular aim in common but, like a litter of pigs, to
empty among them the Continental trough. It did not seem much to
matter which sat on what throne, so long as all available seats were
occupied by themselves. A martial spirit, with no genius for
genealogy, might very well, under such conditions, fight for the sake
of his sword rather than his cause; and likely that had been the case
with Tiretta. He was a mercenary, of the noble and romantic sort; a
free-lance, whose independence of mind shone through all his
undertakings. There is no permanence in the attachments of princes;
but, for the moment at least, it was this very quality of
“self-possession” in his friend which interested Joseph; and because
it seemed the antithesis of his own. Tiretta possessed _his_ own soul
apart, not by philosophy, but by some secret bestowal of it in a
dreamy Rosamund’s bower, to which only he knew the clue. When his eyes
looked fixed and misty, one might surmise that he was far away in that
enchanted spot, the spirit of which always appeared to speak in his
voice and manner. There was something magnetic about the man, which,
in the philosopher’s view, invited scientific analysis.

And yet the fellow was an irrepressible chatterer--that was the odd
thing; and wont, like all chatterers, to blunder into offence. Here
was an example.

Archduke Joseph tried to swallow the pleasantry, but his vanity was
not equal to the effort. He swelled a moment, then delivered himself,
with an icy _hauteur_:--

“You presume, monsieur, you presume upon my indulgence. That is not to
justify my condescension, but to rebuke it. Henceforth I desire you to
leave me to my meditations.”

Tiretta, instantly compunctious, ventured to disobey. He was easily
attached; he really liked the young man. His expressions of contrition
won favour after a time; he earnestly asserted that he was not the
irresponsible garrulous magpie the other thought him--that in the
causes of loyalty and affection he could be silent unto death. Let his
Highness test him and believe. Joseph smiled. Too much protest, too
many words.

“I mistrust all excess--even of fidelity,” he said.

“Your Highness begins, your Highness has said it,” cried Tiretta,
“where ordinarily old age is content to end--in the last wisdom of
simplicity. Be tolerant of us commoner minds, who, being little,
cannot afford, like your Highness, to do without some ostentation,
even in speech. An emperor can dress plain, can dismiss his escort,
can sit in silence self-contained, and remain an emperor. But we must
e’en have some garnish of embroidered coats and sounding words to
recommend us. Well, talking, like drink, grows on a man. So you give
me your liking, sum me up as a wind-bag, only a fond one.”

“I shall do nothing so foolish,” said Joseph, with a smile. “There is
no human nature, my good Tiretta, compounded of such simple
ingredients. To call a man a rogue, a fool, a miser, or what you will,
is the mere refuge of an indolent mind, which seizes upon some salient
feature to express the whole. Remark upon a man’s dandyism, as we have
been doing, but do not call him dandy; remark upon another’s
loquacity, but do not dismiss him as an empty chatterer.”

“Do not dismiss him at all,” said Tiretta gravely. “He will justify
your interest in him yet.”

He chaunted softly a little odd song (they were rolling over smooth
turf at the time)--something about a quarrel between a flower and its
roots, which he improvised for the occasion. It was his faculty for
doing this sort of thing which had procured him his name. He had a
very sweet voice. His mandolin rested in its case in the rack above
his head. Joseph had little ear or liking for music; yet there was a
quality in Tiretta’s which constantly fascinated while it aggravated
him.

“If you would condescend to prose,” he said drily.

“It was this,” said Tiretta. “The flower despised its own lowly roots,
its poor relations, which connected it with the soil. ‘I would stand
alone in my exclusiveness,’ it said; and it persuaded the scythe to
sever it. But, lo! the flower fell and died, and the roots sent forth
another blossom, fair as the first.”

The archduke patted the shoulder next him patronisingly.

“What does it mean, poet?”

“Nothing, sir, but that, stand a flower ever so high and glorious, the
roots have their use. All life springs at one time from the soil.”

“What is the moral?”

“O! the moral? Only that I love flowers.”

“Well, you are a funny fellow.”

“For being a root? It is natural for you to think so. But I shall hope
yet to prove my attachment.”

The prince glanced at him queerly, as if doubting his sanity; then
frowned, and sat looking from the window.

The postilions had had orders to avoid both Parma and Colorno. There
were private as well as state reasons for this step. The past month or
so had been signalised by some cautious _pourparlers_ in the matter of
a suggested marriage between the heir to the Austrian throne and the
eldest child and daughter of Don Philip, and both policy and punctilio
forbade a visit which might lend itself to misconstruction. If any
curiosity as to the person of his possible bride affected the sedate
young gentleman, he had no difficulty in repressing it. A glimpse had
perhaps acted upon him to rasher effect. For, for all his youthful
philosophy, Joseph was susceptible where girlish beauty was concerned.
He even fell in love, years later, with the looks of his own sister,
Marie-Antoinette, at Versailles, and playfully regretted that he could
not marry her. Reports, of course, of the charms of the young Infanta
Marie-Isabelle, had reached him; but then he was wise enough to
recognise that princesses were always beautiful. It was without
emotion that he saw the roofs and towers of Colorno appear and
disappear at a distance among the eastern greenery.

The carriage took a ford of the little river, and toiling up the slope
beyond, was proceeding on its way to join the Milan road, when it was
called to a sudden halt by the archduke.

“Tiretta!”

“Your Highness?”

“That was a bewitching vision.”

“It sits very prettily among its trees, to be sure.”

“Pooh, man! Get out and look back.”

Tiretta obeyed--and this is what he saw. The road ran straight across
the river, and within the south-eastern angle made by the two was
composed a little picture, very quaint and _ravissante_. It showed a
leafy corner shadowed by chestnut trees, and a patch of
green-embowered turf beyond, sloping to a tiny curved backwater, in
which lay a miniature islet set like an aquamarine in a ring, the
whole lying secluded from the road behind a high close hedge of
tamarisk and juniper, in the thick of which was sunk a wooden wicket.
But between the bank and islet was the wonder; for there, thigh-deep
in the water, stood a young girl, plainly arrested in the act of
reaching for a single golden lily which floated in the pool a yard or
two beyond her grasp. There she stood, half diverted, half aghast,
balancing herself by an overhanging branch, one slim arm raised, so
that its sleeve dropped down almost to her arm-pit, the other,
snatched hurriedly from its essay, pressing under to her knees her
rebellious skirt, which yet would rise and rise again in snowy
bubbles. The naiad’s umber hair had looped astray; the little milkmaid
hat upon her head, with its cherry ribbon and saucy bow, was tilted
askew; she stood transfixed a moment; then, with a laugh and shrug,
turned and waded ashore.

An odd small face, peering from the green, greeted her. Then both
disappeared, and only the swirling bobbing lily remained to tell of
the picture.

A voice spoke at Tiretta’s side. The archduke had alighted.

“Fantastic, lovely--a spirit of the beautiful water. How the sun and
shade fought for her face, her bosom! Tiretta.”

“Sir.”

“I would not willingly forget that vision. See, take this ring” (he
pulled a green intaglio from his finger)--“carry it to her; say that
the Count of Falckenstein presents his duty to the nixie of the pool,
and begs her to accept of this gage in token of his thraldom. No
delay--not a moment--or you will be too late.”

Tiretta, in his jack-boots, splashed back across the ford. He found
the wicket unfastened, and entered; a short hedgy lane carried him to
the chestnut trees and the patch of sward over against the islet. He
half expected to find the apparition vanished beyond recall--a dream,
an hallucination. But there she stood withdrawn into the green, a
flushed and laughing reality. Her sodden skirts clung about her; they
were hemmed with mud as if, a lily herself, she had been uprooted from
the water; her raised hands sought to restore symmetry to her
disordered locks; there was a gleam of snowy teeth, a flush of
translucent rose--he thought he had never seen a picture so
captivating. And hovering about the vision’s footsteps was a little
grotesque boy, comical, preposterous--a dwarf in fantastic keeping.

He advanced; she saw him, and was stricken into a stone-eyed Undine.

“Madam,” he said, “I bring a gage from the Count of Falckenstein
yonder to the nixie of the water. He bids me say that he will redeem
it at her will.”




 CHAPTER II.
 AQUAVIVA

If we are to accept the testimony of Louis XV., an experienced judge
in such matters, the beauty of his granddaughter, eldest child of Don
Philip of Parma, was in need of no servile flattery to recommend it.
The little Infanta was, in truth, at seventeen, most that heart could
desire, sweet, unaffected, full of charm and playfulness. Indeed, in
the eyes of some, she erred on the side of condescension, being a
little disposed, like her father, to familiarity with her inferiors.
Yet, on right occasion, she could assume a pretty air of dignity,
consciously summoned, one might think, to the protection of a yielding
over-lovable disposition. She could not bear to hurt; and though she
was wilful, and possessed, and could not always resist the temptation
to indulge, a strong sense of humour, her atonements generally more
than expiated the faults that induced them. To men, her eyes seemed
always asking pardon for the cruelty of their own kindness.

The pretty princess was born in December. She arrived, “when all
sweets were over, to bless the year,” even like our own little
princess Elizabeth, who came with the snow one Childermas day, and
passed away with it, like other holy innocents, in her brief spring.
Isabella’s full name was Isabelle Marie Louise Antoinette--either so,
or written in Italian, or Spanish, as you please. To her kinsfolk she
was always Isabelita. They spoke French for the most part in Parma;
for although Don Philip was a son of the fifth haughty monarch of that
name of Spain, his royal spouse was by far the more forceful spirit of
the pair, a true and steadfast daughter of France, and her will and
tastes prevailed above those of her vain good-natured husband.
Wherefore it was that this twelfth year of the duke’s enjoyment of his
Italian possessions found the court largely weeded of its original
Spanish dependants, and savouring more of Paris than of Madrid in its
councils and pastimes.

Isabella commonly spoke French; and so, through long habit of
resignation, did her _gouvernante_, the Marquise de Gonzalès, a fat
old _rabâcheuse_, who, wishful long ago to escape this tiresome
servitude of hers, had only been induced to stay on in view of the
inability of the ducal exchequer to settle her account. She was a
twaddling, scandalmongering old woman, who “passait pour aimer
l’intrigue”--not the best mentor for an impressionable young girl, one
would think. But, indeed, the old lady’s wits were never the servants
of her inclinations, and I think Isabella measured her fairly enough,
her pretence and her harmlessness, and was never, though she dutifully
submitted, more or Jess, to her duennaship, in the least danger of
imbibing from her principles derogatory to her maidenhood. At the same
time the girl, not ignorant of the financial difficulties which had
almost persistently beset the duchy, was prepared to suffer sweetly
enough the almost arrogant show of authority which the Marquise’s
consciousness of grievance emboldened her to assume.

The two drove out one fair June morning to visit the gardens of the
queer old Aquaviva, a whimsical _protégé_ of the young lady. They
lay, these gardens, a mile or two from Colorno, along the right bank
of the little river Parma, and were designed for nothing else than the
production of perfumery. The _gouvernante_, hot and languid, elected
to remain in the carriage under the shadow of a friendly group of
trees; so Isabella alighted alone. She had hardly entered the garden,
through a green gate in a hedge, before she was launched upon a very
wilderness of flowers. Or at least so it might have appeared to one
who knew nothing of the inner economics of that profuse and dazzling
disorder. Here were roses, not by the bed but by the acre, bickering
flame, as the heat-haze dances from the ground, of orange and crimson
and scarlet; fields of jasmine in orderly rows, knitted in like
hop-binds with horizontal stakes, and loading the air with perfume;
plantations of yellow cassia, of jonquil, of tuberose, of geranium,
each, on inspection, seen to be differentiated from all others, the
whole forming a vast mosaic of flower groups, whose pattern symbolised
the triumph of Aquaviva over some natural conditions obstructive of
his enterprise. For Aquaviva, transferring at one time his little
capital and his extensive knowledge from the flower-farms of Grasse in
the Cannes Valley, where he had been horticulturally educated, to his
native plains of Colorno, which were quite a degree higher in
latitude, had had to circumvent and conquer many difficulties before
establishing his gardens on the productive footing which was to make
of them something more than a joy to the eye and a feast to the
nostrils.

Isabella walked on, steeped, half drugged in the scents, which rose
like incense on all sides. There were men working here and there,
bronzed Italian _lavoranti_, who uncapped to Madonna as she passed,
and felt the sweet place sweeter for her presence. She knew all its
intricacies and details--the sheds for raising seed, the pergolas, the
nurseries, the sunk tanks of water alive with wriggling gnat-larvæ,
the little gleaming channels interlacing all. There was something
about the riotous profusion of the spot, so greenly remote from the
formal alleys and studied perspectives of Colorno, which touched a
strange nerve in her as of some shadowy remembrance, the mystery of
antique forgotten things. She loved it; and its owner and presiding
genius, whom the marquise patronised and detested, was a prime
favourite of hers.

Wending her way, everywhere by great bushes of lavender and rosemary,
she came presently upon the old gardener himself, busy near the
laboratory, a central bungalow where were achieved the processes of
_macération_ and _enfleurage_--otherwise the capture and storage of
the world of fugitive perfumes which diffused themselves around.
Aquaviva carried in his sinewy arms a pile of glazed stretchers, like
small window sashes, or, a more appropriate simile in these days, like
large photographic printing frames, and, seeing Isabella, he paused
with a sardonic pucker of the lips.

“Ah!” said he, “I could have sworn it. A right morning for gadflies.”

His _torso_ was like a lean-bellied fiddle, the string which bound his
green baize apron round his waist helping the resemblance. Great bent
shoulders and thin bent shanks had he, with enormous shoes to his feet
and an enormous aquiline nose to his face. His expression was by no
means truckling or conciliatory; he knew his value with the dames and
exquisites of Parma.

Isabella laughed: “O, grandfather!” she said, “is that the way to
greet your princess? See how I sting you with honey for your
rudeness.”

“Hey,” said the old man, “hoping to make me drop my frames? But
beware. It is the treasure of a dukedom I carry within them.”

She stretched up, and pulled at a frame, trying to peep.

“What is it, avolo mio? Is it lilies, jasmine, violets?”

“It is not for the common ruck. I tell you it is of the ducal
brand--the essence of all flowers in one.”

“It is tuberose.”

“Spoken, Madonna, like an intelligent daughter. Between us we shall
guess, sooner or later, what is his Excellency’s favourite perfume.”

“Why this is it, is it not?”

“Capital, on my faith. She has guessed it already.”

“Grandfather, I do not like you. I shall be severe. Tell me at once,
is the grease on which these flowers are spread well purified in
boiling water and nitre?”

“It is well purified, Madonna.”

“Has it since been boiled in a solution of rose-water and benzoin?”

“That is so, Madonna.” He answered with an amused, approving grin.

“And was the grease originally of choice selection?”

“The most choice, Madonna. The butcher who provided the ox who
provided the suet is fourth cousin to a saint. The odour of sanctity
is over it all from the first.”

“That is very good, then. My father will like to acquire sanctity so
easily and so pleasantly.”

“True; on his handkerchief. But Madonna forgets one thing. The fat,
thus impregnated, has to be dissolved in alcohol, a very devilish
liquor, before the fragrance is released from it. Wherefore sanctity
does not count in the result.”

“I was forgetting. So, after all, you brew wicked concoctions,
grandfather. I shall ask to have you put in the escalero.”

“Not you. You would not hurt a beetle. Besides, where then would you
get your scents?”

“I would distil them from the simple flowers.”

“Pooh! That is what fools imagine. But flowers do not yield their
essence to torture, any more than truth comes out of the escalero.”

“I did not mean it really.”

Aquaviva looked at the girl with a grim smile, and wagged his head.

“You holy love!” he said. “How long are you going to keep me in
torment with this load?”

She moved, with an exclamation of remorse, to let him pass. Going
before her, he deposited his armful of frames within the bungalow,
where were already heaped some scores of others.

“Now,” said he, turning round and rubbing his arms; “repeat your
lesson, profumiere.”

She put her hands behind her back, as she stood before him.

“I boil and refine my grease,” she said, “in the flowerless time,
storing ready a great quantity of it. When the flowers come, each in
its season, I gather them and place them on these frames, every one of
which is smeared thick with the fat, which has the property of
absorbing their fragrance. I pile these frames one on the other to the
number of--O, the heaps that you see there; and leave them thus, the
light and heat penetrating, for----”

“Go on.”

“Ever so long a time.”

“From twenty-four to thirty-six hours will do.”

“That is what I meant. When the flowers have yielded all they can, I
remove them and put fresh ones, and so on until the fat is so fully
charged with their fragrance that it can hold no more. I then scrape
off the grease, heat it until liquid, then strain it and pour it into
bottles, ready for treatment by the perfumers, with their--with their
alcohol.”

“Capital. Madonna has my certificate. And now about macération?”

“That is steeping the flowers in cold olive oil. Some, like cassia,
answer better to such treatment.”

“Excellent! And so do not talk to me any more about your distillation,
which is an inferior process applied only to the leaves, seeds and
other parts of perfume-bearing plants, and in its results resembles no
more the sweet breath of the blossoms than your ladyship’s vulgar
camériste, Fanchette Becquet, resembles your ladyship.”

“Grandfather! What do you know about Fanchette?”

“Only what Bissy has told me, Madonna.”

“And what does Bissy know?”

“Ask him. He has all the wisdom of an owl. You did not come here
unattended?”

“Madame de Gonzalès drove with me. She is sleeping in the carriage.”

“I warrant it, the old sluggard. If they shot women, she would be
riddled like a pepper-box for a false sentry.”

“You must not speak so of my gouvernante.”

“Well, I will not. If it comes to that, I could forgive all Spaniards
for your sake.”

Isabella turned, her slim tallish young figure suddenly erect.

“I will go and look for Bissy,” she said stiffly.

“You will find him in the orange-grove,” called Aquaviva, and
returned, grinning, to his work.

Isabella had one of those small revulsions of feeling which sometimes
came to her when, it seemed, her natural kindness had been presumed
upon. But the mood passed quickly, as she walked beside the beds of
flowers. She did not like to think of these pure things yielding their
essence to fat; yet, after all, it was an emollient process, not
unlike the susceptibility of her sex to soft flattery. She wondered if
to lie on a bed of suet would have a persuasive effect upon her own
soul, coaxing it to part with its fondest secrets; she was quite sure
that distillation by boiling would have the opposite effect. Gardeners
certainly were very wise people; they had learned the value of cold
oil over hot in extracting the truth from shy natures. How cruel the
world was! Would it ever learn in her time the illogic of torture?

Archduke Joseph, in his carriage not so far away, was already
unconsciously formulating in his mind a like proposition. But he lived
to answer it in an enlightened fashion.

The orange grove was Aquaviva’s pride. He had nursed it through long
years into a flourishing condition; for in those latitudes, where snow
often fell thickly in the winter, it was no easy task to protect and
cherish the sensitive trees. The grove was situated in a little green
glade near the river. So enclosed was it within trees and juniper
hedges, so hushed and fragrant were its depths, one might have thought
oneself in an antique bower sacred to love--a place where silence
itself stole into blossom, and needed no more than the shock of a
butterfly’s entrance to shatter it into a myriad scented stars. So
still was it that the bubbling coo of a dove, the plop of a fish in
the stream hard by, sounded, when they sounded, almost discordant. For
true it is that noise, like size, is relative. The man who lives
amongst engines can find balm of nights in “barking dogs and crowing
cocks”; a student in a voiceless hermitage is driven to madness by a
bluebottle.

The trees were all in flower; and, as if that were not fragrance
enough, the grassy floor of the grove was sown everywhere with clumps
of violets, many late blossoms on which still lingered out their
beauty. They too needed protection, but in another way--protection
from the sapping sun which the others loved and monopolised. So that
here were light and shadow at their sweetest.

As Isabella entered the grove, she came plump upon the minor
apparition she sought--Bissy, to wit, in shirt and breeches and an
enormous straw hat. He looked like a gnome, who had taken refuge from
a crow under a great mushroom, and come away with it on his head. Its
weight seemed to bow his little legs, withal his important spirit
walked unconscious of the burden. Or, rather, stooped at the moment,
for Bissy, hands on knees, was peering intently into a violet patch, a
basket of blossoms standing on the grass by his side.

Bissy, incidentally, was Aquaviva’s grandson and only relative. He was
presumably a boy, but of unknown age. His squeezed elfin face showed
the gravity of a man of forty. He took himself immensely seriously,
regarding the flower-farm as his heritage, invited or merited no
rebuke, worked solemnly within his limits, and took no fantastic
risks. And yet the boy was in him somewhere, as naughty Isabella loved
to prove by probing. It was just possible, so to speak, to scratch the
horticulturist and find the mudlark.

“Bissy,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes: “what do you know of
Fanchette Becquet?”

The imp did not even start. He just looked inquiringly round with his
large owlish eyes, then straightened himself to his four foot six of
stature.

“It is blood that amuses Mamselle Fanchette,” he answered promptly.
“That is what I know about her, Excellency.”

“Blood, you nasty boy!” cried the young lady, with a little nose of
disgust.

“Look you, Madonna,” said Bissy; “I know what I say. She comes to see
the gardens once or twice, and to praise the scents--to ask them too:
a little rose-water for her kerchief, some geraniums to put in her
bosom, a spray of rosemary for her garters. She is a poor maid; her
salary is paid irregularly--which I do not believe; she will justify
the gift through her recommendations. But that is all nothing to her
passion for the orange-grove. I tell her what I will tell you about
these trees. They are grafted on a stock of lemon; they are planted in
a good clayey soil, enriched with both animal manure and rotted
leaf-mould; their roots are ventilated with plenty of broken charcoal.
But since they are gross feeders, there is something else. It is blood
from the butchers that they are greedy at times to drink; and it is
that which pleases Mamselle Fanchette. Her eyes glitter like a
tiger’s. ‘I like to hear that,’ she says. ‘They are brave trees, and
earn their right to be the wedding tokens of women who love brave
men’--and she sniffs at the blossoms as if she found a new savour in
them. O, she loves blood!”

“You take a symbol for a sentiment,” cried Isabella--“you do, you
horrid boy. I know Fanchette better than you, and she would not hurt
a mouse. Why do you try to spoil my pretty grove for me. I think I
will never come here again.”

“I should be sorry for that,” said Bissy gravely.

“Then do not say such things any more. What were you peering at when I
came in?”

Bissy wiped his right hand on his breeches; then nipping the lady’s
tender little palm in it, drew Isabella to the violet clump.

“Bend down and look in,” he said.

She obeyed; and there was a monstrous toad returning her gaze. Its
golden eyes stared unwinking at her; its slow throat pulsated.

“Do you know, Bissy,” whispered the girl, after a moment’s pause,
“that he has a wonderful jewel in his head.”

“Bagattella!” said Bissy. “Who told you so?”

“That is not respectful, Bissy. I know because I know--that should be
enough for you. Come away, and I will tell you the reason.”

She had a lively imagination, and she “made up” on the spot:--

“When the first mother ate the forbidden fruit, she found a stone in
it, which her little white teeth could not crack. So she took the
stone from her pretty mouth and threw it away. But it was really the
stone, and not the flesh, which contained the secret of the tree of
knowledge, so that she gained nothing by her disobedience, as it has
always been easy to see. But a toad, being the lowliest thing on
earth, crept, and found the stone and tried to swallow it, which it
has never been able to do to this day, though you may see it all
puffed and swollen with the effort. For the stone stuck in its head,
where it still remains for anybody to find.”

Bissy put out his underlip with polite incredulity.

“If anybody knows, anybody can have it.”

“Ah!” said Isabella; “you are a very clever Bissy; but there is
something more. One must not take life in recovering the stone, since
it contains the principle of all life; and therefore, if you kill the
toad, as you must do to gain the stone, you will find nothing for your
pains.”

“Which toad?” said Bissy.

“Why, this one.”

“But it is not the only toad in the world.”

“It is the only toad that matters to my story,” said Isabella. “What a
little plague you are with your questions. Come, I want to see my
golden lily. Is it full out yet?”

“Yes, Madonna,” said Bissy.

“I will race you there--quick--is anybody looking?”

The imp hesitated, glowed a little, then put himself in position.

“One, two, three--off!”

They ran across the grove, out of it by a green opening, and so on to
the slope of sward bending to the backwater visible from the ford.
Isabella, flushed and dishevelled, was first by a yard or two.

“O!” she cried; “the love! Bissy, I must have it; Bissy, I must.”

Gravity shook its head judicial.

“There’s no way but to wade; and through the mud.”

“Wade, then.”

“I am too little; and I have no love for the water, Madonna.”

“Then I shall go myself; and you shall look on.”

“I am your servant, Madonna; it is my duty to obey.”

“O, what an excellent servant! He will not stir from his post, though
I drown.”

Laughing and wilful she stepped into the water, staggered a little,
found her balance and went cautiously forward. The mud sucked at her
dainty shoes, captured one, and still she was not deterred. She had
almost reached the prize, when the sound of rolling wheels broke upon
her ears. She paused aghast. We have heard what followed.




 CHAPTER III.
 THE COMPACT

Even as he spoke, Tiretta regretted, and blushed over, the nature of
his mission. It was not its insolence--that was nothing in those days;
it was its obvious misapplication. For here was no rustic Hebe, no
frolic _campagnarde_, as he had at first inclined to suppose, but a
damsel of position, as seemed somehow evident from her manner. That,
eloquent to him of the inexplicable shibboleth of caste, told him,
being a gentleman and a Gileadite, that he had presumed. He awaited in
considerable trepidation her answer.

It followed, and without hesitation, witheringly enough.

“My will, monsieur, now and always, is to be spared the impertinences
of strangers.”

If she could be more than gracious to her inferiors, Don Philip’s
daughter could repel crushingly the undesired approaches of her
equals. Tiretta, with a thorn in his heart, could not but observe, and
admire, with what grace the bedraggled little beauty commanded the
situation; how, sopped and ruffled as she was, she could triumph in
her conscious indignation over unflattering circumstance. Her hair was
tumbled, her pretty hat was awry; her two little feet peeped from
their muddy fringe, and one had no shoe on it; yet, booted and martial
as he was, she could make him feel his inferiority in a way that was
at once a charm and a humiliation.

“Impertinence, madam,” he said, “is the last thing I made myself
deputy for. If----”

She interrupted him: “You know the terms of your own service,
monsieur, better than I. I would accept the lesser dishonour, if I
were you, and go without more words.”

He flushed up to the roots of his hair.

“Do you see this, madam?” he said. He held out the green intaglio. “I
fling it from me as I do your unpardonable innuendo”--and he spun the
accursed thing from him into the middle of the pool.

Isabella, paralysed an instant, the next turned her back on him.

“Come, Bissy,” she said, “I need a gentleman escort, and you shall be
mine to the carriage.”

But Bissy hung back. His eyes were fixed on the pool, his thoughts on
the covetable plunder so wantonly--or happily--committed to it. Was it
conceivable a man might dare for profit what he had refused to
gallantry? The ring had shone and looked heavy; the water in the creek
was daily sinking. And, even while he pondered, Madam de Gonzalès,
flushed and peevish, hove into view, followed by Aquaviva in a state
of dancing irritation.

The _gouvernante_ paused, in heavy wonder over the tableau presented.

“Heyday!” she said: “What is the meaning of all this? Cannot I close
my eyes a moment but you must be forgetting yourself and your
position, little Infanta of Spain? An endless, insufferable task for
one, is it not?” Her thick-lidded eyes travelled from Isabella to the
stranger, and back again. “Who is this, and what have you been doing?
My God, a fine state you are in! All dumb and confounded, too. Fie,
fie, girl--don’t tell me it is an assignation!” She wheeled round on
Aquaviva, red with fury. “It is a trick, is it? You have been throwing
dust in my eyes, you infamous old scoundrel? You have been lending
yourself to this tryst on the pretence of instructing her Excellency
in horticulture.”

“Dust!” roared the old man. “It is the dust you yourself raise that
blinds you. What do you all mean interfering with my work and
disturbing the peace of my garden. I want nothing more than to be rid
of the lot of you.”

“Isabella!” cried the _gouvernante_.

“I answer for myself, madam,” said the girl, her face quite pale and
set; “and never, you may be sure, but with silence to insult. I am
sorry you are displeased with my state, but----”

“Your father, the duke, shall hear of it,” cried the old lady.

“I will tell him myself,” said Isabella, “and of your interpretation
of it.”

“It is a natural one, is it not?” said madam, but with a falling face.

“To the Marquise de Gonzalès,” said Isabella. “Shall we return to the
carriage, madam?”

Tiretta, with a fine red on his cheek, came forward.

“I, also,” he said, “desire to answer for myself. The Count of
Falckenstein----”

“Eh!” cried the marquise, with a little whisk and start.

“I said the Count of Falckenstein, madam, happening to cross yonder
ford a few minutes ago on his road to Milan, encountered the vision of
a nymph exploring these waters knee-deep in quest of lilies, and sent
me with a compliment to greet the subject of so charming a picture.
That, upon my honour, constitutes my share in this ‘assignation.’”

The old dame’s face, while Tiretta spoke, was a study. Perplexity
struggled there with amazement and relief. She laughed, as he
finished, on a little high note of understanding and indulgence.

“And it was very natural of his Excellency,” she said. “I, for one,
decline to blame him for it. When rank forgets itself in such naughty
vagaries as miss’s here, it must look to be accepted by strangers at
its own valuation. Luckily, as you will please to inform the count,
the like of this is with her Excellency a rare ebullition. She can do
justice to her training, as you have heard; and I, though made the
victim of the principles I have inculcated, can rejoice, at least, in
such vindication of my teaching.”

She dropped, or rather heaved, a profound curtsey; and Tiretta bowed
as profoundly--an obeisance in which he sought to include, furious as
he was at heart, the object of this jobation. But Isabella, standing
pale and haughty, was very far from responding.

“An apology, madam!” she said--“from us! He will please to inform the
count! I think I have not heard you aright.”

“Pooh, child!” said the marquise good-humouredly. “You have heard; and
I have heard. But it is possible we may draw different conclusions.
Bon voyage, monsieur. We had some news of his Excellency’s passing.”

Tiretta rejoined his travelling companion, who during all this time
had been chafing in his inability to detect what was passing within
the enshrouding coverture of foliage. The archduke greeted him with
some impatience.

“Well,” he said. “Did beauty accept the gage?”

“The gage,” said Tiretta, “lies sunk and damned to all eternity within
the pool.”

“She threw it there?”

“_I_ threw it there.”

“_You_, sir?”

“_I_, your Highness; and may you be damned with it before I consent
ever again to risk being mistaken for your pander.”

The prince, shrinking amazed a moment as if he had been struck,
stalked to the carriage, entered it, and sat down.

“Shall I walk?” said Tiretta, grimly, at the door.

The other hesitated; then silently, peremptorily, touched the seat
beside him. Tiretta, without a word, occupied it, and the carriage
rolled on its way.

Presently, urged beyond endurance, Joseph spoke.

“This is very amusing. You would appear to have met with some rebuff.
Surely, in so harmless a gallantry, you would not blame me for
consequences quite unforeseen. Is it injured vanity, or another’s
innuendo, that saddles you with that hurtful title.”

“Another’s innuendo,” said the soldier shortly.

“The lady’s?”

“The lady’s.”

“She said?”

“She said, what the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Don Philip, was
privileged to say to a poor devil approaching her with that insult in
his hand.”

“It was the Infanta?”

“It was the Infanta.”

 * * * * * * *

“Tiretta, my dear friend, tell me exactly what were her words?”

“She desired, sir, to be spared the impertinences of strangers; and
when I answered with the respectful gallantry of my mission, she
retorted as only a woman can retort with impunity.”

“A woman! Yet the vision of that child! I am sorry for you,
Tiretta--and I am sorry for myself.”

“You have need to be.”

“Why? Did she know me for whom I was?”

“I can answer for the marquise; I cannot answer for her. Likely not;
and, if likely, happily not; else I think you would find her more
woman than child if you came to woo. Be content for that, if it
pleases you. I do not fancy, from what I noticed, that the marquise
will enlighten her. You can be sorry, provisionally, nevertheless.”

The young archduke gloomed, and was silent for a while. It was not
that he resented the other’s freedom. Tiretta was constituted his
privileged favourite for the time being, and might speak his mind
liberally on most matters. It was rather, perhaps, that he cogitated
the invidious position of princes, who, having austere far-seeing
mothers to arrange matches for them, must accommodate themselves at
bidding to double leading-strings, without being given a choice as to
the partner with whom they were destined to run in couple. It made no
difference that inclination in himself might jump with another’s
policy. He would have wished to be free to woo in the sense that
Tiretta, being of the small and independent, meant it. He did not fear
the issue; he only coveted the free-will which would have lent a
glamour to the pursuit. What if, after all, he were to find himself
bound to one predisposed against him? He wished that she knew him, and
knew him better; so, for the time at least, had that rebellious vision
wrought upon his emotions. Presently, with a sigh, he looked up.

“She struck me as very beautiful, Tiretta,” he said.

“Well, I am prejudiced,” answered the soldier drily. “I cannot admire
unkindness.”

“That is to be the true child you are,” said Joseph. “Affection is the
only beauty to a child’s perceptions. Besides, you are not very
susceptible, I think, to feminine attractions. I have observed that in
you.”

“O! have you?”

“Come, Tiretta man, cheer up. After all, the young lady’s vindication
of her position was the commendable thing. One might have regarded her
escapade otherwise in a less admiring light.”

“So the keeper, no doubt, counsels resignation to the poor wretch he
has caught and mauled in a mantrap.”

Joseph laughed. He thought the comparison, in their relative
positions, ridiculous. Of course he did. What importance had this dear
fellow’s feelings in the context? The point was that he himself might
have been misrepresented to the lady. Following that train of thought,
he fell into a profound meditation, from which he did not rouse
himself for several minutes. Then he stirred, like a man who had come
to a conclusion which was to be immutable and final.

“I wish,” said he, “satisfaction on a point or two--as to whether, for
instance, that escapade argued a characteristic lack of dignity on the
lady’s part, or was due merely to a rare ebullition of high spirits,
instigated possibly by opposition.”

“Yes,” said Tiretta.

“I wish, if properly assured on that question, to ascertain what is
the lady’s real opinion of me, and if she was led in any way to
associate my near presence with the episode.”

“Yes,” said Tiretta.

“I am not a bad fellow,” said Joseph. “Am I, Tiretta?”

“You are a very good fellow,” answered the soldier grumpily.

“And I am not a bad friend. You, too, are a good friend--one, I am
sure, who would be glad to explain his comrade in the best light to
one whose good opinion his comrade coveted.”

Tiretta did not answer for a moment. His eyebrows were a little up,
his lips a little compressed. Presently he opened them.

“Let us speak without equivocation,” he said. “You wish me to go and
act the part of Paolo to your Francesca.”

Joseph smiled.

“To speak what your heart believes of me.”

“I am to talk of the fairy prince, of his virtues, of his graces, of
his capacity for romantic love and more lasting affection.”

“Say the best you can of me.”

“Would you not fear Paolo?”

“No, no, my friend--his duty, his loyalty, his insensibility; and much
more than that.”

“I flatter myself, you mean. Well, at least she would not flatter me.”

“It would be your chance to prove yourself to her; to rectify false
impressions. In these matters troubadours are privileged.”

“Let me understand you fully. You think she _may_ have formed a
prejudice against you; you want that impression corrected. Are you to
marry her, then?”

“It seems so.”

“And how should I be accredited?”

“Leave that to me. I will see that you are given the opportunity to
approach her. The rest your heart will tell you.”

“We are to communicate?”

“And she and I, maybe, when you have paved the way. For friendship’s
sake, Tiretta.”

“For none other, you may be sure. I do not like my task.”

“Put it into a song--into many songs. That will lighten it for you. I
wish, for the occasion, I could sing myself. But, in spite of policy,
I will woo my own way in this.”

He dismissed the subject in a little. Its temporary glamour
evaporated. After all he had much, and of paramount importance, to
think upon apart from it.




 CHAPTER IV.
 LOVE’S AMBASSADOR

The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of
distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the
presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing
their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments.
To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a
dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket,
makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the
Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the
magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always
gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the
leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of
powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and
affectation, seems an outrage on one’s conception of the accepted
fitness of things. If you would study that incongruity, as at least I
feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of
Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel
Casanova--memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in
its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into
one’s clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier
savours.

The fact is, I suppose, that codes of manners and of conduct, evolved
under particular conditions of society, are not always applicable to
alien conditions. During the era of the aristocracy in England, powder
and punctilio were some visible tokens of an amelioration in the old
order of things, which had considered overbearance and pugnacity
essential to the man of spirit; they spoke a real improvement in the
attitude of class towards class; and, if that attitude was at first
superficial, its practice gradually engendered the consideration which
it had begun only by affecting. In Italy, it is to be feared, society
adopted the code but eschewed its moral. All the observances, all the
extravagances of an accepted fashion were seized upon by it with
greed; only the underlying truth was never recognised or developed.
The essential inhumanity remained the same; the arrogance of rank was
unsoftened; torture survived without a thought of its outrage, not to
man but to reason. Fashion, in its baser aspects, produced, I suppose,
more preposterous fops in eighteenth-century Italy than in any other
country of Europe. And all because that hot, vivid Latin race had
accepted the imposition of a code which was quite alien to its blood
and its instincts. It was not yet ripe for the change implied. It was
idle dressing-up for a part it did not understand. It could not, in
bagwig and velvet shorts, think Garrick and play Macbeth.

It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in
trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards--fierce, haughty
tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must
picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at
the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather
solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace
ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right
balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European
concert. You would observe, were he to rise, that he has a defect,
still noticeable though mitigated by the craft of his tailor. One of
his shoulders is distinctly higher than the other, which gives him, in
his efforts to correct the discrepancy, a rather stiff unelastic
appearance. In his younger days, he was said, by flattering
chroniclers, to possess, nevertheless, a charming figure. He had also
an equable temper, which, for an Infante of Spain and son of that
moody monarch Philip V. and his imperious spouse Elizabeth Farnese was
something to his credit. It is more to his credit now, perhaps, that,
through much and prolonged test of its qualities, his temper preserves
its even character. He takes life, in fact, very easily, and has no
objection in the world to have his wife described, and treated, as the
better horse. He is quite willing to take the picturesque lead in the
tandem while she pulls the cart of state. After all, he has played his
effective part in the achievement of their present position, and has
laurels, if rather withered ones, to rest upon. He was inclined as a
youth, it was said, to the study of military science; and he has
actually been a soldier, and has fought his way, and stubbornly fought
it, to the enjoyment of these possessions of his, which were procured
him originally through the persistent restless intriguing of his
mother. Now, in the sense of prolonged security, he has grown
slothful, and satisfied with minor triumphs, the greatest of which
latterly has turned upon the successful nature of the negotiations for
his daughter’s marriage with the Austrian Crown Prince. Isabelita is,
it would really appear, to be an empress some day--not so bad a match
for the daughter of only a younger son of Spain. Papa is very pleased,
and inclined to regard the occasion as in the nature of a personal
reward for years of, comparative, privation and ducal cheese-paring.
He has not, in fact, to this day succeeded in bringing the profit and
loss accounts of the duchy into line.

Now, as he sits writing, he strikes us as being a thought
over-bedizened for the task and the hour, which is early. Everything
upon him, you will remark, is conceived according to a taste slightly
in excess of that which is the northman’s limit. His smooth-fronted
toupet stands up eight inches from his forehead, and is surmounted by
a roll of sausage curls, which descend to two veritable _pains à
café_ behind his ears; his cravat is a very muffler of Valenciennes,
and is fastened by a brooch as big as a shoe-buckle; though presumably
in _négligé_, he wears over a lace-ruffled cambric shirt, puffed
from elbow to wrist, and garnished with mushroom-coloured ribbons, a
pink silk vest covered with silver net; and shoes and breeches to
match, dividing a space of white silk stockings, complete the
elaborate picture. The only concession to business apparent about him
is his ample loose-sleeved camisole; and even that is made of grey
velvet lined with ermine. Altogether he suggests a Hogarth beau--a
thing which, somewhat travestying fact in the artist’s own country,
would pass for a faithful transcript here.

The room in which we discover his Excellency is small but
appropriately furnished. There is a good deal of glass and glitter in
it, a characteristic perfume, some bright sketches by Boucher and a
Lancret _fête galante_; and as noticeable a feature as any is a great
dish of sweetmeats, having a little table of rosewood with brass
mouldings to itself. The duke is writing to his wife at Versailles. He
sucks a comfit as he evolves without difficulty his periods. Simple
souls, often better than intellectual, write good letters: I have
known an ingenuous athlete express himself with a neatness and clarity
I could envy without reaching. Here are some sentences which I
extract, as pertinent to our story, from the ducal epistle:--

“All goes well, according to our latest advices; and the official
demand for our daughter’s hand will certainly be presented to his
Majesty your father within a month from this date. So far, so
excellent; and the days when, in your own phrase, we lived like
‘ragamuffins,’ are buried even to their shadows. Let us have a mass
said for their souls, poor things, for they possessed some virtues.
... We have here, lately arrived, the most popular chanteur since
Farinelli. He comes, with a letter of recommendation to the Marquise
de Ravilla from the archduke himself, and is to charm our daughter
into love with a shadow whose approach she has dreaded a little. That
suggestion is for your exclusive ear, ma mie. It emanates from one who
is very cunning and very observant--the Gonzalès, no less; and is
founded upon the presumed consciousness of somebody that he had
belittled himself, his rank, and his moral stature, in somebody else’s
eyes. You will recall that little incident of the carriage and the
ford, as I passed it on to you in madam’s own words. Certainly,
according to her, it had its effect upon an over-sensitive nature,
predisposed, perhaps, to prejudice. Somebody had already been pictured
to this frank nature, it seems, in the light of a philosopher and
prig. She may not associate the two--the stranger of the ford, that is
to say, and the philosopher--but she may come to, or may have her
suspicions; and anyhow he may think that she does, and be anxious to
eliminate at once a bad impression. So this Tiretta is despatched to
play the part of Love’s advocate with offended beauty. I do not vouch
for the truth of this, or endorse its policy; I repeat only for your
private ear what the marquise of her shrewdness conjectures. She, for
her part, is so sure of the truth of her surmise that she wants the
man sent to Colorno, that there, amid romantic environments suggestive
to the heart of contemplation, the points of his fond advocacy may be
sympathetically pondered. She says that it would be flying in the face
of love’s providence to frustrate somebody’s obvious purpose and
design; that that impression referred to--whether it concerns itself
with prig or roué, or, worse still, with both--is hardly one of happy
augury for the future, and calls for exceptional treatment; that, in
fine, if somebody has contrived this thing, somebody knows what he is
about and has made himself responsible for his instrument.

“In the meantime, our newly-arrived improvisatore exhibits his
qualities to triumphant effect. He is a soldier and a fine man; but
this gift comes to him apart from his training, God knows whence. He
will sing and rhyme you an hour on end; and, observe, he is very
flattering, though veiled, in allusions to a supreme lord and comrade
who possesses his heart.”

To these passages the sick duchess answered in due course, and with a
characteristic warning, the whole gist of which may be conveyed in a
single sentence:

“As to this minstrel, beware that the medicine, my Pippo, does not
prove a drug, given for a definite purpose, but afterwards indulged in
for its own sake”--a really preposterous suggestion, which it was
incumbent on a _cadet_ of Spain to wave aside with the briefest
comment:

“You make me smile, dearest wife; you positively amuse me. The man is
to be regarded, like a courier, as a mere vehicle for the conveyance
of an august document of the heart. He would hardly commit the
absurdity, I think, of associating his own personal insignificance
with the message he was employed to deliver, any more than the fiddle,
could it speak, would claim to be other than a vulgar structure of
wood and string, obedient only to the hand of its master, and denuded
of all importance the moment that hand was withdrawn. Believe me, ma
chérie, the percipience of the unelect is not so negligible a
quantity as you would seem to imagine. This instrument--if indeed an
instrument it is--will play its part with a full sense of the
momentary distinction that part confers upon it, yet without a thought
but of sinking thereafter into the oblivion which is its necessary
destiny. If it were otherwise, there remain means to persuade it. Yet
it cannot be otherwise. I think I may answer for _our_ daughter that
she will entertain no delusions as to the relative values of the hand
and of the instrument upon which it plays. Which, certainly, is quite
enough said upon that small subject.”

Yet it was a very small subject who once crept through the keyhole of
the King’s treasury and robbed his Magnificence’s coffers.




 CHAPTER V.
 IL TROVATORE

Isabella mistrusted few people and disliked nobody for long. She was
one of those happily constituted girls who are troubled with no
problems, have no quarrel with destiny, and never resent their not
having been born boys. She had endearing looks and a fine spirit, but
without self-consciousness in the one, or arrogance in the other. She
was never in arms for the prerogatives of her sex, because it never
occurred to her that they were being either questioned or abused. If
she coquetted at all, it was more with women than with men; yet she
was equally natural with both. As sweet a princess as Perdita--as
sweet a milkmaid she would have been, had fortune deposed her.
Impressionable, poor child--it was a pity only that nature, not
sparing her the softest of hearts, should have done so little to
protect its own rich achievement from harm. But nature, bent only on
relentless propagation, designs these triumphant things as lures.

Isabella, during all her young life, had endeared herself with
whomsoever she had visited. Grandpapa Louis, the cynic and impure,
doted upon his _charmante_; haughty grandmamma in Spain had, on her
death, left her the solitary bequest devoted by that opulent lady to
her lord’s relations. Isabella did not want the money, but she wept
over that proof of affection; while papa Philip tried not to weep,
tears of chagrin, over being left out in the cold. However, in that
dismal poverty of the exchequer, something to somebody was better than
nothing to nobody; and I have no doubt that the legacy was taken into
account in all subsequent dispositions of the young Infanta’s
“household.”

Wealth, after all, is like the other things, size and sound, relative.
We are not to suppose, you and I, that, because a certain thousand a
year might appear to us opulence, a duke might not consider himself a
pauper on fifty times that income. I do not know what the revenues of
Parma represented to Don Philip in hard cash; I do know that he was
constantly and piteously complaining to his royal relatives of his
embarrassments. One man’s affluence is another man’s necessity; else
you and I again might have criticised the expenditure of the Parmese
Court, have commented on the waste, the idle profusion of a State,
which, for mere vanity’s sake, must boast a superfluity of service
which it was inadequate to support; have suggested a drastic economy
here, a wholesale retrenchment there. We should have been assured, no
doubt, that all that _could_ be done _had_ been done, and that only
the indispensable remained--a possibly unanswerable statement from the
opposite to our own point of view. From that standpoint the emptiness
of the great palace at Colorno, during the absence of the Court, was
so qualified an emptiness that its superfluous inmates could still
have peopled a substantial villa or two, and left something over for
emergencies, Besides the personal staff, which included attendants,
preceptors, valets and grooms sufficient--with a lady of the wardrobe,
two _femmes de chambre_, and some minor officials attached to Isabella
alone--the gardens, the stables, the kitchens, the guard-house all
gave indolent occupation to a small garrison of retainers, who, mostly
idle and mostly gossips, numbered amongst themselves none, perhaps,
quite so pert and so voluble as Fanchette Becquet, the Infanta’s first
_femme de confiance_.

Fanchette, who hailed from Paris, had attained her present post more
through private and particular interest than through particular merit.
There were reasons for this, it was understood, which it was not
necessary to divulge, but of which the girl herself was fully
sensible, and of which she would have been the last not to take ample
advantage. There was no high-born lady of the Court who presumed, or
was allowed to presume, so much on her position as Fanchette. Her very
audacity and insolence of retort possessed for certain masculine minds
a charm which was a perpetual source of indulgence and profit to her.
The duke himself had been known to suffer her impertinences with an
enjoying relish which redounded in no ways to her disadvantage. In
style and temper she was a veritable Parisian _mondaine_, dapper and
pretty, though her lips were a little thin and her nose a little
sharp. She had no heart at all, but her emotions, easily responsive to
small provocation, blinded herself and others to that defect.

Fanchette one evening was “finishing” her young lady in preparation
for a descent to the audience chamber--to which was coming M. du
Tillot, Marquis de Felino and Secretary of State--and was taking full
advantage of the licence allowed her tongue by a spoiling mistress.

“It is fortunate, is it not, your Highness,” she said, with a little
simper, “that somebody whom we know does not approve of rouge for
ladies?”

She was daintily fitting, as she spoke, a spray of natural pink
rose-buds into the silken fillet which bound the girl’s unpowdered
chestnut-brown hair. Isabella’s laced bodice was of the simplest, meet
sheath for the flower-like neck and bosom which emerged from it. A
_sacque_, like a drooped petal, fell from between her shoulder-blades;
her slender hips were innocent of the grotesque abomination of hoops.
So she was permitted, in that court of burlesque and man-millinery, to
indulge her own humorous _naïveté_. It gave her an odd distinction,
not unagreeable to papa’s pride. He would sternly repress any
inclination detected in others to ape, servilely, that natural
innocence; Isabelita should be the only sweet Arcadian in Parma. If
she was to be Hebe in a raree show, she alone should display the
delicious novelty of acting humanly, while the puppets, reversing
their part, looked on and applauded. And yet, to Isabella herself,
hers was no part at all, but only the most natural of instincts.

“Fanchette,” she said; “your voice sounds very demure; or else I am
very stupid. Was it weighted, or was it not, with some meaning I did
not understand?”

“Only that mademoiselle’s cheek, so sensitive to sudden changes of
feeling, is its own best interpreter.”

“Interpreter of what, and to whom, Fanchette?”

“Ah! I have blundered,” said the maid; “and now I am full of
confusion. It would be too daring in me to suggest.”

“Well, I will not ask you to,” said Isabella. “Does my cheek satisfy
you now? But it does not blush for what you think; only to be made the
target to gossips and impertinents.”

“O, mademoiselle! O, your Highness! Let me go and weep my heart out in
solitude. I have offended you, and without the least little thought of
offence. O, let me go, mademoiselle!”

“Don’t be silly, Fanchette. I am not blaming you for the idle chatter
you repeat. People may think what they like about rouge, without its
affecting my fortunes, that is all. Sensitive! There is nobody in the
world so absurdly sensitive as yourself, I believe. Come----”

She rose to her feet, with a coaxing smile. The maid held in her hand
a little ornament of paste and silver with which she had been about to
fasten the flowers into place; Isabella took the trinket from her,
and, putting an arm round the over-slim waist, tried the effect of the
thing against Fanchette’s own powdered locks.

“It is like sparkles of ice through mist,” she said. “It suits you
ever so much better than it does me. Will you accept it for your own,
Fanchette, and bring me something else?”

Fanchette sobbed, wiping an eye which yet had a covetous side-glance
for the toy.

“I’m sure I meant no presumption,” she gurgled; “or to abuse the
confidence your Highness reposes in me. I only thought your Highness
would approve sincerity better than an affectation of ignorance, which
your Highness must know could not be real.”

Isabella sighed.

“There, girl,” she said--“there. To be sure I like sincerity.”

“Where what is to be is an open secret,” continued Fanchette--“and
somebody’s tastes so coincide with your Highness’s; I--I thought your
Highness would be gratified to know.”

Isabella laughed, and then sighed again, as she released her hold,
with a little conciliatory pat, and reseated herself--a movement which
gave Fanchette an opportunity furtively to examine her prize.

“I daresay I am,” said the Infanta. “It is gratifying, at least----”
she stopped.

“It is gratifying, at least,” said the maid, who had resumed her
duties, “to learn, as your Highness was about to remark, that
philosophy can so concern itself with natural beauties. But indeed
there are other proofs that a fine complexion is not the only thing
honoured in Vienna.”

“I suppose I ought not to ask you what you mean, Fanchette.”

“Mademoiselle has not heard of the Chevalier Tiretta?”

“No.”

“Such a voice, your Highness, and such a man! He is a gift from the
archduke to his Excellency, and has been ravishing the Courts of Parma
with his music these days past. They say----”

“Well?”

“I hardly like to repeat.”

“Do not, then.”

“That somebody in love has made this nightingale his avant-coureur to
overture his passion.”

“Do they say, girl? I think, indeed, your idle fancy is the only
gossip.”

Fanchette’s head was seen in the mirror to nod itself, and her strait
lips to smile.

“It is not fancy, at least,” she said, “but simple reason, your
Highness, to deduce from this singer that philosophy may have its
sentimental side. Else it would not choose for its close intimacy--as
is whispered to be the case--so picturesque a comrade, or, having
chosen, select him for a mission so romantic.”

Isabella rose. There was a little stately chill in her young aspect.

“That is quite enough,” she said. “I do not wish to listen to any more
of this nonsense, or to seem to encourage you to repeat it. Give me my
fan and mouchoir, please. It is time for me to descend.”

At the door a couple of powdered _valets-de-chambre_ greeted the young
lady, low-bowing, and, candle in hand, preceded her down the broad
stairway to the _salle-d’audience_. It was a fine chamber, bemirrored,
bemarbled, with a pillared balcony through which the soft night air
flowed in. Penury or plenty, there was nothing here, no seat, no
ornament, no picture, between the painted ceiling and the rich, deep
carpet, but declared itself in terms of gilt and splendour a thing of
luxury. The room was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of wax candles
set in girandoles, and as Isabella, announced by a gentleman usher,
entered it, each separate flame bowed to her as to the goddess for
whom they had all been waiting.

There were only three people present--the _gouvernante_, in an
elaborate toilette and stupendous hoop; M. du Tillot, short,
complacent, in a blaze of silk and embroidery; and a second gentleman,
a stranger, somewhat soberly dressed, who stood in the background,
bowing low, so that his face showed foreshortened. The Secretary of
State came forward, beaming, ingratiatory, tripping on his fat little
pumps. He bowed elaborately over the hand which Isabella gave him, and
kissed it as if he were negotiating an oyster.

“I greet your Highness,” he said, “on behalf of the Court, myself,
and, above all, his Excellency, your father, who, I rejoice to inform
you, is very well.”

“And my maman, monseigneur?” asked Isabella, her eyes full and
shining.

“She writes in the best of spirits,” said du Tillot: “like one who
finds in the promised fruition of her hopes a glad new lease of life.”
He was a kind old man. The formality achieved, he pressed the little
palm, and, looking at the lowered lids, “we will do our best, will we
not, my child,” he said, “to justify maman in her convalescence?”

“I want maman to be well above all things in the world,” said Isabella
simply; and then the _gouvernante_ struck in in her high throaty
voice:

“Eh bien! It is very well to wish for others what our self-will is
inclined to deny them.”

It seemed unnecessary, but madam had that way of grudging its perfect
bloom to harmony, to which certain minds, having a mistaken sense of
humour, are wont, seemingly irresistibly, to be moved. She could not
forego her grumble, even where policy counselled silence. She would
deliberately invite offence, and then, resenting being treated as
offensive, would study, though she had to bide her time for it, to
make herself as unendurable as possible.

“Am I self-willed?” asked Isabella, appealing to the minister. But,
though she spoke plaintively, there was a spark of ominous colour in
her cheek.

“You are your mother’s true daughter,” answered du Tillot, with a
glance of annoyance at the marquise. “You will yield to loving reason
what you would ever refuse to dictation. But that is neither here nor
there in the light of my present business, which is to introduce to
your Highness’s good favour--” he wheeled, with an expressive
gesture--“the person of the Chevalier Tiretta, a gentleman of the
Viennese Court, and as admirable a musician and improvisatore as he is
a soldier of tried merit.”

Isabella was conscious of a little thrill and shock, as she turned to
the hitherto unregarded stranger. Then a flush mantled her face from
chin to brow, and she dropped a curtsey quite repellent in its
frigidity. She knew him at once; how could she fail to? or to
associate this and that in the sudden leap of recognition? A sense of
indignation, of recoil as from an astounding revelation, were the
predominant emotions in her mind. Then Fanchette’s gossip, and the one
conclusion to be drawn from it!--she hardly heard the purring phrases
of the Secretary of State, as he improved upon his opening:

“His Excellency, your father, deploring his prolonged absence from his
child, sends her this voice to interpret sweetly for him the love his
heart is withheld from expressing. He entreats her to share with him a
treasure his affection will not permit him to monopolise, and to
preserve and honour it against his soon return.”

Isabella’s cheek, as if to vindicate Fanchette’s claim, had gone from
red to white. She turned her back on the stranger.

“I needed no such proof of my papa’s love,” she said to du Tillot; “or
of any instrument, however accommodating, to interpret it to me. But
you will assure him from me, monsieur, that his daughter will not fail
to give honour where honour is due.”

“Heyday!” cried the marquise--she had been effervescing where she sat,
her eyes glassy, and a mirthless smile on her fat old lips. “This is
not self-will, to be sure! This is a graceful yielding to reason, and
a fine reception of his Excellency’s honoured protégé. What do you
mean, child, abusing your father’s consideration and insulting his
deputy in this fashion?”

All this, to be sure, was grievously embarrassing to the stranger, who
had to stand during this dispute, feeling very much like an actor who
has come forward to make an unwelcome explanation and holds his ground
biding an abatement in the storm of hisses and orange peel which
greets him. His mouth twitched, it is true, and there was a ghost of a
twinkle in his mournful eyes; otherwise his aspect was one of profound
wonder and deprecation. But the Gonzalès, wrought up now to the full
fury of her resentment, would by no means consent to forego, in the
face of this wounded appeal, the moral triumph it afforded her. She
got to her feet, fuming and ejaculating, and, while M. du Tillot
arched his brows in lost amazement over the scene, hurried across to
the chevalier, and, seizing his two hands in hers, panted out a flurry
of apology, explanation, protest:--

“No wonder you look surprised, monsieur; no wonder you look hurt. This
reception of his Excellency’s gift, of an honoured subject and comrade
moreover of one whose least recommendation should entitle its bearer
to our utmost attention and consideration--it is unaccountable, it is
infamous, it reflects upon my careful tuition in a way which is
humiliating to a degree. I beg you to attribute to nothing but a
spoilt caprice this seeming abuse of a favour, which others, less
_self-willed_, can appreciate at its worth; to forget a slight----”

But here du Tillot, grim and peremptory, thought fit to interfere.

“The chevalier,” said he, “is, I am sure, more taken aback over this
tirade than over any imaginary provocation to it. Her Highness said
nothing to which exception could be taken by a reasonable mind. And as
to the fine instrument--if monsieur will forgive me the figure of
speech--she has as yet heard its virtues only trumpeted by others.”

He turned to Isabella, with a smile. The girl was quite white.

“I did not mean to imply such offence,” she said. “If my manner
suggested a ‘spoilt caprice,’ monsieur will know how to interpret it
at its true value.”

She would say no more. She seated herself on a sofa, and set to
fanning her face, as if its aspect were not already chill enough.

Du Tillot, puzzled by the equivocalness of her words, met the
situation, nevertheless, with diplomatic tact. This romantic
essay--if, indeed, it were one, as privately surmised--had not opened
propitiously. Possibly the girl’s prejudice against her royal suitor
was more deep-seated than they supposed. Yet how could _she_ have
guessed this troubadour’s presumptive mission? It was merely
conjecture with the best of them. It would seem that only to be
accredited from Vienna was offence enough in her eyes. At the same
time he was furiously angered with the marquise over her outburst.
What did the old fool, manœuvring to bring about this situation, and
then spoiling it by belittling her charge in the eyes of Austria’s
representative? He could have slapped her gross old arms, viciously,
and with joy.

But he did nothing so impolitic. On the contrary, he tripped over to
the cross old lady, and bantered her charmingly and playfully on her
temper. The ardour of her spirit, he said, bespoke the youth which was
perennially reluctant in her to quit the temple of its triumphs and
conquests. But was not the generosity of sentiment, characteristic of
that vernal condition, a little apt sometimes to wax unnecessarily hot
in defence of its enthusiasms? There had been no slight intended here,
he would answer for it, either to an exquisite gift or to her fine
appreciation of it.

“Enthusiasms!” cried madam--but she was already mollified. “I assert
nothing, for my part, but an unquestioning faith in the perfection of
those accents which the tenderest regard has chosen to be its
interpreter.”

“And which shall answer to your faith, I give my word,” said du
Tillot.

Madam laughed high.

“After such assurance,” she said, “the chevalier has no choice but to
submit his credentials. What shall it be, monsieur--love, friendship,
philosophy? Say philosophy as applied to love.”

The stranger’s mandolin was lying on the harpsichord. He lifted it,
with the quietest air of acquiescence, and caressing it in his arms,
as if it had been a dear infant, touched out a disconnected note or
two. Thence his fingers seemed to wander haphazard over the strings,
seeking, while his abstracted eyes pursued their theme, the point
where thought and setting should blend into one alliance, melodious
and expressive. And presently the words came:

“Apply philosophy to love, as salve is applied to a wound: and, lo! as
the wound is healed, so is the salve infected with its virus. If love,
then, shall live, philosophy must die.”

So ran his theme, followed, with an infinite elaboration of word and
note, to the little rippling cadenza on which it ended. It was very
finished, very clever; but with scarce a suggestion of real feeling
behind it. Only the soft flexibility of the voice seemed to suggest
itself a medium for nobler inspirations. It was very sweet in quality
and very moving.

The marquise applauded the improvisation sky-high. “What do you think
now, little grudger?” she said, with a triumphant look at Isabella.
“Has not monsieur justified in himself his Highness’s gift? It is for
you, in turn, to propose the theme.”

“I think,” responded the young lady, coldly, but with a faint rose of
colour on her cheek, “that love is a vulgar complaint and philosophy a
rare one. I would let love, for my part, be the one to die, since he
is the easier spared. Monsieur, perhaps, will sing us his requiem.”

Monsieur bowed low, a smile in his eyes, while madam, shooting a
significant glance at du Tillot, set to fanning herself scornfully.

Once again the fingers fluttered lightly on the strings, and once
again gradually disentangled from them, as it were a flowering spray
from a thicket, a tender Lydian measure:

  “Love died of Isabel, and lay at rest,
  Slain by the cold sweet arrows from her breast.
  And, as he quiet slept, came Isabel
  To view the cruel work she’d done so well;
  When, as is wont to hap, the wound she’d given
  Broke forth anew, denouncing her to heaven.
  For whom Death answered, dropping from above:
  ‘Now is my reign established, quit of Love!
  For my sake did you do this thing?’ Then she:
  ‘Ah, no! But that I loved Philosophy.’
  So, hardly had she spoke when, with a spring,
  Love rose, and, laughing joyously, took wing.”

Madam, at the finish, broke into rapturous applause: “Il fait tourner
la chance!” she cried, with a rocking laugh. “Il fait tourner la
chance. O, that was very well indeed, monsieur! You have the true
genius for improvisation.”

But du Tillot, secretly watchful, shook his head just perceptibly.

“I hope not too daring,” he thought, noticing the girl’s face.

Isabella neither applauded nor dissented. A liberty, her aspect might
have denoted, was best rebuked by contemptuous silence. Only when
presently the marquise called the stranger to her side, she rose, as
if in quick avoidance of his neighbourhood, and addressed herself
exclusively for the rest of the evening to the Secretary of State.

But when the gentlemen were gone--one of them in the stinging
consciousness of an obeisance unacknowledged--she turned upon the
_gouvernante_ with real anger in her eyes:

“Did you not recognise him, madame?”

The old lady actually quailed before the inquisition of that look.

“What if I did?” she said sullenly: “What then?”

“And draw the only conclusion that one can draw from his presence
here?”

“You are a fool and a prude,” cried the marquise, bursting out
suddenly between fury and trepidation. “My God, I think I have never
known such another. All this to-do about a piece of pleasantry that
was nothing in itself, and should count for less than nothing in the
context of that sincere and noble nature which condescends to honour
you with its regard. The selection by such a prince of an instrument
to sing his devotion in your ears should be enough to convince you of
the high character of his deputy. But whether you like the chevalier
or not, and whatever your sense of filial duty, you have got to endure
him, that is all--aye, and to listen to him, too.”

“It will not be your fault, at least, madame,” said Isabella, “if my
ears by this time are not inured to offence,” and, very pale, with her
head high, she walked out of the room.




 CHAPTER VI.
 NON DOLCE FAR NIENTE

And so we reach a situation which, having no least authority to
complicate itself, must suffice us in its simplicity to the end. It is
a situation as old as the human drama; it has formed the groundwork
for a thousand tales of passion and infidelity, more fierce, more
involved than this that I relate; it embraces for its essentials but
three characters, the lady, and the diffident lover, and the false
friend. Yet, although our version may not rank in poignancy with the
tragedy of the Rimini, or in homeliness with the courtship of Miles
Standish, it can claim for its main details that virtue of truth which
ennobles even little calamities above the finest ecstacies of the
imagination.

It is into a brief idyll of love and summer, then, that we are now to
penetrate. Would it might begin and end there in the green gardens--to
flow, in Tennyson’s words:

      “... sweetly on and on,
  Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
  Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”

But, alas! though the spirit of romance plead to us, soft as his
loveliest temptress to St. Anthony, our historical conscience must
remain cold and deaf to its entreaties. As things happened, so must
they be recorded.

The lady, and the lover, and the false friend. It is such a simple
tale, and so haunted by precedent, that the least sophisticated
reader, given these premises, could surely write it for himself. Only
remember that no such friend was ever false by design. Nor was this
one. He began by detesting his task, not from conscientious motives,
but because he went into it branded by the wounding stigma of her who
was its object. He knew in what comparative light she would regard his
advocacy; and he knew that in his own conscious acceptance of that
estimate was foretold the failure of his mission. What value were to
be attached to the praises of such a man?--so would run her thoughts.
To be belauded by him were to be implied despicable. So he would only
end by confirming the very complaint he was sent to alleviate--and
serve those right who had commissioned him. It would do them no harm
to learn that to strain devotion too far were to have it snap and
recoil on themselves. At this beginning of things he really believed
that he hated the young Infanta--a sentiment certainly little
conducive to the successful accomplishment of his business.

And it did nothing to put him on better terms with himself to realise
with what contemptuous confidence he was delegated to this task.
Joseph or Philip--it was all the same moral of princely omnipotence.
He was with both of them just the insensate instrument, to be played
upon, to evoke certain emotions at command, and then to be dispensed
with as a mere mechanical agent that had served its purpose. That he
might prove a self-conscious agent, possessing feelings and passions
of his own, never seemed to occur to either of them as remotely
conceivable. He was just turned loose into the green pastures of
Colorno, as a lowly steer might be entrusted to the company of a
pedigree heifer--entrusted to excite her interest, that is to say, in
the royal bull which was to succeed him by and by.

He laughed, putting that image to himself; yet really it was a not
exaggerated one. Only, apart from the pledges of so-called friendship,
he was doubtful of his own capacity to excite. If the lady started
with a prejudice, he started with a grudge, and the two between them
seemed inimical to a right sentimental understanding. Supposing
panegyric were merely to react through him upon its subject? In that
case the logical course would be to represent Joseph as undesirable.
Yet he hardly dared to risk such a chance. No, he would be faithful to
his mission, and, if that failed--well, _he_ had not been the one to
initiate the business of the green intaglio. They must fight it out
among themselves.

And in the meanwhile he would act according to his lights. For some
days after his installation at the palace he was scrupulous in
obliterating himself so far as Isabella was concerned. He saw the
marquise privately, and took pains to convince her, against her more
truculent judgment, that his policy for the moment lay in
self-effacement. Time and opportunity, he said, would best decide the
manner of his next approach. He brought her to agree with him, the
more easily as that old intriguing bosom could yet find, in the
attentions of a personable male creature, the shadow of an ancient
thrill. She admired his bright volubility--for, the chevalier’s tongue
once loosened, he gave it full exercise--she admired his romantic
looks and more romantic songs. They were all for her for this time
being; and for her the frank confidence which confessed, confirming
her suspicions, the true purpose of his mission. They were
conspirators together, very humorous and understanding.

In truth, the man did not know how to begin. That unforeseen antipathy
seemed to blight his inspiration, and he was glad of the respite. He
spent much of his time, while so temporising, in wandering about the
spacious grounds. They were fair in the Italian style, with formal
walks, and fountains, and colonnades of marble; better still, with
remoter green recesses where one might lose oneself amidst flowering
thickets, set here and there with sunk gardens and lily-ponds. One
morning, when so strolling, he came plump, turning a leafy corner,
upon Madame Gonzalès and her young charges. Those were three in all,
the two younger, Ferdinand and Louise, sharing, pretty equally between
them some fifteen years. These youngsters drove in a little chaise,
with a pretty white goat to draw it, and Isabelita walked smiling at
the head. Tiretta saw the smile fade and the slender figure stiffen in
the moment of his appearance. He bit his lip, as he stopped to greet
the cavalcade with a bow.

“Ah, monsieur!” cried the marquise, with a quick wrathful glance at
the young lady; “this is well encountered. We are all hot and tired,
and would welcome someone who would amuse us.”

They had halted near a rustic bench, and thereon the old lady seated
herself, fanning her moist face fretfully.

“Charmed,” said Tiretta. “What shall I do--turn Catherine-wheels down
the alley, or run after my own tail, like a puppy?”

The little eight-year-old boy laughed gleefully. “Is that your tail,
monsieur?” he said, stretching out to touch the chevalier’s sword.

“Like the scorpion’s, I fain would think, young sir,” said Tiretta.
“It hath a sting in it for those who would approach it rashly.”

The boy, pulling at the reins, looked up with large indolent eyes.
“Woa, Belletto! Stand still, little hog! Are you a soldier, monsieur?”

“I am what they call a soldier of fortune, sir. I fight, when I fight,
to vindicate and extol her name, as the Knight of la Mancha fought for
his Dulcinea. You have heard of him?”

“Haven’t I, just! But I would rather, for my part, fight for my
country.”

Isabelita’s little hand, for all the feigned abstraction of
Isabelita’s eyes and thoughts, touched the child’s shoulder
approvingly. He looked round at her. “Wouldn’t _you_, Lita?” he said.

“What, dear?” she answered, stooping to him.

“Wouldn’t you rather fight for your country than for Mademoiselle
Fortune?”

“Of course, Ferdy. How can you ask such a question?”

“There was never a knight in the world more worthy than this Quixote
to wear his spurs,” said Tiretta.

She was impelled to answer him against her will:

“There was never one who despised fortune more, or owed so little to
her.”

“I do not despise her,” said Tiretta quietly. “If I did, I could not
serve her as disinterestedly as this don served his peerless one. But
a man must have his ideal to inspire him, though it be no better than
a purse of fairy gold, and though it leave him in the end as poor as
he began.”

“My God, what nonsense you all talk!” cried the marquise crossly; “and
monsieur is the most wilful of the lot. He is a brave soldier, and he
has fought for Spain.”

“Is Spain your country?” asked Ferdinand.

“I fight for fortune--always for fortune, I tell you,” said Tiretta,
with an obstinate smile.

The little boy touched his sword again.

“With this, monsieur? Has it killed many people?”

The Gonzalès laughed loudly.

“It has killed one person,” said Tiretta, “whose blood, mademoiselle
your sister will likely tell you, has dishonoured it for ever.”

“Whose?” said the child eagerly. “Tell me, monsieur.”

Tiretta drew out the blade--an elastic strip of steel, long toughened
by use--and ran his finger along it.

“It belonged,” he said, “to an old friend of mine. I thought him one
of the noblest of men; but since, like myself, he was a mere soldier
of fortune, that may be nothing but my prejudice. He had fought
successfully in a number of causes; but in the cause of self-interest
he failed. He had many and grave faults--a persistent craze for
gambling; an arrogant temper; a furious hatred of the people. To hear
him fulminate, one would have thought he ranked them with the
grass--ready, on the least provocation, to mow them down by the acre.
But he played straight, while others robbed him; out of his lean purse
he pensioned a dishonest rogue grown crippled in his service; his
temper never impaired his perfect honour. And, as to his hatred of the
people--why here, after all, was the moral of it. He met his death
rescuing a drunken old woman, horrible, hideous, debased, from the
hands of a party of miscreants. But she was a woman, you understand.
That was in Castille; and there I stood by his bedside, and received
this weapon from his hands as a last bequest. I have tried to honour
it since, but never to such honour as when, in piercing that scoundrel
heart, it was used by him nobly to falsify the asserted principles of
a lifetime. At least, so, being another soldier of fortune, I regard
its distinction.”

He slipped the blade back into its scabbard, while the children, only
half understanding him, regarded the act in silent curiosity.

“But _am_ I amusing you?” he cried, with a laugh, to the marquise. “As
a soldier of fortune, I could bring many such pretty tales out of my
pack.”

“Pooh!” said the old lady impatiently. “Why do you take this perverse
pleasure in misrepresenting yourself? We know, monsieur, what we know;
and that does not conceive the case of a certain exalted mind stooping
to intimacy with a worthless adventurer. There are patrons whose
simple favour speaks all that is needed for the high merit of those
they distinguish by it.”

“I am not denying it, God forbid, madam,” cried Tiretta. “I would not
so dishonour his Highness’s noble character as to pretend it could
find pleasure in base friendships. As a prince, he is without
littleness; as a man, his instincts always lead him towards the
highest.”

“It is so, without question,” said the marquise, nodding her head
delightedly.

“Nevertheless,” said Tiretta, “I hold by my title. It hath the warrant
of the noblest gentleman ever born of imagination or fact. And so I do
not use it in irony or self-depreciation, but as a title to be
defended like a king’s.”

“Eh bien!” said madam indulgently; “let it remain, then, as a question
of terms. Be to yourself what you will; to us you shall be the
knight-errant. Eh, Isabelita?”

“Pray do not ask me, madam,” responded the girl coldly. “I am not a
judge of what constitutes a knight-errant.”

She quite foresaw the angry protest her tone would evoke; and yet she
would affect no other. Everything this man said offended her. She saw
only design and insincerity behind it. This mission he was engaged to
fulfil must always be paramount in his mind, and her consciousness of
that preoccupation made her suspicious of his every sentiment. She
thought it a pity that one so recommended by his looks and soldierly
reputation should condescend to lend himself to such finical, rather
contemptible practices. But no doubt he had been demoralised by
flattery. There was nothing in the world like a fine voice to convert
a man into an insufferable coxcomb. The insolence of the light laugh
with which he received her snub spoke a whole volume for his
impregnable self-complacency. It brought a flush to her cheeks.

But the laugh had in reality spoken no more than a tickle of that
humour which accepts its own failures whimsically.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried the marquise. “You were ready enough with
your definitions when you wanted to contradict monsieur. But one can
no more produce reason from temper than grapes from a thistle or music
from that tree.”

“Cannot one?” said Tiretta, hastily interposing with a droll look.
“Ah, but I do not feel so sure!”

There was a knot of frayed bullion hanging from his sword hilt, and,
picking delicately, he unwound from it a single strand of gold wire a
yard or so in length. This, after testing, he carried to a branch that
overhung the walk, and, fitting it taut within a natural bow made by
the wood, contrived a tonic resonant string, which, daintily touched,
answered to his manipulation like that of a fairy guitar.

“Now,” he said, his head bent to the string and his fingers lightly
caressing it? “shall we see if the little tree will sing to us?”

“Yes, yes!” cried the children breathlessly.

“You must be very quiet,” he said. “It will speak, if it speaks at
all, so soft and shy that a sound would frighten it.”

They sat as dumb as mice--as dumb as the hot motionless air about
them. And presently his fingers moved--the merest phantom of music;
and in the low phantom of a voice he took up their tale:

  “What music in the little tree?
  The wind, the bird, the humming-bee.
  They yield their secrets up, and sing
  With tirra-lirra down my string.

  The cricket with his shrilling call,
  The little cheeping mouse and all,
  They skip and dance like anything
  As ‘tirra-lirra’ sounds my string.

  Then ‘Tap!’ the hidden wood-chuck. Hark
  His tiny baton on the bark!
  And nightingale stands up to sing
  His tirra-lirra down my string.”

The wire snapped, and the singer threw up his arms with a resigning
laugh.

“More, more!” cried the children delightedly; and the _gouvernante_
applauded with all her might: “Brava, bravissima! It was the most
perfect, the most wonderful thing!”

It was wonderful really. This man had the inexplicable gift. He could
have produced music out of a key, or a saucepan-lid, or an old shoe,
like Paganini or some other. He seemed to think in it, and the
appropriate words fitted themselves rhythmically to the sounds. It was
all done without the least appearance of effort; and there was the
woodpecker’s tap and the nightingale’s trill unmistakable in their
context. Of course the verse given is an adaptation, and I daresay a
bad one, of the original; but it supplies the sense.

Isabella was moved, as she could hardly fail to be. Certainly his
voice was a beautiful one--she would grant him that. He had the right
to be conceited about it--if he was conceited. But she felt all at
once a doubt. He had sung so prettily and naturally, and solely for
the children’s sake. Perhaps, after all, what she had thought the
confident effrontery of his manner betokened no more than the
conscious independence of a free spirit. He would not be overruled,
she remembered, about his self-imposed title. That hardly looked like
conceit. If she could only believe a little in his personal
genuineness, she might excuse him more. It was something in his
favour, at least, that he had undertaken a task so unwelcome as this
must be from considerations of pure friendship. Yet had he done so? He
was a soldier of fortune--he himself had declared it--and the lure he
followed must always and necessarily be a golden one.

And straight, on the thought, the unwarranted meanness of the
accusation so recoiled upon herself as to make her seem, in its silent
utterance, the contemptible one. That momentary revulsion of feeling
wrought its mood, penitent and characteristic. It was always this
affectionate child’s instinct to propitiate where she thought she had
hurt; and, if only in thought, thought none the less must plead for
absolution.

The little Louise, leaning from her place, had caught the chevalier’s
arm in both her own and was nestling her plump cheek against it. That
was pretty and significant. It showed he was a man whom children
naturally trusted and liked.

“Look,” said the little maid; “that is Lita’s own lily-pond down
there. Lita loves lilies.”

He felt the inopportuneness of the allusion, and his lips twitched a
trifle as he responded:

“Do you know what water-lilies are, ragazzina? No? They are the little
washing basins of the nixies.”

“They do not hold water, monsieur.”

“Ah! we who live on land wash in water, you see; but those who live in
the water wash in sunshine. If you look very carefully, you will see
they are all full of it.”

A sweet voice spoke to him:

“I am very proud of my pond, monsieur.”

He acknowledged the concession with a little grave inclination of the
head: “You have reason to be, Madonna”--and turned and addressed
himself to the child again.




 CHAPTER VII.
 LOVE-IN-A-MIST

The next day opened wild and wet. In the night a west wind had
driven in from the sea, and drawn a rushing curtain over the rainbow
summer of the gardens. Isabella, for no reason that she could define,
felt strangely restless and uneasy. She was not wont to weather moods,
or to feel impatience over enforced confinements to her rooms. Now,
quite inexplicably, that prospect seemed insufferable; something in
her cried out for space and freedom; the call of the wind and the rain
reached to her for the first time, as though an unsuspected door in
her heart had suddenly blown open. As sin or fever dreams of water,
eternally of a cool and cleansing stream, so her soul turned with
longing to the cold purification of the storm. And presently, unable
to resist, she put on cloak and hood, and slipped out undetected into
the gardens.

The rain came in her face and blew it as pink as a flower; the wind
snatched at her hair, and caught and played with a fluttering wisp of
it. As she went on, a spirit of exhilaration rose to possess her,
quite alone and at liberty as she was. State and observance seemed
unreal things; there was not a soul abroad to remind her of them; she
and nature were in one confidence together, as if, like old companions
long mistily estranged, they were as mistily reunited.

Involuntarily, it seemed, her steps took her towards the spot
associated with an incident of yesterday. There was a woven arbour
near by the lily-pond, and her thoughts settled there, as in a
hermitage sweet for meditation. She would like to sit and watch the
drops plash in the water; she pictured the lilies drunk to satiety on
the element they loved, and expanding their gorged cups till they
could stretch no further; she foretasted the wet solitude of it all as
a refuge from strange unrecognised emotions, a little distressful yet
a little sweet, which seemed suddenly to have overtaken her, flowing
from some primeval source.

The flowering borders, as she passed them, were all gravel-splashed
and sodden. She saw an early blossom that she loved, a little blue
starry thing of the fennel tribe, and stopped to shake its
heavy-hanging sprays free of water, and to pluck one and put it in her
bosom. Then she went on.

As she neared the arbour an instant panic seized her. Some sound, more
self-betraying than her own light footfall, had penetrated to her
through the flapping shutters of the wind--a voice, a tuneful
vibration. She stood transfixed, her thoughts poised on the prick of
swift escape. And then she flushed a little and remembered herself.
She was the Infanta, mistress of her own actions and of her chosen
retreat. Very resolute she stepped on, the trampling rain covering her
approach, and paused once more, herself unseen, within close hearing
of the sound.

It was the stranger, alone apparently within the arbour, and communing
with himself through the medium most natural to him. For the first
time she heard him, witless of any audience, delivering up his soul
like an unconscious bird. She felt it like a revelation, while she
stood spell-bound. There was no forced cleverness here, no artificial
display, even of the sort that had won the children’s hearts; it was
just moving thought transmuted into music.

She hardly gathered the import of the words, nor desired to. It was
enough that they blent themselves inevitably with the haunting melody
his fingers drew from the strings, and spoke with it a language that
was articulate only to the soul. The effect was no more nor less than
a sensuous selection of sweet sounds, gathered, as they offered
themselves, into a fragrant bouquet, whose scent, to speak in symbols,
touched the deep tears of things.

Suddenly conscious of something warmer than a raindrop on her cheek,
Isabella started and moved. The music ceased on the instant. She took
her shamefaced courage in hand, and entered the arbour.

He rose from the bench on which he had been seated, looking as if he
saw an apparition. She smiled at him a little faintly.

“You did not know, monsieur, that this place was sacred to my
meditations?”

“I did not know, Madonna. What can I do to expiate such desecration?”

“Not speak in mockery, at least.”

“Ah! Do I?”

“Your eyes betray you, I think. I will be candid with you, monsieur.
It is not the first time I have read them so. Is it that you regard
your mission with so little seriousness?” He was startled enough--on
the point of prevaricating. “Will you not tell me the truth?” she said
sincerely.

His brows bent a little.

“Will you have it, Madonna?” he answered in a moment. “See, I entered
here, all unguessing of its holiness, to brood alone. The weather, I
thought, secured me. But there are others, it seems, who feel its
fascination no less. Will you not forgive the innocent sacrilege, and
bid me go?”

“Are we, then, so distasteful to you that you must leave us in order
to brood alone--on your injuries, perhaps?”

“I have injuries; but I do not wish to speak of them.”

“Monsieur, I stood a little while outside--I say it to my
shame--listening to you. That is to confess; and will you not
reciprocate my candour? _Please_, monsieur.”

The pretty entreaty quite disarmed him.

“I will speak the truth,” he said. “Do you ask me if I take my mission
seriously? My answer to that is that his Highness the Archduke might
choose a finer advocate to sound his praises, but never one more
earnest or convinced.”

She looked down, drawing in the dust with the point of her little
shoe.

“I have always heard of him as a very grave and virtuous prince,” she
murmured.

“Believe it true, I beg you,” said Tiretta. “His ideals are the ideals
of a conscientious ruler and a noble gentleman. He has wisdom beyond
his years, but free of pedantry, most sweet and natural affections, a
fine presence, and a will which, if strong, is neither arrogant nor
obstinate.”

She did not answer for a little; and then she looked up.

“Well, you have fulfilled your part,” she said. “Was there need to
make such a mystery about it?”

“There was so little, it seems,” he answered, “that your Highness has
guessed it unspoken.”

“And yet, monsieur, is it the whole?”

“What more, Madonna?”

“Why, this paragon of a prince should surely need no panegyrist so to
recommend him, unless, indeed, there were a conscious flaw somewhere
in his perfection.”

He looked down in his turn; then suddenly up again, and boldly.

“If high-born ladies,” he said, “will masquerade as rustic wenches,
wading for lilies, it is no sin to accept them as they appear.”

She drew back quickly.

“I think you may go, monsieur,” she said.

He bowed, and was leaving, when she stopped him.

“One moment. That sword of yours--so dedicated--a fine comment on your
yesterday’s sentiment! A woman is a woman, is she not, and therefore
to be saved insult?”

The chevalier’s handsome pale face seemed to go a thought whiter.

“It is not in the code,” he said, “that princes may not bestow
insults. Your Highness took full advantage of that prerogative in
refusing the token.” His eyes were suddenly burning; his lips set grim
as judgment. “I have some reason, perhaps, to brood over my injuries,”
he said. “They have known no salve, your Highness will understand,
since, for friendship’s sake, I essayed a thankless task.”

He was again turning to go, and again she delayed him.

“Monsieur, I entreat you. A friend, I know, may act for a friend
against his better inclination, and only because he is a friend. I do
not doubt the independence of your mind or the honour of your
principles.”

Tiretta bowed stiffly, but in silence.

“I ask you to forgive me,” she said.

It was so sweet and unexpected that for the moment he was quite taken
back. Then his face flushed through all its even pallor.

“It is I who should be the petitioner,” he said. “I am your Highness’s
sworn henchman from this hour.”

She smiled, rather tremulously, and, turning, signified with a gesture
that she would prefer to be the one to go.

“No, monsieur: the grove shall be sacred to its songster. I beg you to
continue to consecrate it. As for me, I am frightened already over the
scolding I shall get if madame detects me returning through the rain.”

He ventured to delay her one moment:

“I am to be permitted to speak henceforth, as a true ambassador, what
my heart dictates?”

“O, fie, monsieur!” she said; “to think that perfection could need any
trumpeting!” And, with those smiling ambiguous words, she left him.

For some moments after she was gone Tiretta stood motionless, frowning
into vacancy. Then, with a sigh, he stirred, and, perceiving in the
act a little spray of some blue flower which had fallen from her bosom
to the ground, stooped, and secured it, and held the thing wonderingly
in his hand.

“Love-in-a-mist!” he whispered: “So in the strange North lands--my
lands--they call it. Love-in-a-mist!”




 CHAPTER VIII.
 CORRESPONDENCE

A couple of communications, relating to the rather fantastic
business in hand, were despatched about this date from Colorno, the
one by Tiretta and the other by the _gouvernante_. The soldier wrote,
_inter alia_, to his royal friend and patron:

“You will recall your words, that in this _affaire_--one of policy, it
is true, but still an _affaire_--you were determined to woo your own
way--c’est-à-dire, the way of a prince, who cannot desire plums but
he must have a lackey to put them into his mouth for him. Well, as
your Highness’s lackey, I have the honour to inform your Highness that
the plum forthcoming is a very blooming and delectable one, promising
satisfaction on all the points specified, and indeed, I think, on
others supernumerary. The question is merely if the plum, for her
part, wishes to be devoured; but, even so, there is always a sweet
provocation in coyness. Rest assured, at least, that I have left
nothing undone to commend to it the fine taste of the connoisseur for
whose enjoyment it is distinguished in being selected. I put it so for
the reason that, whether by way of intuition or tittle-tattle, my
mission, as I soon discovered, was suspect. That made my task none the
easier; and none the easier the allaying of the prejudice which, as
your Highness correctly surmised, _did_ exist against yourself. There
is no blinking the fact that the lady had learnt to associate the
Count of Falckenstein of a certain occasion with the heir to the
Austrian throne, and that the knowledge stood at first in the way of a
perfect reconciliation between her impressions of fact and the
laudatory image, even a little strained, which I was moved to draw of
your Highness. But that impression, I flatter myself, and the true
devotion which gives fervour to my poor art, is surely if slowly in
process of readjusting itself; and I look confidently to the near time
when the complete conversion I anticipate shall see eye to eye with me
in the regard of your Highness’s true character, its essential
greatness and nobility. In the meanwhile I pray that that state of
grace may be quickly forthcoming, in order to my release from a task
to which nothing but my sense of friendship (I say it with all
deference) could reconcile me. Carpet-mongering is not to my taste,
nor am I pleased to have my soul sit and grin like a monkey on a
hurdy-gurdy, while I grind out the music to order. Improvisation to
command is a pure paradox, is it not? So that, to end, if your
Highness is dissatisfied with my progress, I have only to suggest that
I possess another instrument at least as familiar to my hand as the
mandolin, and as ready to ring true in the service of Austria, and
that your father the Emperor waits at this moment for recruits in
Silesia.”

This missive the young archduke received and pondered in his cabinet
at Schönbrunn. He frowned over it a good deal; it interested and yet
irritated him. Truth to tell, this romantic venture of his had, in the
multitudinous pressure of State affairs, got rather crowded out of his
mind. Fervours and enthusiasms have a distressing way of dwindling,
like toy balloons, when put aside after an exciting game, and of
incontinently bursting when one seeks to re-inflate them. So this
unphilosophical afflatus had come to appear just a little limp and
puckered to Joseph now he was invited to resume it, and to threaten,
if incautiously reblown, to explode into thin air. The private mission
it had inspired appeared to him all at once an extravagance, and more
calculated to cheapen than to vindicate the imperial virtues which
were its theme. This affected humility was perhaps a bad precedent to
set in view of future relations; after all, he was answerable to no
one but himself for his principles and actions; and he was
particularly annoyed in that connection to learn that his purpose had
been more or less divined. Tiretta must have managed very badly to
make such a thing possible. He trusted at least that the suspicion was
limited to Colorno, since he had an idea that the Empress, were it to
reach her ears, would strongly disapprove his action. On the whole, he
regretted having embarked on a project which had grown, or was
growing, distasteful to his better sense of fitness.

And yet--that vision! The archduke was unphilosophically
impressionable, as has been said, to feminine attractions, and fain,
where women were concerned, to be admired for himself rather than his
position. Perhaps, all considered, as things had progressed so far and
so favourably, it would be folly to recall his advocate at the crucial
moment. At the same time there was something in that advocate’s tone
which disturbed him. Under its veneer of homage he seemed to detect a
shadow of mockery, a humorous independence of mind, an imperfect
conception of the sacro-sanctity of the task imposed. Humour, if the
“something” was due to that objectionable quality, was quite out of
place in a matter so momentous. He would be relieved to be
satisfactorily done with a man whom he had never really fathomed or
understood.

He answered Tiretta, commending what he had accomplished, advising the
nicest tact, and promising to recall him the moment, in the deputy’s
own opinion, his mission was fulfilled.

To the Duke of Parma Madame Gonzalès wrote as follows:

“Your daughter appears irreconcilable in the matter of the chevalier.
There is so far so little cause for that apprehension once hinted at
in correspondence by her august mother, that the difficulty is to make
either the man or his mission endurable in the girl’s eyes. I should
doubt the policy of continuing M. le chevalier at Colorno, were it not
that I cannot conceive of such an advocate failing in the long run to
impress himself. But how often we know the divinely inspired preacher
to end by creating between others the emotional ardour which he is
incapable of feeling or attracting on his own account. Such, I trust,
will result from this propagandism of sweet sounds, and to the most
desirable effect. The man is very cunning, like a veritable
troubadour, in singing the praises of his prince. There is no direct
allusion, but the reference is unmistakable. At present, there is no
denying, the seed has fallen on difficult ground; but I have hopes.
She listens, at least, and her comments decreasingly savour of
coldness and irony. Yet, it would be to deceive ourselves to pretend
that she is as yet more than a potential convert. Last night M.
Tiretta, being entreated to our entertainment, and demanding, as is
his wont, a text, I gave him the posy he wore in his bosom, a little
spray of the blossom we call St. Catherine’s flower. ‘It is the blue
flower of martyrdom,’ I said; and he answered, ‘Then shall it inspire
me to sing of one I know in Vienna who is willing to die for his
faith.’ And so he improvised most meltingly on that theme; yet to
barren effect so far as her Highness was concerned. I have seldom
known her more chill and unresponsive to a sweet ending. Her face was
like a stone. Eh, bien! we must console ourselves with the thought
that the uttermost resistance often betokens the near point of
surrender.”

Don Philip, as has been hinted, fathered his pretty daughter in a
tendency to what Mirabeau called “le don terrible de la familiarité”;
only what in her proceeded from an open and affectionate disposition,
in him was accountable to sheer weakness of character. He was a vain,
useless, good-natured man, whose foolishness, perhaps pathetically
beautified in the case of his first-born, was to find its supreme
expression in the person of Ferdinand the second child, in whom a
vicious imbecility came to develop itself. But Philip himself was not
vicious, save in the sense of the mischief that is wrought through
idleness. He frittered away his time in small local excitements; he
devoted the most of his mornings to the mysteries of the toilet; he
played faro and enjoyed an occasional intrigue; he patronised the
Mass, the opera, and the promenade, each in its due proportion; he now
and then entertained, for his highest intellectual distraction, some
traveller of distinction visiting Parma. As to money, he could never
master its significance; as to business, he detested it. On both
counts his ministers had a bad time of it with him, and his familiars,
of whom he had several, a remarkably good one. The confusion in the
exchequer was their opportunity, and they took full advantage of it.
The duke was easily responsive to prayers for assistance, especially
if they emanated from people “d’un état peu remarquable.” He had the
liking of the petty mind for impressing by his bounty those of such a
far social inferiority that the full measure of his condescension
could be felt between them. Amongst his closest intimates were the
Messieurs la Roque and la Coque, two men of indifferent birth, who
caused endless trouble in the matter of palace factions. The former
was middle-aged, crafty, smooth-tongued and a flatterer; the latter
was a pert coxcomb and braggart, jealous and mischievous. He had a
minor faculty for music, which his conceit magnified into genius;
could set mediocre verses of “the right butterwoman’s rank to market”
order, to compositions as vulgarly primitive. One might find his like
in a hundred popular balladmongers of to-day--men who have the gift to
touch out emotional chords to clap-trap sentiments. He and Don Philip,
whose measure he exactly fitted, wasted much time together producing
and practising over a number of such little sticky effusions. They
were sometimes moved to tears over their own lucubrations.

His Excellency was at his toilet, his two friends being present, when
the marquise’s letter was brought in to him. Its delivery had to be
delayed, pending the performance of an important rite. This was no
less than the placing of the ducal wig in position on the ducal poll.
M. Frisson, the _perruquier_, spotlessly aproned and with a comb stuck
in the side-frizzle of his own bob-jerom, as a clerk sticks a pen
behind his ear, received the august erection from an attendant who had
just brought it in from the powdering-closet, and, delicately shaking
and blowing on it, poised it a moment over the cropt scalp, with the
air of an archbishop officiating at a coronation, before he deftly
lowered it into place. It was an action of ineffable and unfaltering
elegance, necessitating none but the most trifling of after-touches to
complete the effect--a slight joining of the flats, so to speak, with
a fragrant grease-stick, a whiff of powder, a just more perceptible
distribution of the rouge on the cheekbones. His fingers fluttered
like butterflies tasting the honey of flowers; he stood back finally
to admire his own work; a valet offered the duke a laced _mouchoir_
heavily scented with tuberose; and the ceremony was accomplished.

Don Philip, exhaling incense, proceeded leisurely, the attendants
being dismissed, to read the _gouvernante’s_ communication. But first
he put it from him with a nose of disgust.

“Toilet-vinegar,” he said. “The very ink reeks of it. What odds on the
writer?”

“Ten to one on the Gonzalès,” cried la Coque.

“No takers,” said the duke, and, frowning, perused the thing at arm’s
length. Both men sat eyeing him, the one inquisitively, the other
covertly, as he read the letter. He pished and anathema’d over it a
good deal.

“Twenty gold ducats to a lira that she asks her wages in it!” cried la
Coque impulsively, as the duke made an end.

Philip sniggered. “Taken,” he said, and tossed the letter across to
the speaker.

La Coque made a wry face, and la Roque laughed softly and enjoyingly.
He was a full-bodied man, with small drooping-lidded eyes and a small
moist mouth.

“Look before you leap, my little Charles, is a ver-y good proverb,” he
said.

“Bah! good for cardsharpers,” retorted la Coque angrily.

“Is that,” said the other smoothly, “a specific innuendo or a
generalisation?”

“Supposing it is the former?” said la Coque insolently.

“Then I repudiate it, with----”

“With what?” demanded the coxcomb, rising.

“With considerable indignation,” said la Roque.

The duke made a laughing gesture.

“Put down your crest, bully-boy; and either read the letter or hand it
me back.”

La Coque’s curiosity got the better of his temper, and, reseating
himself, he obeyed, muttering below his breath. After a while he
looked up, a very sneering expression on his pert combative face:

“Her Highness shows a better judgment in music than some other
people--that is all I have got to remark,” he said.

Don Philip prepared to amuse himself at his friend’s expense. He was
always ready to exact such payment for the familiarity he invited.

“Meaning,” he said, with a just perceptible wink at the other
intimate, “that she shows signs of succumbing after all to what, for
our part, we found instantly irresistible.”

“I neither meant that, nor detect here any such indication,” was the
glowering answer.

“You puzzle me, Charles,” said the duke. “What _did_ you mean then,
may I ask?”

“I meant just what I said.”

“Was ever such a cross enigma!” protested Philip to la Roque. “Here is
our daughter, though in an unaccommodating mood, almost confessing
herself at last a captive to the charm to which we all yielded at the
first assault, and our friend will have us insensible by comparison.
But I say we shall refuse to surrender to the Infanta that first place
in appreciating M. Tiretta, in taking which we were all unanimous.”

“Say with one exception,” cried la Coque.

“One? Yourself, do you mean?”

“Certainly I do.”

“What! You valued him at first at something lower than the rest of
us?”

He knew very well the spiteful jealousy aroused in this rival bosom by
the stranger’s success, and delighted to prick and goad it.

La Coque ignored the exclamation. His patron’s amiable purpose was
perfectly plain to him.

“I recognise, at this moment, M. Tiretta’s art to be supreme,” he
said; “only I spell it, for my part, with a little a.”

“‘Elles ne sont point bonnes,’ remarked the little low fox of the big
high mulberries,” murmured la Roque silkily.

The other darted a malignant glance at the speaker, but restrained
himself. The duke, his nose wrinkled in a covert snigger, saw
something in the insolent face which stiffened his own.

“An innuendo, Charles my friend?” he said. “Or are you meaning nothing
but to belittle, after your way, M. Tiretta’s gift?”

La Coque set his white teeth and nodded. He looked very much like a
snapping terrier, whom it would be dangerous to handle incautiously.

“I do not belittle his gift,” he said. “I spell it with a smaller
letter than you, that is all.”

“And with another significance--you imply something,” said the duke,
after frowning at him awhile. “What is it?”

“Perhaps my ears,” replied la Coque, “are more sensitive than most to
the subtle nuances of sound--to discords, disharmonies, so slight as
to be imperceptible to less exquisite understandings. Perhaps her
Highness is likewise constituted, so that within this Tiretta’s
mellifluous tones she is able to detect a something insidious,
incorrect, which at once fascinates and repels her.”

The duke did not answer; and presently he went on:

“I was over at Colorno yesterday, and listening--not to him, you may
be sure, but to one who observes things, and reports to me in
confidence. See clever Hyacinth laugh to himself there, as if he
guesses who that someone may be. This Hyacinth of ours, monsieur, has
a marvellous gift for detecting smoke by its smell. Put his fat nose
above a hearth, and ten to one he will instruct you presently where
the fire burns. That is not the case with her Highness’s governess,
whom we may certainly commend for an old fool--saving her marquisate.
She cannot see an inch beyond _her_ nose in any direction; and, when
it comes to smoke, a man may blow it in her eyes in the name of
flattery, and she will go blind rather than not accommodate him.”

The duke, still staring with a perplexed expression and still silent,
made a gesture to have the letter returned to him. Receiving it from
la Coque’s hands, he sat awhile studying and frowning over its opening
sentences. Presently he looked up.

“I find no shadow of justification here,” he said, “for such an
innuendo.”

“What innuendo, monsieur?”

“That--that----” Don Philip rose suddenly to his feet, angry
excitement in his eyes. “Are you daring to imply that this man is
capable of such a mad abuse of his mission?”

La Coque, his lids stretched, his chin hanging, looked the picture of
stupefied innocence.

“Why, what can your Excellency mean?” he said.

“What did _you_ mean, sir, by your art with a little a?”

“Nothing whatever, but that I do not rate the chevalier’s capacity for
music so high as you do.”

“And that was all?”

“What else, in heaven’s name?”

“You suggest that he blinds the marquise’s eyes--to what?”

“O, to nothing in particular!”

“I insist upon knowing.”

“Your Excellency overwhelms me. The mere thoughtless speculation of an
idle mind. I put two and two together, not even considering that,
according to some people, they do not necessarily make four.”

“Come, explain yourself.”

“Why, her Highness, by what we hear, is not, and very sensibly, moved
by this man’s meretricious Art--with a big A; and yet she is moved by
his art.”

“Well?”

“Well, monsieur?”

“You suggest a personal interest?”

“I suggest nothing--nothing whatever.”

“Who was your informant?”

La Coque smiled, and shook his head.

The duke stood moody and preoccupied a moment. He had never in his
heart approved this fantastic wooing by deputy; and had only abetted
it for a diplomatic reason. It was still an open question with him and
his duchess whether Maria Theresa destined Isabella for her son Joseph
or for his younger brother Leopold, and, while that question hung in
the balance, he had been willing to contribute what bias he could to
the desired result. But supposing the girl’s own perversity was
actually promising to confound that issue by way of an intrigue with
the chosen instrument to its success! It was the day of slack
moralities, and he had no hesitation in putting it so to himself, with
little resentment but for the offence it implied against policy. And
yet he loved his daughter in his way, and believed in her.

Believed in her, of course. She was utterly incapable of such a
descent from all that constituted her his child and an Infanta of
Spain. The thing was insanely preposterous--a vicious calumny. His
expression cleared.

“My good Charles,” he said ironically, “your discretion is beyond
praise; only, evidence withheld is little better than false evidence.
I should recommend you, for the future, to modify your spite against a
better man, or it may get you into trouble.”

And, with these severe words, he left the room.

La Roque, following, paused an instant to whisper in the ear of the
crestfallen coxcomb:

“Mum, Charles--mum for your life! Mamselle Fanchette was it?--and in
her Highness’s own suite It would never do to reveal the source, would
it? But trust to my silence.”

La Coque, grinning savagely, struck his right hand softly into the
palm of his left.

“A better man?” he muttered. “We’ll see. Let him conquer where he
will, then. Only, if signs are reported true, the victory will not be
exactly as desired.”

But from that moment his jealousy of the rival singer developed into a
positive hatred.




 CHAPTER IX.
 THE DECOY

Tiretta one morning was traversing an inner corridor of the palace
on his way to the gardens, when, passing by a private door which gave
egress from the Infanta’s apartments, he almost ran against a young
woman who at that moment issued from the opening. The lady effected a
quite natural little scream and start, notwithstanding the fact that
her eyes had been, but the instant before, watching through the
door-slit the young gentleman’s approach. He apologised becomingly,
with many regrets for the alarm he had occasioned, and was proceeding
on his way, when an exclamation from the girl arrested him. She had
pressed a faultless little hand to that region in her dainty bodice
under which her heart was presumably lodged, and, with her eyes half
closed, appeared to be swaying slightly. He returned at once, and,
with an aspect of real concern, offered his support.

Mademoiselle Becquet resisted, though faintly, the proffered
assistance. There was, after all, something of the moral
_hors-d’œuvre_, of the appetisingly unexpected, about this early
capture of her slim waist by a shapely masculine arm. Finally she
turned her head away, and, with a sigh, yielded herself to the embrace
just as it appeared about to be withdrawn.

“You are better?” said Tiretta anxiously.

She gulped, still panting a little.

“It was the suddenness, monsieur. My heart is weak.” (The wicked
fibster! It was as tough as indiarubber, what there was of it.)

He expressed his compunction:

“And soft, I am sure,” said he, “on behalf of a penitent sinner.”

She smiled, in a recovered way.

“If you please, monsieur. But you need not take advantage of that
absolution. A soft heart is the most fatal possession a girl can own
to in this bad world. It were as foolish as to flaunt her jewels in
the Ghetto.”

Tiretta, with a laugh, released the slender waist.

“If you can stand alone,” he said.

“O, yes!” she answered--and indeed there was no doubt she could.

He looked at her with a twinkling gravity.

“What is your name, child?”

She dipped him a demure little curtsey.

“Fanchette Becquet, at your service, monsieur. I am her Highness’s
confidential maid.”

“She is prettily served, Fanchette.”

“And handsomely, I am sure, monsieur. You see I return the
compliment.”

He laughed again at her insolence--and checked himself suddenly.

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

“O!” she said innocently: “do you not love my mistress? Everybody
loves her.”

He breathed again. There was safety in generalisations.

“If everybody loves her, then I suppose I must,” he said.

She clapped her pink hands.

“I will tell her. She will like to know that.”

He stared at the girl aghast; then nipped one of her slender wrists.

“If you dare! Are you off your head?”

“Perhaps, monsieur. You see you startled me so.”

“I don’t believe a word of it. I believe this was premeditated.”

“Yes, that is quite true.”

“It was?”

“I saw you coming before you saw me. I thought I should like to be her
Highness’s proxy for your attentions. I would have let you kiss me, if
you had offered.”

He released her, and stepped back.

“You are certainly mad,” he exclaimed.

She laughed: they were quite alone: then came close up to him.

“Would you like to practise again on me, monsieur--to test the
softness of her heart by deputy? No?”

“I am no thief,” he said, as if stupefied. “Keep your jewels, for what
I care.”

“That is well,” she answered mockingly, “since they are bespoken by
another. Only I love an intrigue.”

He commanded himself by a great effort; assumed a chilling
masterfulness, if he did not feel it.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I cannot pretend to know on what false and
vicious assumptions you are daring thus to impeach my honour. They are
mistaken, whatever they are; and let that suffice for you.”

Fanchette set her lips tight, and nodded her head once or twice.

“O! very well,” she said. “There is no harm done. If I am mistaken I
am mistaken, that is all.”

He should have gone; but he unwisely lingered.

“I believe,” he said, “I ought to probe this to the bottom. Only
gossip takes good care to be elusive.”

“It cannot help itself, monsieur,” said the girl. “It is all shaped
upon signs and hints and glances--upon a mystic code which only the
initiated can interpret.”

“Then in that case you are not one of the initiated.”

“I do my best, monsieur. Hey-day! Well, from my own point of view, I
am sorry for my mistress--especially as she looks, for her
entertainment, to the company this afternoon of so chill a cavalier.”

“What do you mean?”

“O! nothing, but that we are going, she and I, to that old Aquaviva’s
garden; and without the she-dragon, who will be engaged over M. du
Tillot.”

“Her Highness expects me to accompany her?”

“I did not say that. To think she could so commit herself! But she
sighs over the incompleteness of her dear orange-grove, which, says
she, only needs its Orpheus to be the sweetest garden under heaven.”

“It is melancholy to have to produce music to order, is it not,
Fanchette?”

“I think it is, monsieur.”

“Well, I must respond, I suppose. It will only be a little while
longer. It has this use, that you shall convince yourself by my
behaviour of the wickedness of your innuendo.”

Convince herself as he convinced himself, no doubt. He told his
conscience, as he walked away, that thus to go forward, steadfastly
and dutifully, his eyes set to his mission, his ears deaf to the jeers
and chuckles of scandal, was his only safe course. There was a story
somewhere he had read of a prince whose way to a definite purpose lay
up a stone-strewn hill, every pebble of which, when he came to the
test, was clamant with an agonised or seductive voice entreating him
to turn. And he did turn, and was changed into stone. Well, he must
not be like that prince, that was all--an easy matter, it seemed. But
the spirits of evil know their business better than man, or they would
not provide so simple a lure for his ruin. It is the complicated trap
which fails to beguile the confiding little mouse; the deadly snare
consists in no more than a fragment of bait and a wire spring.

Just to go steadily forward: yes, but this unexpected halt, with its
startling revelation, had suddenly made of that plain road a rather
formidable maze. Had he appeared, noticeably appeared, to be making
too personal a matter of this business? Then how was a part so
impassioned to be played in a spirit of aloofness? He swore he was
loyal to his mission, loyal to his friend, that he was a man of
honour, that he had never consciously wavered in his fidelity. Of
course he had not. The devil knows better than to inoculate his
victims perceptibly. It is a very favourite trick of his to encourage
a man, who knows nothing whatever about moral architecture, to build
over-heavily upon his moral strength. Tiretta was so confident in his,
that he had never thought of questioning its capacity for supporting
any test. He did not now; he would not, Fanchette and all such
mischievous gossips despite. He was just, he flattered himself,
beginning to succeed in his romantic undertaking, and to feel a
certain thrill in the near accomplishment of a task which had once
promised to prove so distasteful. To withdraw now would certainly seem
to give a colour to calumny. If only for the lady’s sake, he must
prosecute his purpose to its triumphant end.

What a chivalrous Tiretta, to be sure; but indeed, he was not yet so
conscious of his own state as to be guilty of lying to himself in the
matter.

And in the meantime Mademoiselle Fanchette stood and looked after the
retreating figure, and curtsied derisively to its back.

“You are a very pretty gentleman,” she said: “but I know a prettier.”

She had that other in her mind’s eye. He was also a musician, but of a
very different “tone,” so to speak. He did not deal in the visionary
stuff of dreams, but in the practical material of courtship--the sort
of suitor a woman could understand. He set adorable words to
intelligible music; one was at no trouble with him to puzzle out
sentiments which fitted themselves quite naturally into the
love-traffic they recorded and provoked. And he too was handsome, but
in a braver, bolder way, wooing, as a man should, by compulsion. She
was in fact very much under the thrall of this cavalier, though still
coquetting--for business’ sake, as some Frenchwomen will--with the
thought of capitulation.

And yet, with a curious perversity, she was jealous of the very
quality she sneered at--acutely jealous of the mistress who might
command, if she liked and as she liked, that dreamer of dreams. She
did not understand M. Tiretta’s mystical rhapsodies (she had often,
herself unseen or unobserved, heard him improvise), or the fine
subtlety of his mind, or the rareness of his gift; she did not admire
either his melancholy looks or his serene humour. But an uneasy
suspicion as to the superior value of these qualifications, as
compared with la Coque’s showy and meretricious ones, haunted her. She
felt them like supercilious reflections on her own vulgar taste, or on
what they seemed to imply to be such; and the thought, as with common
natures, did not drive her to aspire, but to degrade. She had no wish,
for herself or her lover, to rise to Tiretta’s level; she would have
liked dearly to pull him down to theirs. Wherefore, in the prosecution
of that amiable design, she had been quite ready to lend herself a
subtle instrument to the ruin of that rival favourite. She would even,
if provoked to it, have given her body to the task, as she had her
soul. To hate and to seduce, to seduce because she hated, to risk
loving because she had seduced--that was something her mental
attitude. It was the passionist French view, and Fanchette was
excessively French.




 CHAPTER X.
 THE ORANGE GROVE

All the glowing air was steeped in incense. The mealy pollen of the
orange blossoms, washed out by the rain of the preceding days, had
dried and scattered its largesse, powdering with gold dust the purple
whimples of the violets underneath. The smell of warm moistened grass
rose to mix with and to freshen the languider perfume, whose excess
had otherwise been cloying. No whisper breathed, no blade stirred in
all the lovely grove. It was like a painted picture, each leaf of it,
each waxen blossom, each incandescent globe of fruit drawn clear and
motionless against its background of vivid blue; and so stilly
luminous throughout, that its shadows were but tempered light,
embroidered, like rich velvet, with spangles of brighter emerald;
while the very prismatic sparkles with which the air was dusted seemed
themselves to float asleep.

An hour ago a nightingale had sung, sweet as a little bell-glass;
since when this hush had fallen on the grove, sunk in warm drowsiness
within its encircling green--a quiet so profound, one might have
fancied one could distinguish the soft rustle of the cloud-skirts, as
now and then they trailed across the sky.

A single blossom dropped, and the whole illusion scattered, like a
mirrored image in a pool into which an acorn has fallen.

On the instant there came into this voiceless paradise the figures of
a man and a stunted boy. The man carried a lute or mandolin slung over
his shoulder; the boy, large-headed and large-hatted like a gnome,
followed importantly in the other’s footsteps.

“It is the enchanted garden of Hesperus,” said Tiretta, pausing on the
threshold. He lowered his voice instinctively, as if he had broken
unexpectedly into some woodland shrine of the gods; then went a soft
step or two and paused again.

“It is a very good plantation,” said Bissy, tolerant and superior. “We
have established it against some odds, signore, I can tell you.”

“What odds?” He looked at the imp vacantly, his thoughts elsewhere.

“Wind and snow,” said Bissy. “The trees have to be protected and fed.
Though they are grafted on sound lemon stocks, they are capricious at
first, like infants put to a wet-nurse, and require a deal of coaxing.
When lusty, they become strong feeders, as Mamselle Fanchette will
tell you.”

Tiretta caught the name.

“Who will tell me?”

“Fanchette. She is her Excellency’s lady. She likes to hear that these
trees drink blood. They will supply right wedding tokens for the
brides of brave men, she says.”

The old florist, busy and preoccupied, had not recognised the stranger
when the latter had ridden over from Colorno to visit his gardens; but
Bissy had at once, and had offered to escort the gentleman whither he
would.

“It is down there, through the juniper thicket,” he said, pointing
suddenly, with an air of shrewd confidence, “that one reaches the
margin of the backwater where you first came upon her Excellency
wading. Holy mother, what a state the old lady was in! It looked at
first as if she would have liked to drink _your_ blood, signore. And
then all at once she changed.”

Tiretta took one step and nipped the elf by his ear.

“Ow--ow!” wailed Bissy; completely flabbergasted.

The chevalier looked formidable.

“Your tongue is too long, whelp. Stand still a moment while I clip it
for you.”

“No, signore, don’t!”

“I think I have no choice.”

“For the love of the saints, signore. Ow--ow! I will tell you
something. It is ill to hurt one who has tried to do you a service.”

“What service?”

“The ring, signore, that you threw away in a pet. I hunted for it, I
did, when the water sank low in the creek; but I could not find it.”

“You had no thought of me in the matter, you egg. You wanted it for
yourself.”

He seemed to warm from counterfeit to genuine anger as he spoke. He
wrung the boy’s ear, so that the poor mannikin howled again.

“I’ve a mind to pull it off for you. What the devil do you mean,
daring to criticise the actions of your betters!”

Suddenly conscious, in the midst of his fume, of its absurdity, he
released his prisoner and stepped back. Poor Bissy, holding both hands
to his smarting headpiece, stood wriggling and sniffing noisily.

“Stop that!” commanded the chevalier; “or I shall have a double reason
for gagging you.”

He could not tell himself what had provoked him to the assault. The
nature of a particularly unpalatable reminder might have been
responsible for it. No self-respect likes to have recalled to it the
processes of past humiliations, even though it directly owes to them
its present position. Help a nerveless subject to decision, help a
diffident lover to his mistress, but never thereafter imply to either
of them that he was once other than the masterful hero your assistance
made him.

Not that Bissy had been of much assistance to our hero on a certain
occasion. Only things had altered since then; the old atmosphere of
bitterness had sweetened to a strange new flavour.

Seeing the boy, with swollen lids and puckered face, trying to repress
his sobs, remorse gripped Tiretta. That passion was always his
besetting weakness. It urged him to reparations which were even more
ill-advised than the hasty acts which led to them. If he had been
unduly angry, he was inclined now to be unduly lenient.

“Come,” he said; “I haven’t killed you. Tell me the truth; what would
you have done with the ring if you had found it?”

Bissy, morally chastened, gulped and snuffled.

“I should have done the honest thing, signore.”

“Good boy,” said Tiretta. And then he added magnanimously: “Well, if
you are successful, you can keep it for your pains.”

That was generous of him, since the ring did not belong to him to
dispose of--a conclusion perhaps shrewdly appreciated by the owlish
urchin.

“I do not want it,” said Bissy, aggrieved and righteous. “The most I
should expect would be a lira for my trouble. Her Excellency, no
doubt, will give me that for her slipper.”

“What slipper, boy?”

“The one she lost in the pool. I found that, though I could not find
the other.”

A sudden warmth seemed to suffuse Tiretta’s whole being. He held out
his hand nonchalantly.

“I am staying at Colorno. I shall probably see her Highness this
afternoon. Give it me, and I will return it to her.”

Bissy, still wiping his eyes, shook his head.

“I want the credit myself. Besides, I have not got it with me.”

“Listen here: I will give you a golden ducat for it.”

“Why, signore?”

Why, indeed? The shameful fool blushed before that small inquisitor.
He stammered:

“I--I offended her Highness that day. It will serve as a
peace-offering.”

“A dirty one,” said Bissy. “It is all stained and muddy.”

Tiretta had one infallible argument with the obdurate. It was the one
which came to him naturally and confidently. He put his hand quite
caressingly on the boy’s shoulder.

“Very well,” he said: “it does not matter. But, inasmuch as I have
wronged you, child, I am going to atone with a song. Would you like to
hear me make music?”

“If you please, signore.”

Tiretta penetrated a little way among the trees, and stopped, resting
his back against a trunk.

“Sit there,” he said; and Bissy, allured and wondering, squatted
before him like a toad.

The troubadour unstrung his instrument, and, tuning it a moment softly
at his ear, wandered into a symphony as sweet as falling flowers. His
eyes, as he played, grew dreamy and remote; he forgot his purpose and
his company; the spirit of the haunted place stole into his brain,
drugging it to oblivion of all else. The words came, when they came,
independent of his own volition, it seemed:

  “I know not what I love--
   A shadow, a delight,
  Like the morning moon,
   Thin wraith of her that night
     Bared warm to my impassioned dreams,
     And now so cold and distant seems.

  “I know not that I love--
   Yet one flower from its breast
  Doth breathe a sweeter perfume
   Than it ever once possest.
     And why this is I do not know,
     But only joy that it is so.

  “I know not what is love
   But a thing of whims and hates,
  Since what my dreams fulfil to me
   Her scorn repudiates
     The moment that my eyes, awake,
     Would close for ever for her sake.”

He ended on a tumbled note; and to the sense of a sudden creeping in
his heart. Something had moved on the threshold of the grove hard by.
Bissy, his mouth agape, scrambled to his pudgy feet.

“It is Madonna,” said the boy. And then, approaching Tiretta, he
whispered, “you shall have the slipper, signore,” and, retreating,
scuttled from the grove, ducking his obeisance to the lady as he
passed.

Tiretta remained motionless, a feeling of strange awe, of strange
guilt at his heart. And, as he stood, she came on and passed him, and
was gone into the grove.

Its sweet and fitting apparition; her footfall had seemed to make no
sound; her robe was white as mist; one moment she had turned her grave
innocent eyes to his, whether in wonder or rebuke he could not tell,
and so in silence had moved on. He almost believed it, in truth, to be
a spirit, conjured up of his unconscious rhapsody. Had she heard it,
marked it, resented it? He hardly knew himself of what he had sung;
from what spring of unearthly emotion what passion had risen into
expression. Only this he knew--that no thought of friendship, of
loyalty to another’s interests had inspired him.

Why should it have? It was no new thing for such abstract sentiments,
bubbling up from the soundless deeps of his soul, to find on his lips
their irresistible utterance. He was the voice on these occasions of
something beyond his control, of something for which he could not be
held responsible.

He stirred, in a sudden revulsion of feeling. A little heat of anger
overtook him, and he consigned Fanchette to the devil. It was she who
had tempted him into this situation, with her common winks and becks
and nudges, so to speak--tempted him, and only to be snubbed for his
pains. Why should he submit to being thus passed over, as if he had
sinned against some code of conduct or good taste? He would follow,
and ask her Highness point blank if his presence in the grove was
desired or not.

Yet a thrill ran through his veins as he moved to give effect to his
resolution. He felt it, and set his teeth, frowning, as a man might
who resents his own blushes over some innocuous malapropism into which
he has been betrayed.

She had paused among the trees at a little distance away, a slender
spirit-like figure, seeming half diaphanous in the shadowy glow of
things, claimed both of fancy and reality, like a leaf-dappled
hamadryad. His mandolin slung over his arm, he went straight up to
her, and, standing erect, the soldier uppermost, spoke out his
thought:

“My presence here is unwelcome to your Highness?”

Her face looked pale; there was still a wonder in her eyes as she
turned to him:

“It was quite unforeseen, monsieur.”

He bowed.

“I accept the rebuke. My coming was due to a misapprehension, for
which I am not responsible. But the mistake is soon remedied.”

Her eyes seemed to wonder more and more. And then the faintest flush
stole to her cheek.

“Do you not like my orange grove, monsieur?” she said.

“It is beautiful,” he answered. “I seem doomed unwittingly to
desecrate your Highness’s chosen retreats.”

She looked down a moment; a minutest smile rose to her lips:

“I have no claim to it really,” she said; “only I love its sweetness
and solitude. Bissy is its inspiring genius--as you seem to have
discovered.”

He saw the sparkle in the eyes she raised, and stood spellbound by it.

“I had wronged the boy--hurt him,” he said very seriously; “and my
song was in the nature of an atonement.”

“A strange one, surely, for a boy’s hurt.” She was grave all at once.
“What had he done to offend you?”

“Will you please not to ask me? I am a hasty fool in many things.”

“You mean you sometimes give pain without intending it?”

He bowed his head.

“Monsieur,” she said, very earnestly, “in that case will you throw
away that flower from your button-hole?”

He seemed to have instinctively known what was coming. He put his hand
over the withered posy.

“My theme,” he said--“that night--it cannot have hurt you. Madame
herself proposed it.”

“Whence did you gather your theme?” she asked him.

“From the floor of the arbour,” he answered. “What then? It was of his
Highness’s martyrdom I made it the text.”

She sought his eyes, a wistful pain lined between her own.

“Ah!” he said, before the appeal on her lips could be spoken; “do not
insist. Let me buy my right to it with a song--a dream--a
memory--something I cannot explain elsewise.”

He had caught at his instrument; a madness seemed to have risen in his
brain, desperate, inspired, overbearing, all in one; he hardly knew
what he was saying or doing--only that some passion, insidious,
unrealised till this moment, was mastering and overwhelming him.
“Listen,” he whispered, while she stood before him white and
wondering--“hear what it means to me--what emotions--what old sweet
agonies of death and parting.” The music came to him, the words, the
throbbing anguish of it, as he spoke:

  “Love-in-a-mist! Blue eyes in tangled hair--
  Wet eyes that brim through lashes of dark rain--
  Where have I known your mystery, your pain?
  In what green gardens kissed your soft despair?

  “There was a parting once--but when? but where?
  I ask it of my heart, and ask in vain--
  Only a wild voice weeps across the main:
  ‘Love-in-a-mist! Wet eyes in tangled hair!’”

He ended; and a dead silence ensued. Then the girl, moving like one
half stupefied, and with a sigh that seemed to rend her bosom, took a
single step away and stopped.

“Forgive me,” said Tiretta. His mood was spent, exhausted for the
moment; he could only utter that broken prayer.

She put her hand to her eyes, and seemed to stumble. He was by her
side in a moment. “I did not mean it!” he said hoarsely. “God knows
what tempted me!”

She looked up at him then very piteously.

“What gardens?” she whispered, as if she could have wept.

He answered like one in a dream:

“There were green bays; and the mist was over everything. Strange
shapes came and went in it--they shrank and dilated. And the eyes of
the women were like heaven in April--strange wet blue eyes behind the
rain. They come out of sleep: they have haunted me since
childhood--the strange eyes--the wild visions of the North. Ah, do not
think me mad, Madonna!”

His breast was heaving, his hands entreating. She moved on, motioning
to him to walk beside her. As they passed slowly together through the
sweet scented shadows, he grew more composed--and she also, it seemed.
Presently she spoke to him, in a low earnest voice:

“Will you try to forget it--never to let it be again?”

She held out her hand; and, like a man who delivers his own
death-warrant, he detached the faded flower from his breast, and laid
it reverently in that soft palm.

“Condemn me,” he muttered, walking with bowed head, “to a traitor’s
death. I deserve the worst.”

“It was a momentary possession,” she answered. “The evil thing is
gone.”

He sighed. “As I must go--as I must go, lest it come again.”

She did not answer. Stealing a look at her, he saw something in her
face which made him knot his fingers together, as if forcibly to
control some scarce endurable emotion. And so they wandered on, as it
were in a tragic trance, both soul-stricken and both dumb. Threading
the golden trees, as if always to weave deeper the silences between
themselves and the common world, they came out presently, unconscious
of how they had reached it, upon a green sward sloping to the river.
And there the man turned, and gazed upon his companion.

“Do you not recognise the place?” he said--“of my shame?”

He saw her lips move, and the tears gather in her eyes.

“No, of mine.”

Could mortal fortitude forbear--endure further? With one mad step he
had her in his arms, and their lips met.




 CHAPTER XI.
 SWEET BASIL

Fanchette was chattering to Aquaviva, like the intolerable magpie he
thought her, when a couple, issuing from the orange grove, came into
her ken approaching up a flowery path. She was silent instantly--a
relief so grateful to the old gardener, that he was moved to raise his
head from his work to examine into the cause of it. He grunted his
satisfaction:

“That is a mercy. You will attend to your own duties now instead of
interfering with mine.”

Fanchette tossed her head.

“What an old bear, to be sure! I shall have to withdraw my patronage.”

“Do,” said Aquaviva. “It will be the better for my reputation.”

She would have retorted, only that she was intent on other things. As
the couple came near, she ran to her mistress, and smoothed and
fondled her with a privileged intimacy.

“Ah! you have been exploring, you bad demoiselle, careless, as always,
of your poor Fanchette’s credit. Look at the moss stains on your
skirt, and the flower crushed in your bosom! And the sun has caught
your neck and face, too, naughty mistress.”

As she readjusted things with dainty fluttering fingers, she just
glanced with an arch smile at Tiretta--a little telegraphic signal,
full of comprehension and meaning. He looked away immediately.

“There, that will do, Fanchette,” said Isabella, flushing finely. “It
is time we went home, is it not? What is grandfather doing there?”

“He is doing something horrible, disgusting. You will not like to see
it.”

More to escape an embarrassment than from any awakened curiosity,
Isabella walked on. Tiretta, dropping behind a moment, whispered in
the maid’s ear:

“Little liar!”

“If you please, monsieur,” murmured Fanchette demurely.

“She never expected me.”

“Did I not say so?”

“You implied that she did.”

“And was that why you came?”

He drew up, baffled. She gave a tiny laugh.

“It was to convince me of the wickedness of my innuendo, was it not?”
she whispered. “Well, I am convinced, monsieur.”

He had better have been silent from the first. She put a finger to her
lips.

“Hush!” she said. “You can trust in me--you can always trust in me.”

He should have answered; should have repudiated, then and finally, the
implication. He hesitated--and the next moment they had overtaken the
Infanta, where she had paused beside the old perfumer.

“Grandfather, what is that in your hand?”

The old man rose, groaning as he straightened his back. He held by the
handle a lipped vessel, half-full of a sluggish ruby liquid.

“You should know,” he said. “It is what your loved oranges grow rich
and fat on.”

“Not blood?”

“Bullocks’ blood.”

Isabella, with an exclamation of horror, shrunk back.

“Those are not oranges, my friend,” said Tiretta.

He pointed to a row of little shrubs or herbs, set in earthenware jars
against a sunny wall. They were green and bushy, and the vessels were
of many colours, fancifully designed and decorated.

“They are sweet basil, or basil-thyme, master,” said Aquaviva--“a
common stock, until enriched by good feeding. It is the way of the
world all over. It is blood which makes the quality--meat-juice, and
plenty of it. These are having their first weaning, and the result
will show in a year, or maybe two or three. Simple enough in
themselves, they will flower, when they do, fit to grace a lady’s
bower. ’Tis said they flourish best on the blood of murdered men.”

“Come away, Fanchette,” said Isabella. But the maid lingered.

“Harkee, my friend,” said Tiretta: “I will buy one of your basils
unweaned--that pretty one at the end there in the green jar--and back
it against all the rest to flower first and smell the sweetest.”

“As you will, master--and be a fool for your pains.”

Tiretta saw the young lady into her carriage--a service accepted by
her very formally and silently--and presently rode back to Colorno,
his purchase under his arm.




 CHAPTER XII.
 PAOLO AND FRANCESCA

  “... deep into the dying day
  The happy princess followed him.”

It had been one delirious moment snatched from the hands of fate. So
it was understood between them--an impulsive contact, passionate,
transient, never to be spoken of or repeated. Isabella might, if she
would, have made of that mute stipulation a definite compromise with
her conscience, since a princess, no less than any other woman, was
free to barter her lips for one instant of delight, provided she
incurred thereby no after responsibility towards their ravisher. There
were flowers, in the world of gallantry, to be sipped, as well as
hives to be plundered; and one was not called upon to hold oneself
bound to every honey-loving freebooter whom one permitted to settle a
moment and taste.

She might have thought thus, I say; only, if she had, she would not
have been the passion-pure child, innocent and affectionate, of our
knowledge. She was, in fact, very troubled, very shamed, over what she
had done, or allowed to be done. And yet her heart, conscious-guilty
as it might feel, would thrill in the memory of that moment. Though
she had since made one to that unspoken compact of silence and
abstention, she never had a thought but that that instant of emotional
self-surrender had delivered her, a rightful captive, into the hands
of her conqueror. She could never now love another man; only her love
must be content to remain for all time an abstraction, a pathetic
dream, impossible of realisation. If only they would consent to leave
it so; to let her die unwedded--perhaps in the peaceful seclusion of a
cloister.

So a single kiss wrought on this loving nature, that it had for her
the tragic sanctity of a pledge. It did not matter how extenuated by
good resolutions. The fire once kindled would not so be quenched. Nor
would the cold water these two engaged themselves to throw on their
own heart-burnings have any effect but to make the heat glow presently
the fiercer. That is a mere chemical commonplace, and, unless love is
to be accepted for something other than a matter of gases and
combustion, follows of necessity. Fire, to be put out by water, must
be put out, and not simply fed.

It is true that, in the first of the reaction from that madness, they
had both shrunk back aghast over the magnitude of the peril they had
touched and escaped. Yet the very sympathy engendered of that common
fright was fatal. It constituted between them a secret which by habit
became a tender and a passionate one. Whatever distance was affected
in their relations, there was that knowledge to obliterate it. They
were at all times and in all places conscious of it and of one
another.

And so, what was to be the end? An idle problem. If love could think
of ends and retributions, love would not be love but sanity.

They continued to meet--were they not expected to meet? That was the
mortal irony of it all. Omnipotence laid no embargo on their
friendship--applauded and encouraged it, rather. The signs of their
better understanding filled the old _gouvernante_ with jubilation. “He
comes to vindicate my belief in him,” she wrote to the duke. “In a
little you will find the girl converted to your wishes.”

And Tiretta? He did not succumb without a struggle. He hated his own
treachery, but he could not hate himself, so sanctified of that
idyllic passion. For long he fought desperately to command his own
humorous, philosophical, independent view of things--to remain “the
master of his fate, the captain of his soul.” And all the time he knew
that his only resource lay in flight; and he said to himself, “I await
no more than her dismissal.” But she never spoke the word that was to
banish him and kill his heart, and he said, “To abandon her unbidden,
to leave her to bear the brunt of this alone, were to play the part of
a coward.”

Specious, perhaps; yet in a measure the truth; only that his own
defences weakened while he lingered.

And then at length he could battle no more, but, spent and exhausted,
gave up the struggle. He was like a man who, having swum too far from
shore in a tide-race, and seeking to return, grows slowly and
agonisingly conscious of the futility of his efforts, and yields
himself first to despair and then to resignation, keeping no more than
afloat as he drifts out into the unknown. He had done his best, but
the tide was too strong for him. Let those who had committed him to
the effort take upon their own consciences the result.

In the first, pitying her embarrassment in his presence, responding,
as he believed, to her unspoken wish, he rather avoided her; or, when
they met, addressed her only with a grave and formal courtesy. The
inevitable change happened one day when they chanced upon one another
near the green arbour sacred to an unforgettable memory. She was
standing there alone, looking down upon her own lily-pond, when he
came upon her, and he would have withdrawn, with a low-spoken apology,
only she stayed him. He stopped, his every vein tingling, beside her.
She did not speak for a moment; and then she looked up in his face,
with a sudden desperate resolve in her eyes.

“That day,” she said hurriedly--“when I spoke to you at last--I had
meant it to show I was sorry for my rudeness. Why did you snub me
about my lilies? I think you love the children better than you do me.”

“Love!” He repeated the word like one stupefied.

She was so unsophisticated, so incapable of maintaining, in the face
of apparent unkindness, the pose to which her conscience had condemned
her, that she was unable to qualify her reproach by a word.

He stood as if stunned; then very gently sought her unresisting hand,
and raised it to his lips.

“If I might love you!” he whispered, imprisoning the soft palm, and
gathering it fearfully to his breast. “But it is madness.”

“I thought you meant to show me so,” she answered--“that that was why
you avoided me.”

“And if I did--what else was possible?” A long ecstatic sigh quivered
from his lips. “I must go,” he said. “It is the only way. You must
forget me and forgive me.” He bent suddenly, and looked in her face;
and his voice broke. “O, my love, my love--keep back your tears!”

Gently she released her hand, turning away from him. And he strode a
step or two, hither and thither, in unbearable pain.

“Why have they laid this cruelty on us?” he said. “I cannot live and
endure it. Tell me to go.”

“I cannot.”

So near inaudible--so whispered from a bursting heart! He felt as if
his own heart would break with the rapture of it. Again he turned from
her, and strode forth and back.

“Prometheus!” he cried. “Give me my fire! I defy the gods! Afloat on
the long drift of dreams--everything surrendered; everything believed
possible; no to-morrow to this ecstasy. Isabel, we will be sweet
lovers, my sweet love.”

One beautiful moment, in that embowered place, he held her in his
arms; then put her gently from him.

“That I must teach you duplicity!” he said--“so truthful, so innocent!
But we must be circumspect, or the dream will end. It is all a dream,
is it not, dear love?”

She could not kill the happiness in her eyes; but she made them grave
for his behoof.

“If we might talk,” she said; “knowing what we know, but never
alluding to it; keeping for ever that dear secret--even from one
another.”

“For ever!” he said. “Well, what have we to do with time? I would
rather be mad than sane. Talk on, sweet music.”

“I have so much to say--and yet I have nothing. I think you have come
into my heart, and that no words are needed there.”

“Yet we must talk, being mortal, for lucidity’s sake. Tell me, how did
I steal in?”

“I cannot. Your voice made me sorry; and then--my own cruelty. Were
you thinking of that when you sang to Bissy?”

“I suppose so.”

“I was frightened of myself, monsieur.”

“Monsieur?”

“What can I call you?”

“I will tell you. My real name is not that I am known by--a nom de
guerre, in literal truth. My own I laid to rest long years ago, never
again to be revived. But love knows its own resurrections. I will tell
you. It is for your sweet ears, for your sweet lips alone; and you
will keep my secret, Isabel?”

She promised, and to the end was faithful to her vow.

“And now,” said he, “where is my flower?”

To his rapture, she brought the little withered spray out from her
bosom, and kissed it once and gave it to him.

“It shall lie on my dead heart,” he said.

Her voice was full, her eyes were shining, as she answered:

“It gave me a living one, I think. O, love, the strangeness and the
sorrow of your music! It robbed me of my soul, of my will, that day I
listened here.”

He gazed at her, his eyes rapt and dreaming.

“It was the rain,” he said. “Such a wild wet day, after long heat,
brings to me always, like no other, the passion of the past.”

“Your past?”

“How can I say? Old pictures, old hauntings, young dead faces--the air
is full of their streaming, the wind of their voices. And I know them,
yet they are strange to me; I hear them, yet they utter no word. They
were all born and perished ages before I reached the world; they come
out of the wild beautiful places, the mists and mysteries of the green
gardens where I kissed your eyes--yes, _your_ beautiful eyes,
beloved.”

“Not to part?” she whispered.

He did not answer, but he put his lips to the dead flower before he
hid it in his breast.

“Are you terrified of me?” he said. “Do you think me mad?” And she
answered, dwelling on his face: “Be mad, if to abandon me were
reason.”

Drowned in that sunny ecstasy, they both stood silent for awhile. Then
Tiretta sighed and stretched his shoulders, as if in blissful waking
from a dream; and he looked with a tender humour at his comrade.

“I am not all moonstruck,” he said. “I would not have you think that
of me, lady. I have rubbed shoulders with life. I can be practical on
occasion. This tendency to rhapsodising is a sort of possession that
visits me at times. It puts visions in my mind and words on my lips.
Hold the North responsible for it.”

“You speak so strangely of the North,” she said wistfully; “and often
I think your eyes are turned to it.”

“Over the long wastes of water. It shines there so mistily,” he
answered; “it blossoms so full of faint entreating faces. Is it the
way home, I wonder--the path to that real unknown God, the God of
utter love, to whom, shrinking from the Jehovah of Israel, we are for
ever blindly stretching out our arms--the God to whom we turn, as the
poor world-broken turns from the high-altar to the pitiful Mother, the
lovely and grief-hushing in some wonderful, inexplicable way? So it
seems to me, my Isabel--the long far lands of home--the shores of
unutterable consolation. Shall we go home together some day?”

She answered like Ruth, a very passion of emotion in her voice.

“Sweet love,” he said, deeply moved; “so dear and strange the North
seems to me--a symbol and a mystery. And to reach it at last, just a
sleep and a returning. You did not know I was of northern blood?”

“No, I did not know.”

“But I am, Isabel. When was it--when your
great-great-great-great-grandfather was on the Spanish throne, and his
fleet sailed northward to destroy the heretic. Do you know your
house’s history, child--the magnificence and the shame of it? How
those little islands, those little hazy islands, planted like green
ramparts on the threshold of the unknown, called to their aid the
winds and lightnings, and smote the invader, in his presumption, from
their seas. And how of that vast flotilla few escaped; and not one but
was disabled; while many beat round the northern limits, only to be
dashed to pieces on the rocks and shoals of the western islands. And
of those poor souls who found a landing there, hundreds were slain,
and but a handful, sheltered of passion and pity, survived--pity that
gave protection, passion that gave me my ancestors and my name. The
sun and the mist meet in my blood, Isabel--the passion and the mystery
of life. And sometimes one prevails, and I am human; and sometimes the
other, and I am a seer or a lunatic.”

She listened, wondering a little; and then said she, “My strange love;
let me look in your eyes.”

Smiling and unmoving he faced her; and she stood gazing in silence.
Presently she said: “I have always wondered; and now I know. They are
brown; and yet they are blue. It is the sea gleaming through their
shadows.”

“It is the North,” he answered--“whither we are flying some day--you
and I together, dear love. Listen!”

He took his lute, and sang softly to her:

  “Where the sea and sky meet,
  Kissing far away,
  O, come, love! O, come, love,
  Daring salt and spray!
  There join earth and heaven,
  Each fulfilled in bliss.
  O, northward, love, come northward,
  Where the strange thing is!

  “Where the storm-bow’s shining
  Standeth where God stood,
  O, set thy little foot, love,
  Safe from wreck and flood!
  Dim and far in the raining
  Lights gleam mystical.
  O, northward, love, come northward,
  Where strange things befall!”




 CHAPTER XIII.
 TOKENS

He talked, having a willing listener--she laughed at him for a
chatterbox. He had long fits of silence--she tried to enter into his
dreams. Sometimes he was moody and troubled; and she knew why, and
blamed herself for his self-reproach; sometimes, and that most often,
they drifted soul to soul on a halcyon tide, and let the world go, and
forgot everything but themselves and the rapture of living.

And they met and met; and still were faithful to their platonic
compact. It was pretty to mark their idyll; but Nature, while she hung
them with flowers, was for ever a little impatient of their content.

Nobody interfered with them; their intimacy was encouraged rather than
suspected; the world conspired for their ruin. They were so little put
to it to practise any duplicity, that their consciences almost came to
acquit them of the necessity for it. In company they were called upon
to display no greater decorum than good taste would have imposed upon
a betrothed couple; and elsewhere, on the strength of that mutual
understanding, they could consort in honest seeming, as if no guilty
thought were at their hearts.

And, indeed, there was none in Isabella’s--a child of seventeen, and
in love. Guilt is for criminals, who work the other way and through
hate of their kind. Fanchette’s soul should have been the guilty one.

One day Tiretta took a queer object from his pocket. It was down in
the deep gardens, and they were alone together again.

“Do you see that?” he said. It was a little white slipper, woefully
grubby.

“If you please, Bonbec,” she answered. It was her name for him, quaint
in its underlying confidence, but betraying nothing to chance ears.

“Well, do you not recognise it?”

“No. Stay----” she laughed and flushed. “Is it really the recovered
relic of that day?”

“Relic?--indeed it is.”

“Horrible dirty little thing!”

“May I keep it?”

“O, Bonbec!”

“That and the flower--a priceless pair.”

“Priceless, indeed. What presents I make you!”

“I gave Bissy gold for this.”

“O, then, it is invaluable!”

“Lady, I have slept with it every night under my pillow.”

“I should at least have pulled off the heel if I had been you.”

“Tell me, may I keep it?”

“I wish I might give you something worth your taking, Bonbec.”

“Saving yourself, I could wish no dearer gifts. They speak heaven to
me--yes, the little soiled slipper and the little crumpled flower. So
much so that, in fairness, I want to make you as inestimable a gift in
return. Isabel, will you take my pot of basil, and cherish it for me?”

“I will love to--dearly I will.”

“It is so inconsiderable a thing, it would pass for a mere compliment.
I have a strange feeling about it--now do not wonder why, or whence it
comes--that its flowering will coincide with our loves’ triumph; that
it waits to be the symbol of our bridal. Is not that an odd
superstition--irrational, meaningless; and yet somehow I cannot shake
it off.”

He smiled; but his eyes were serious. She answered as movingly:

“If love can make it flower, dear my heart, that day shall come
quickly.”

“So I feel it,” he said. “Tend it; touch it; breathe on it--no more
will be needed. It will think the spring is in its green veins; it
will open its little smiling eyes, like a waking infant, to you its
mother. Fancy it our sleeping baby, Isabel.”

They were silent for awhile, the girl looking down with flushed
cheeks. Presently she said:

“Will Bissy wonder, do you think?”

“Bissy?”

“Why you gave him gold for it--that other?”

“Ah-ha! Bissy is astute, a shrewd calculating elfin. He will not kill
his goose with the golden eggs. The mine is not emptied of its
possibilities for him. Trust him to be silent; and perish all
scruples!”

He deprecated meeting trouble half-way; he bade her just drift and be
happy. He was in one of his irresponsible moods, indolent and
garrulous. Sometimes, he told her, he felt like a warm mass of
animated jelly, afloat on a tropic sea, and just dreamily conscious of
the sun and the soft swaying of the water. If only he could roll
lazily round, and feel the contact of his lady radiate, and with her
drift on for ever through the glassy silences!

“But I think there would be two sides to that,” responded Isabella
very sensibly; “and only one would be turned to the sun. Picture the
black abysses underneath, and what might rise up from them.”

He laughed:

“Then we will be two birds floating on tranced wings through the
limitless blue.”

“And the storms, Bonbec?”

“Then two angels, it must be; and think of another side to that if you
can.”

“I can only think of God, Bonbec.”

He looked at her, and laughed again; but suddenly was silent.

That night Fanchette, preparing her mistress for bed, made an
impromptu statement, quite innocently:

“I have put the pot of basil in your Highness’s chambre-à-coucher.”

Isabella, guilty of an involuntary start, paused a moment to recover
her self-possession.

“What pot of basil, girl?”

“O! I thought your Highness would know. It was delivered as from M. le
chevalier, with his respectful compliments.”

“I recollect now. M. Tiretta, uncertain of his movements, begged me to
hold the stakes, as it were, between himself and Aquaviva. You
remember the challenge?”

Indeed, that explanation of his gift had been offered to the Infanta
by M. Tiretta himself; and not as a contingent one. If there was to be
any question of subterfuge, the guilt should rest with him.

Fanchette remembered very distinctly.

“I think then, with your Highness’s permission, it is well placed
where it is,” she said.

Isabella, her colour a little heightened, found a difficulty in asking
why.

“O, I have a sentiment about these things,” said Fanchette. “Warm
thoughts will make the flowers in one’s bosom open prematurely--I have
noticed that.”

“Are you proposing to me,” said Isabella, “to wear this entire bush as
a posy?”

“Well, warm dreams, then,” said the maid. “They will make a very
forcing-house of one’s bedroom--mademoiselle will see, if she has any
love for this plant. It will come to blossom while she slumbers. Or
perhaps she would rather I removed it. It is not good, say some
people, to breathe in sleep the same air with flowers. They are like
sweet-tongued suitors, best shut the other side of the door.”

“That will do, Fanchette. You are allowing your tongue too much
freedom.”

“O, I did not mean to imply anything,” quoth injured innocence. “Your
Highness, if you please, is so ready to think the worst of Fanchette.
Only what I will venture to say is that, if you are not on the side of
M. Tiretta in this business, it will be sensible of you to let me put
the basil-pot elsewhere.”

“I am not, however, the least troubled with these scruples,” said
Isabella courageously. “As you have put it there, it may remain, since
its leaves at least smell sweet. And if I find I suffer from its
neighbourhood, it will be simple to remove it.”

“O, if you ask me, I do not think you will suffer from it!” said the
maid, airily pert.

“Good-night, Fanchette!”

“Good-night, your Highness, and fruitful dreams.”

The alcove where the Infanta slept had in it a little dim hanging
lamp, which burnt all night. It was enough and no more to betray in
shadowy contour the half-visionary sweetness of the face upon the
pillow, the rounded shoulder, the waxen hand. She lay, on this night,
so still, she hardly seemed to breathe. She was listening, her lips
just parted, to the sounds in the great house dying away in the
distance one by one. The last door boomed its remote thunder; the step
of a sentry passed beneath her window, and attenuated and ceased; a
profound stillness reigned everywhere. Then, sitting up, she sat
thrilling a moment, and slid softly from her bed. Listening again, as
if half fearful of what her own longing might bring upon her, she
crept barefooted, in her ghostly night-robe, to the table where her
treasure lay, and knelt, and put her arms about it, and buried her
face in the fragrant leaves.

“My baby,” she whispered--“open, open your pretty eyes, and make me
happy. Did I deny you? It was for love’s sake and your father’s, most
dear. He would tell you so if he were here.”




 CHAPTER XIV.
 CONFESSION

Somewhere I have read or heard of a marine invertebrate, which, when
its stomach disturbs it, throws the oppressive thing away and gets a
new one. It is a beautifully simple solution of the problem of
life--which problem unquestionably has its centre in those
regions--and as triumphant in its utter banality as the method of
Columbus with his egg or of Alexander with his Gordian knot. Without
doubt, if man had been constructed on that principle, his history
would have needed not a thousandth part of the apology which is now a
necessary accompaniment of its recital. The myriad ills attendant on
digestion, the brutalities, the tremors and the hallucinations, would
have entirely lacked their excuse. Conceive the practical humour of
the statement that one had no stomach for an enterprise; conceive such
a solution of the saturnalian difficulty as Vitellius never dreamed. A
permanent and undetachable stomach was certainly the actual curse
which Satan inflicted on mankind.

The nearest approach to this impossibly beatific condition consists,
as popularised by the Catholic and Universal Church, in throwing away
one’s conscience and getting a new one. The priest conducts the
process, and the medium is the confessional. Therein the distressing
load may be cast, and therefrom the patient be discharged re-equipped.
It has all the efficacy of the other, though at the same time hardly
its simplicity. For one thing, one cannot do it alone by oneself; for
another, a dose of penance is conditional on the treatment--usually a
trifle, but sufficient to leave a taste in one’s mouth. However, it is
a useful alternative.

Fanchette’s conscience did not often oppress her; but, on the rare
occasions when it did, there was always this means at hand to rid
herself of its burden. She would go to the little church in the
village, ring up Father Leone, and empty her reservoir of sins upon
that good man’s devoted head. Then, cleansed and chastened, she would
come forth in a rare condition for fresh frolics, the first taste
whereof would be comparable with that of a cigarette after a Turkish
bath.

These moral “drenchings,” however, though easeful in their results,
were painful enough in their process to make a resort to them
unwelcome. Fanchette had a constitutional dislike to confessing
herself guilty of anything--except of the best intentions; and it was
only the recognised destination of those abstract virtues which drove
her from time to time to appeal to Providence in the matter of their
better understanding, so far as she was concerned. It was in some
ways, in this connection, a convenience that Father Leone was both old
and deaf; that he was, moreover, an absorbed herbalist, and, if the
truth must be spoken, far more interested in vegetable physiology than
in Christian ethics. Yet again, to accuse oneself to dull ears had its
drawbacks, since the self-exposure necessitated could command no
consolation of sympathy to ameliorate its own ugly nakedness. On the
whole, perhaps, she would have preferred an intent and properly
responsive listener; but, since that was not to be had, she must put
up with what was. After all, to confess was the thing; and, if the
priest was deaf, it was no business of hers to question Providence as
to its selection or affliction of its own ministers.

Fanchette’s conscience had been troubling her, and one afternoon
Fanchette went across to the church to renew it. She went very staid
and unapproachable, paying no heed to the jests of rude men or the
quizzings of gossips. A cavalier, walking up the street, espied the
demure figure at a distance away, and dodged behind a corner to avoid
recognition by it. Peeping thence, he saw the young woman approach the
church, and disappear within its portals, when, convinced of her
mission, he immediately came forth and followed in pursuit.

The church of Santa Maria was a dull little edifice, and had been
rendered duller by the former duke, Don Philip’s elder brother, who,
on his promotion to the crown of Naples, had transferred everything of
value from it to his new capital. Without, it was a mere whited
sepulchre; within, its necessary appointments exhibited just what
decency demanded and no more. Don Carlos had fairly pillaged the
building, in fact, and the dross of plate and pinchbeck which remained
was hardly worth the considering. From its tinselled high altar to its
little paper-petticoated Virgin in an alcove near the door, it was all
cheap and tawdry. There were some depressing “stations of the cross”
on the walls, and, in a dark place under a painted window, a single
confessional box, having a stall for the priest in the middle, and on
either side a curtained recess for penitents. When one of these latter
desired relief, he or she must pull a little bell-handle in the wall
near the altar-rails, the sound caused by which summoned the
sacristan, who in his turn summoned the priest from his presbytery
hard by.

The cavalier, passing the church portals, went straight up to this
presbytery and knocked on its door. He was a little pinchbeck in
seeming, like the candlesticks--eloquent somehow of polish without and
cheap metal within. He was rather short than tall, neatly built, with
very black eyebrows, and in his face a pert insolence suggestive of a
popular _café-chanteur’s_. Perfumed, self-assured, and brilliantly
veneered, M. la Coque was able to pass with the vulgar for a very
complete gentleman. Women, who alone in nature exceed their lords in
the gorgeousness of their plumage, found his fine colouring vastly
attractive: Fanchette, we know, found it irresistible.

After a short interval the door was opened by Gaspare, the sacristan,
who was also general servitor to the meagre household. He was a snuffy
old fellow, hoarse-spoken, and with a leery acquisitive eye. He
greeted the visitor, with an air as of being on a footing of sly
pleasantry with him.

“Ha, signore! What plenary indulgence now for what mischief? Is the
market closed to your worship in Parma, that you must come all the way
here to get relief?”

La Coque pushed the old man within and closed the door after them.

“Coquin!” he whispered: “be quiet! The indulgence I ask is at your
disposal and worth to you just a silver ducat. Come along now. Is his
reverence safe bestowed?”

“What wickedness is forward? I don’t budge until I know.”

“Hark to that chink, Gaspare! A double silver ducat to line your old
breeches withal! Where is his reverence, I say?”

“Where the last trump wouldn’t disturb him. In the garden, reading.”

“Excellent. When the bell rings for confession I will go and be his
substitute.”

The sacristan fairly gasped in his breath.

“What, you will! Do you understand that at the first word the devil
will pull you down by the legs through the floor?”

“O, the devil loves a jest, Gaspare, as much as you do!”

“O! A jest is it?”

“Of course--what else. Quick--there goes the bell! Find me a hood and
cassock.”

“Who is it?”

“Well, there is no harm in confessing. Mademoiselle Becquet.”

“Ah-ha!” The old rascal’s face puckered like a monkey’s. “An
assignation?” He shook his head and waved his hands in rebukeful
protest; then turned, and shuffled before, sighing, sighing:

“It is sacrilege; I wash my hands of it; you will pay in advance,
signore?”

Fanchette, kneeling in the church alone, gabbled little prayers, and
reviewed her programme between whiles. Then she rose, rang the bell,
summoned the sacristan, stated her requirements, and withdrew to the
confessional-box, where she disposed herself on her knees behind one
of the curtains. Shortly she heard the altar rail click, a slow step
approach, and her view through the grating towards the chancel was
suddenly obscured by the interposition of a bowed, scarce
distinguishable head. She settled herself for the ordeal.

“Please, father, give me absolution for what I am about to confess.”

“A timore inimici eripe animam tuam,” responded the seated figure, in
a low, mumbling voice. “Deliver yourself, my daughter.”

The penitent hesitated a moment, as if calling up her nerve; bit her
lower lip, and began:

“I have to accuse myself, first and foremost, of infidelity.”

“That is bad. Is it spiritual or secular infidelity to which you
refer, my child?”

“Infidelity to my lover, father.”

A sudden cough seemed to catch the listener; he crowed a little as he
answered:

“To be sure. There will be some good reason for this apostacy, no
doubt.”

“It is to be found, father, in my own conscience, which shrinks from
the load he would have put upon it.”

“What load? Be specific, child. Has he tempted you to wrong?”

“Not in that way--he knows better. But he desired to use me as his
instrument in the ruin of a man he hated.”

“It is admitted, my daughter, that it is lawful sometimes to do evil
that good may come of it. Possibly this lover of yours may have seen
in his enemy one of those human abnormalities whose destruction,
though demanded by every moral law, can only be compassed by craft. In
that case you would be doing a positively pious work in helping him.
But, as to this infidelity: the word implies, according to my reading
of it, a positive no less than a negative sentiment; an attraction as
well as a repulsion.”

“Yes, father.”

“May it conceivably be hinted, then, that you have turned not so much
_from_ one lover as _towards_ another, his rival in your fleeting
affections?”

The penitent did not answer.

“Speak, daughter,” said the confessor, rather violently clearing his
throat.

“I cannot, with confidence,” answered Fanchette, thus adjured, with an
air of distressed hesitancy. “Certainly I have felt pity for the man;
and I have heard it said that pity excites in one a feeling of
fondness for the pitied--but I do not know.”

“You do not? This is not confession, but equivocation. Tell me the
truth at once, if you would be absolved.”

“How unsparing you are, father! What if I do love him--a little? It is
the fault of the first one for imposing such a task on me. He knew my
tender heart--he might have foreseen the inevitable result.”

“I think he might indeed.”

“Besides, though the first one is a musical-box, the second is a
nightingale.”

“Damnation!” said the confessor.

“Father! What do you mean?”

“I mean that you may go to the devil, Mademoiselle Fanchette Becquet.”

“After you, if you please, M. Charles la Coque.”

“What! you know me?”

“I saw you first in the street; I saw you afterwards through this
grating as you approached. Could I mistake you, you wicked wretch? May
you be cursed to all eternity for your profanation of this sacred
office!”

La Coque sank back a little into the shadows, then bent forward again,
and spoke softly:

“Do you know, Fanchette, I think I am coming out to strangle you.”

The young lady, now verging on hysteria, answered with a scornful
gasp:

“It would be worthy of a man who could commit such an unutterable
meanness--and without a shadow of excuse.”

“O, I had my excuse! I was uncertain of your fidelity; and you see how
I was justified in my doubt. Then this opportunity offered, and I
couldn’t resist taking it.”

“It was Gaspare, I suppose. You corrupt everybody and everything you
touch. Well, you know now I hate you.”

“All’s one for that. It’s not your hate but your love that we’ve got
to reckon with. A nightingale, forsooth! That hired automaton--that
painted jackdaw mimicking his betters! You shall answer for the
insult.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I told you.”

Actually, with the words, he unbuttoned the hatch and stepped forth.
She crouched away from him, huddled within the curtain, her breath
coming quick. The church was quite empty and silent.

“Come to my loving arms, Fanchette.”

She uttered a little whimper.

“If you were not such a vain fool you would understand.”

“Understand what?”

“That, knowing who you were, I should not so have betrayed myself, if
it had been true.”

“It is not true, then?”

“It is true I _do_ pity him--and her.”

“Pity excites a fonder feeling. You have said it.”

She hesitated, saw no way out of the _impasse_, and took refuge in the
long-threatened collapse. He succumbed at once.

“O, hush, girl, for heaven’s sake! All the world will hear you.”

“O--O! I don’t care. To be so doubted and put upon; to have served
this man as I have; stifled my better feelings for his sake; sought to
ruin a mistress, who has never shown me anything but kindness; as good
as offered to be the chevalier’s abettor and their go-between--and
then to be treated as if I were a perfide and a wanton! I will never
give my heart to anyone again; I will beg admission into a convent and
end my days a spouse of heaven! O--O!”

He was terrified. He knelt down by the struggling figure, and crushed
it within his arms, seeking to suffocate its outcries.

“Fanchette--you are betraying us--for God’s sake compose yourself!
There, there, girl--I did not mean it. I believe you, on my soul, to
be true to me. We must make our compact binding--indissoluble--never
to be questioned from this time by either of us. Come with me--through
the sacristy. Gaspare is always my friend--he will be my friend
again--and the priest is safe elsewhere. Any moment may bring
discovery upon us. Come, lovely and adorable--let us kiss and forgive.
Fanchette!”

Little by little, coaxing and caressing, he got her to her feet and
away with him. Father Leone, pacing his garden, was left undisturbed
to his vegetable meditations, and Fanchette’s conscience had to defer
its unloading to a more convenient opportunity.




 CHAPTER XV.
 A BOLT FROM THE BLUE

Surprised and beset in that moment of unguarded emotionalism,
Fanchette had capitulated; and there was an end to her scruples as a
reluctant confederate. With the sacrifice of her self-respect went her
last feeling of charity towards hard-pressed virtue. She regarded that
now, with the eyes of the qualified _chère-amie_, as an hypocrisy to
be derided and shown up. Thenceforth she was in all things her showy
tyrant’s most devoted auxiliary, to be cursed or fondled, to be used
and abused, to be dragged by him by the hair of her head, should he
please--and so to revile him and spit at him, and turn with raking
fingers on any humane champion who should come to her aid. That is to
speak conditionally of Fanchette, but not of the type to which she
belonged, and to which she would sooner or later conform. Not that
jimp figure of hers, in its striped sarsenet frock with the slim
waist, not that demure smile and young mealy complexion, would save
her presently from the fate of the termagant, swollen of feature and
foul of tongue, to which she was destined. There was in her that seed
of Xantippe which is wont, once quickened, to sprout and increase and
burst into riotous blossom in a night. She was of the substance of the
true virago--vulgar, incorruptible, animal; rending the lust she has
provoked; ready to die whether to spite or to save the object of her
desire; ecstatically courting her own destruction at the hands of the
rage she has wantonly excited--and all to prove her utter devotion to
and absorption in the one. Such was Fanchette in promise--a sufficient
foil, even so undeveloped, to the nobler passion she was called upon
to assist in betraying.

That idyllic love should lie at the mercy of such coarse
understandings! But so is it decreed in this paradoxical world of
ours, where the myriad inanities sit in judgment on the sapient few,
where the rabble overrules the senate, the dunce the scholar, the loud
illiterate voice the cultured wit.

La Coque stood for the vulgar majority in this case. His hatred of a
finer spirit was simply the expression of an envious and ignoble mind.
He was avid to ruin Tiretta, and indifferent as to what other fair
fames he besmirched in the process. At the beginning he had had no
least grounds, save his own inventive malice, for the scandal at which
he had obscurely hinted. Later, when he came to learn that appearances
were at least beginning to give colour to his fiction, his joy waxed
great and fierce. He began then seriously to contemplate the means and
methods by which he might bring this belauded cockerel to his knees.
He set Fanchette to watch and to report.

Enough was soon gathered to give him a clue to his policy. He aimed at
nothing more at the outset than the disgrace and recall of his
detested rival, as he chose to consider him--an end, nevertheless,
which must be effected without compromising the Infanta. He was sharp
enough to see that any mistake in that direction might involve himself
in ruin. It would be sufficient for his purpose could Tiretta be led,
somehow and definitely, into an amorous self-betrayal, armed with the
evidences of which it would be easy for anyone to procure the
reptile’s dismissal. He instructed Fanchette to affect sympathy, to
worm herself into the chevalier’s confidence, to inveigle him if
possible into a pretended intrigue with herself, on the score that it
would at once cover his real design and afford him particular
opportunities for prosecuting it. He instructed her so to manage
appearances, in fine, that at the right moment M. Tiretta could be
represented to the duke for the traitor he actually was, and to the
Infanta as having been secretly prosecuting all this time a
discreditable _affaire_ with her own serving maid.

And to this pretty programme, Fanchette, a procuress for love’s sake,
was amiably prepared to subscribe--even though she might endanger her
own emotions in the process. For she certainly found a fearful joy in
playing with the fire kindled for another’s consuming.

As material for the plot, that little scene in the corridor had had
its timely uses. It had put her and her gentleman on a confidential
footing, which that later whispered colloquy had encouraged and his
own indecision confirmed. Thereafter he must suffer her secret
intelligences meekly, and little by little cease of any pretence at
misreading them. In truth, poor fool, in the torment of self-reproach
he must endure, the solace of a sympathetic ally was hardly to be
refused. Somehow it seemed to make him feel less guilty.

Not that he frankly countenanced Fanchette’s partisanship, or ever
appeared to assume an inner meaning from it. But, like the artless
receivers of stolen goods we hear of, he accepted its fruits
unquestioning, and, when she made profitable opportunities for him,
took them with the most ingenuous air possible. He thought, in truth,
she was a friend, and so played in all things into her hands.

The main thing was, for his greater exposure and degradation, to
discredit him in Isabella’s eyes. Fanchette took a peculiar pleasure
in that moiety of her task. One day, having manœuvred to come upon
him alone in the grounds, she met him point blank with a question
which brought him up aghast:

“Are you in love with me, monsieur?”

He stared a moment, and then bungled out a monosyllable:

“Why?”

“O!” she said; “it is a fair challenge, is it not? Tell me--do you
think me pretty?”

He was beginning to recover his self-possession.

“Yes, certainly I do, Fanchette,” he said.

“Do you take an obvious pleasure in my company?”

“If it is obvious, it is obvious,” he answered evasively.

“I will put it another way,” she said. “Is it for my sake that you
seek it so often?”

“Do I seek it often?”

She put up her face quite close to his, and said mockingly:

“Would you like to kiss me now, monsieur?”

He drew back, with a smiling shake of the head.

“I honour your good fame too well, Fanchette.”

She broke into a shrill little laugh.

“O, the darling, the Joseph! And yet he cannot be happy apart from me.
Why, I wonder. He will never say--wherefore it behoves the poor
rejected one to give him a morsel of advice.” She came close again,
and perked her chin at him. “Do not think for a moment, monsieur, that
I want your love; and as for my good fame, it can look after itself.
But, for my company, that is another matter from the point of view of
your own interests; and, if you follow my advice, you will continue to
pretend to take pleasure in it, if you do not feel any.”

“But I do feel pleasure, girl.”

“That is well, then; and I say, let your pleasure be as obvious to
others as it is to yourself.”

He looked his bewilderment, and she derided him:

“How slow of comprehension you are! Why, for the reason that they may
think this no more than an intrigue with a femme de chambre, and so
spare you the gossiping and eavesdropping which might otherwise work
you mischief. O, understand me, monsieur! It is friendship which
suggests this--not inclination. I do not propose to you to do more
than pretend.”

He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he
stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and
left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an
abyss.

A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love--an
outrage and a shame. But it embodied a _quasi_-revelation which was
even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless
misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally,
for the guilty sham it was. He positively blushed like a child
detected in a lie.

Was it a fact, too, that gossip was beginning to whisper? He had been
so absorbed in his dream, had held it in truth so sacred from the
world, that he had never so much as imagined that danger from without.
Not while the dream lasted--the mad impossible beatitude. And was it
already threatening to an end? He would not believe it--so perfect and
so uplifted, risen above the reach of mortal hurts. These shadows were
but conditions of its brightness.

After all, what had he done but follow the path appointed him, and if
by the way he had wandered into paradise, that chance was in the
itinerary. He had not abused his paradise; he had simply turned its
inspiration into song. In appearance, at least, there was nothing to
convict him.

And so he ended with derision for that monstrous suggestion, and a
determination utterly to discard it. Yet the thing being always in his
mind may have given him thenceforth in Fanchette’s company an air of
self-consciousness, which the vicious might interpret if they would
into a secret understanding.

Let all that pass for the moment. Our theme is still of Isabel and her
“young palmer in love’s eye” wandering, yet unchallenged, in their
unsoiled Eden.

Now June with these bewitched lovers drifted down a golden haze into
July, and July itself burned stilly on towards harvest-time. It was
the midsummer of their happiness--all the world one soundless tide of
light on which their dreaming hearts, like the fairy nautilus, made
rainbow sail by mystic strands, and silent moon-drenched gardens, and
paths of rippling flame which ran into the sunset. All time was
rapture to them, and most when they were silent and together; for
speech is but the sorry change of thought, and cannot for all its
volume match one golden maxim of the soul. What they felt, each to the
other, was better understood unspoken; in sleep alone it found the
perfect utterance.

One day, loitering so rapt, they came upon a terrace-corner by the
house where, at a man’s height above the ground, was a window with a
little balcony looking towards the lower gardens. Here were myrtle
bushes growing and loading the air with their scent. Beyond, the turf
shelved down to meet the leafy margin of the thickets, which enshrined
the flowery walks and lily ponds dear to the girl’s heart. She paused
and pointed to the window.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that was my bower, my oratory?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“It is,” she said. “Have I not a beautiful altar to worship at?”

He understood:

“This view? the green dale of quietude, with all its lovely secrets. I
like best, Madonna, the lilies of your altar-piece.”

“Ah, if one could but see them!”

“It is enough to know they are there, as I know the love that is in
your heart. It is sweet, I think, in hiding. But some day it will be
sweeter to go down and drown among my lilies. Is the basil in bud
yet?”

“Not yet.”

She called him by the name it was only hers to know. He sighed.

“It is shyer than these myrtles. Why did we not make them the symbol
of our bridal? They have the better right. I wonder what it waits
for?--my life’s blood, perhaps, Aquaviva would say.”

She cried “Bonbec!” and looked at him with such a white piteousness
that his heart smote him.

“Beloved,” he whispered: “That was a senseless and a wicked thought.
Forgive me for it. But I wish the basil would blossom. Where do you
keep it--in that same dear bower?”

He stood on tiptoe to peep, but could catch no more than a glimpse of
daintily flowered silks and hangings, and gilded mirrors, and a sheen
of _marqueterie_ and ormolu, all in the richly fragile fashion of the
day.

“No,” she said, still pale and troubled: “In my bedroom, which is
above.”

He wafted a kiss to that lily sanctuary.

“Could you not, unsuspected, come down from it,” he whispered--“just
to the little balcony--and speak with me when all the house is silent?
To be alone together in the night, my beautiful!”

Her cheek had turned from pale to pink; but she looked at him with
unfaltering eyes.

“I will do anything you tell me to,” she said.

“Even if it were that, Isabel?”

“It would not be wrong if you told me.”

Much moved, he touched her hand, and bade her sleep undisturbed for
him. “And speak for me in your prayers,” he said.

“Every night,” she answered, “when I kneel to our unknown God, Bonbec,
and pray that some day we may find the print of His footsteps under
the rainbow.”

It was his song that was in her mind--that had become, indeed, her new
faith’s inspiration. That “passion of the past” of which he had
spoken, and into whose ghostly texture her own life seemed woven;
those “long far lands of home” towards whose unutterable rest and
understanding his spirit sought to convey her--to what more soothing
wings of mysticism could she confide her burden of fearful joys and
apprehensions? Northward: the world’s unfathomed mystery of the
pointing finger: the threshold of the great wonder; and home--not home
new made, but home recovered! That was the ecstasy of the thought.
They had been wanderers apart these long centuries, and now at last
were come together again upon the starry track.

Fond nonsense, was it not? And yet so strangely real to them, that
that flight together up the white staircase of the world for ever took
them in fancy homewards. When they thought of escape--not spoke, for
that had not come yet--those little outpost islands in the cold seas
were always their mental refuge and first breathing-place.

But these transcendent moods were not for every occasion. They had
their living Eden to engage them, and it was sweet to tread all day on
flowers, and hear the drowsy doves murmur, and take the sun into their
hearts. And so fate allowed it until the golden cup was brimming.

One night--long cause had Tiretta to remember that night with rapture
and with grief--the Gonzalès left the two alone together in the
_salon_ whither the chevalier had been invited to improvise sweet
ditties for the ladies’ behoof. He had not perhaps acquitted himself
very well; he seldom did under compulsion; and the marquise had shown
signs of boredom. She was overfed, she was sleepy, she was cross;
moreover she had an indescribable air as of resenting the lagging
close of an entertainment which had lost its point and its motive.
There was patronage in her manner to the soldier; there was even a
hint of insolence. At last she said, with rude impatience: “Well,
minstrels stale, I find, like other sweetmeats, and there comes a time
when we wonder why we cloyed ourselves with them. After all they only
appear at the feast to prove how well we could have done without
them.”

She had gorged herself at dessert on _marrons-glacés_, the old pig,
and no doubt spoke feelingly. Yet there seemed a motive behind her
ill-manners, too.

“I have sung badly,” said Tiretta good-humouredly. “I admit it.”

“Eh bien!” said madame; “it does not matter in the least. You have
done your best, and there is an end of it.”

She got up almost immediately, having delivered herself, though with a
hurried manner, as if she doubted having gone too far, and, saying she
had an appointment to keep and would be back in a minute, waddled out
of the room.

“To sleep,” whispered Isabella. “She will say to herself it is only to
shut her eyes for a moment; but it will be an hour.”

“She will expect to find me gone when she returns,” said Tiretta. “It
was a very palpable hint.”

He stood before the girl. She rose, and they looked at one another.
Their hearts were somehow conscious of a vague foreboding. Then she
moved, and made a sign to him to follow her to the window. Together
they stepped out upon the balcony which overlooked the dreaming
grounds.

It was a night for love and lovers. The moon burned large behind a
film of mist, whose gauze just veiled the barren spaces of the dark,
and charmed the sleeping trees, and shook within its tissue a spangled
star or two, caught like fireflies in a web. Deep and shadowy below
them lay the gardens, their far solitary sentinels two dim and grey
colossi, Hercules and a satyr, whose hugeness alone had in past days
saved them from the hands of the despoiler. Now, mere unsubstantial
phantoms of the mist, they seemed to move and palpitate, as if some
antique spirit in the night stirred in their stony veins. Here and
there low down a light twinkled from a distant lodge or villa. Not a
sound broke the utter stillness, save now and again the drowsy burr of
a cricket, or the swish of a bat’s wings as its shadow dipped and
fled.

Silent in that breathing trance of things, the two stood together and
drank in the beauty of the scene. Their pulses throbbed in unison to
its sensuous appeal; they touched, and did not draw apart. Never
before had he seemed so dear or she so fair in the other’s eyes. He
marvelled how he could ever have dared to lift his to this white
miracle of girlhood--to dream of possessing it. As she stood near him,
the sense of her proud young loveliness, so submissive to his love, of
all that maiden treasure, and he the chosen master of its sweets and
secrets, swelled in his heart until he scarce could bear its rapture.
Mad thoughts were surging in his brain; he felt that he was losing
command of himself, when suddenly she turned and spoke to him, a tense
emotion in her voice:

“Whatever happens, keep me in your heart.”

“Isabel!” he breathed.

He held out his arms; and she came instantly into them, and gave her
lips to him, yielding herself utterly with just one sigh like a
dreaming child’s. All discretion, all good resolutions were forgotten
in the passionate stress of that moment. He strained her to his breast
with a fierce tyranny of possession; and, her face lifted close to
his, she whispered out her soul.

“I shall not be false, even though--O, you will believe me, you will
believe me, will you not?”

“Hush!” he said. “What is there to fear?”

“I do not know,” she sighed.

“Not the cryptic utterances of that rude old woman?”

“Your mind, too, is troubled. How can I be so close to you and not
feel it. Bonbec, I am afraid of to-morrow.”

“Come away with me then--here, to-night. I will get horses, and we
will fly northwards--Isabel--to the unknown Eros! He gave us to one
another--O, long long past in the beautiful gardens!--and I cannot
live without you, beloved. Duty, honour, reason--throw them all to the
wolves, so that our love alone remain to us.”

She clasped her white arms about his neck, and with one soft hand
caressed the hair from his forehead.

“Would it remain, dear my lord? Or would you not come to grudge the
price you paid for it? And yet I love you so that I must risk it; but
not till every other hope is gone.”

“What hope, Isabel?”

“Ah! I do not know. But give me that plea of desperation for my
pretext. Then, at last, if you call to me I will come.”

“My princess; my true heart!”

“Not your princess, but your slave, Bonbec.”

“My bird, then.”

“O, yes, indeed--caught captive by a song, and trembling in your
hand.”

Some noise, real or imaginary, startled them. He stirred; but she
would not let him go.

“Yet one moment, beloved.”

“Is it she returning?” he said. “Well, let her find us. To die for
you, Isabel--what a little thing it sounds beside my love! Just to
change this mortal suit for one more meet to await our nuptials in!
Yet how sweet the body clings to sweet!”

She struggled to free herself--to push him from her.

“No, go,” she said. “For pity’s sake, Bonbec! O, you kill my heart
with fear!”

“One last kiss to comfort it.”

She tore herself from him, and he left her, going gaily through the
empty room.

All that night he slept on roses, and all the following day he walked
on air, his brain drugged with an exultant ecstasy which bore him far
above the world of common thoughts and common apprehensions. Some
instinct holding him from presuming too soon on a transcendent favour,
he took horse and rode far into the country, returning only to the
palace when night was falling. And presently, hardly knowing what to
hope or what to fear from it, the summons reached him to attend the
ladies in the _salle-d’audience_.

She was not there when he entered it; only the old marquise, who rose
with unwonted condescension and alacrity to greet him.

“Ah, monsieur!” she said; “you are to congratulate us and yourself on
the happy termination of your labours.”

There was a sort of leery jubilance in her manner, sufficiently
significant in the context of late forebodings. He looked at her
stupidly.

“I do not understand,” he said.

“What!” she cried. “You have not heard?”

“Heard what? I have been absent all day.”

“And no advice has reached this amorous proxy from his indulgent
principal? Eh well, monsieur! Wonders will never cease. It was for us
to suppose that your periodical reports to the archduke were lately of
such a favourable nature as to decide his Highness upon thus bringing
matters to a head. And he has not informed you of his decision?”

“No, madame.”

“That I, then, should be the first to enlighten you!”

“If you please, madame.”

“It is only, monsieur, that her Imperial Majesty has despatched an
ambassador to Parma to request for her son Joseph the hand of the
Infanta. Such, you may consider if you like, is the fruit of your fond
advocacy.”

If he was staggered, he took the blow standing and like a soldier. No
hint of what he felt must betray itself here. Even the old lady was
half imposed upon by his manner.

“And her Highness herself?” he said, in a voice whose very desperation
lent it coolness. “She is reconciled?”

“Hoity-toity!” cried the marquise. “A fine expression to apply to
her.”

“Else,” said the chevalier, “why should _I_ be here?”

“Well,” answered madame: “that is true enough; but it was not
diplomatic. Judged by the alacrity with which she obeyed her father’s
summons to court, I should say she was very well reconciled indeed.”

“She has gone to Parma?”

“To receive the betrothal ring, monsieur. And so your task is ended.
Henceforth, so long as you favour us with your company here, you are
free to command your own time and your own inclinations. I can
appreciate, believe me, the relief it will be to us all.”




 CHAPTER XVI.
 FAST BIND, FAST FIND

It was a very impressive ceremony, this betrothal by
ring--conventual, almost sacramental in its character. The
ambassador’s face had been flushed, his voice hushed, as he had
presented this visible symbol of what was to him but something less
than a hypostatic union, in which he himself modestly represented the
third figure in the trinity. Whereafter, not as bride of Christ, but
of Christ’s more confident vicegerent, the heir of Austria, stood
Isabella, pledged by token of the shining gem half slipping from her
listless finger.

The words were spoken, the gage hung there in witness of their numbing
actuality; she was left alone with the duke her father. Its first heat
of transport had faded from Don Philip’s cheek, and been succeeded by
a rather rigid pallor, a look of hardness, both furtive and resentful.
He uttered a little sardonic laugh--the most extreme expression of
humour to be allowed himself by an Infant of Spain--and, pacing an
aimless step or two, turned with a sudden violence on his child.

“Well?” he barked.

She shook her hand; and the ring dropped from it--fell and bounded on
the carpet.

“It is too big for me,” she said piteously.

He stood transfixed a moment; then forgot his dignity so far as to
dive and recover the desecrated trinket.

“God in heaven!” he began; then checked himself and choked down his
fury. “A defect soon remedied,” he said, his voice quite hoarse.

“But not my unfitness to wear it,” she answered. “O, father, have pity
on me!”

He went off like a madman, flinging back and forth the length of the
room, and ended by stopping suddenly, his fists raised and clinched,
to apostrophise space:

“That our dearest hopes should have come to be realised--and for this!
That we should have devoted our love, our diplomacy, our peace of mind
to the welfare of this monster of inconsistency and ingratitude!”

She cried out: “O, no, no! O, lord and father, not either!”

He came round, actually grinding his teeth:

“I foresaw this. I read indifference and rebellion in your reception
of his Highness’s plenipotentiary. But I tell you that your protests
will be of no avail; that we refuse to listen for an instant to any
one of the fancied scruples which would deprive us, in the very
fruition of our hopes, of the reward of so much disinterested
self-sacrifice.”

She let the storm pass, waiting with bowed head; and presently, with
an effort to command himself, he put a question to her:

“What is your unfitness? Speak!”

She looked up, then, the tears brimming in her eyes.

“I do not think I was born for a throne,” she said--so movingly, that
his heart should have been touched a little. “Its grandeur frightens
me.”

He waved that absurdity aside with _hauteur_. To scratch his pride was
to find the cold, inflexible Spaniard.

“You were born your father’s daughter,” he said, with a brevity which
was final. Then he bent his eyes searchingly on her. “Is there nothing
else--no romantic folly of a young and foolish brain?”

For one moment, so temperate his tone had fallen, she had a mad
impulse to tell him the truth, to throw herself upon his mercy and his
love. But the thought of whom she might endanger thereby came to her,
in time to stay the confession on her lips.

“I am so young, father,” she said. “If it is romance to want to keep
my youth a little longer, and then to yield it to a humbler state than
this, I am guilty of it, I suppose. But I do so love the simple things
of life; and I am not heroic in the least.”

“What need of heroism here, you fool?”

“O, much, much! To throw away all that is dear to me to be an
empress!”

Still he searched her young innocence with that frowning stare. At
length, stirring, and setting his lips grimly, he made to close the
colloquy:

“All folly and madness, as you must know. The step is taken; it is
irrevocable; and you must reconcile yourself to the position imposed
upon you.”

“Imposed--imposed!” She wrung her pretty hands, and, writhing, pressed
them to her mouth. “O, that is it--no choice for me--to give myself
away from all I love!”

She ran and threw herself at the duke’s feet, and caught at his hands,
and wept to him:

“In mercy, father, do not make me do this thing!”

He sought to free himself from her; in his fury he even dragged her as
she knelt, so that she almost fell before him.

“I think you are mad,” he said.

“Yes, mad,” she answered--“I am mad. You must not wed a mad woman to
an emperor’s son.”

He was frightened a little over the vehemence of her despair. Whatever
was to account for it, it was not to be laid, it seemed, by coercion.
He must try other means, a different appeal. If a startled suspicion
had risen in his heart, he must not betray it; his pride, indeed,
prevented him. He passed a hand across his forehead, and forced
himself to address her in calmer tones.

“Come,” he said; “control yourself, and try to be reasonable. Why,
consider, my little Isabelita, what it is you ask of me--how utterly
wild and impossible. You have not been ignorant of our plans for you,
or of the steps by which they have reached at last this triumphant
consummation. And all this time you have shown no sign of revolt, of
anything but a tacit conforming to our wishes. What has suddenly
changed you?” His face darkened in spite of himself.

“I think,” she said, “there are no slaves in all the world like
princesses. It is not for me, as with the free and happy, to say to my
father, ‘I have tried with all my heart because you desired it, and
yet I cannot, and I know it would be wrong to give myself rather with
aversion than with regard.’ It is enough with more fortunate girls to
say ‘I do not love him.’ But what does that avail with us?”

“Aversion!”--he breathed the word in deep scorn--“when you have not
even met him?”

“O, father! you have said it. I have not even met him.”

“What, then?” He burst out again, in spite of all his efforts at
self-control. “Have you no sense of decency--of what your rank demands
of you? There should be loftier motives than mere personal feeling
behind these great alliances. But I will hear no more. My patience is
exhausted.”

“I will not marry him.”

He stared at her in amazement.

“Sullen and obdurate!” he said. “You will not? We will see. O, I knew
very well you had started with an insane prejudice--the mere peevish
humour of an unreasonable child. But, beware! Kingdoms are not to be
bandied on such terms of spoilt caprice. What or who has instigated
you to this rebellion, I say? If any has abused his trust to do so,
let him look well to the consequences of his daring.”

She was scared in her turn now--so scared, that her heart for an
instant seemed to stop.

“I am a woman, father,” she said faintly; “why should you look for
anything beyond a woman’s natural repugnance to being pledged against
her choice or will?”

He did not answer for a minute; and then in a softened, more
persuasive tone he said:

“A woman, child? To be sure; and I had thought it enough to appeal to
the woman in you; the daughter first of all. How we had laboured for
this alliance, prayed for it, rejoiced at last in its reality--ah, mon
Dieu, you cannot know! And yet you should know. It has been the hope
of our maturity; our comfort and solace in our days of bitter trial.
It was to set us right with the world, to relieve us of our
embarrassments, to enable us to do justice at last to the many poor
souls long devoted to our fortunes. And with you it rested to be the
almoner to all these pathetic needs.”

“Father--no! You kill me with your words!”

“Kill you? Ah, child, what if it kill your mother, in the frail state
she is in, to learn of this final blow to her hopes?”

She had thrown her arms, as she knelt, across a chair, and now laid
her face on them, abandoned to hopeless grief.

“Am I to speak her death-sentence then?” asked the duke, in a broken
whisper.

Her face still hidden, she held out her poor left hand. Understanding,
he slipped the ring upon the quivering finger, and, wise in the
resolve to let well alone, went softly from the room, and left her to
her despair.

In the corridor outside he came upon M. la Coque, who scanned his
agitated face with a furtive curiosity. The duke motioned his
favourite to follow him, and led the way into his private closet,
where he threw himself into a chair, and began to fan his brow
exhaustedly with his handkerchief.

“Charlot,” he said presently, looking up from under languid lids: “is
the door shut?”

“It is fast, monseigneur.”

The duke signed to him to come nearer.

“You were witness of her reception of the pledge?”

“Of the Infanta’s?”

“Now who else? The Infanta’s, of course. Well, how did it strike you?”

“That mademoiselle, perhaps, made a little light of the gift.”

The duke dabbed his forehead, and sat up suddenly, with a sigh.

“Charlot?”

“Your Highness?”

“What was that you once hinted to me about someone’s art with a little
a?”

“Your Highness thought fit at the time--very properly, I am sure--to
reprove me for what was merely an idle speculation.”

“Very likely. You declined to state your authority, if I remember. Do
you still?”

“That must be conditional.”

“On what?”

“On your condonation of a certain liaison.”

“Well, well. Who is the other party to it, Charlot?”

“I must crave your Highness’s absolution.”

“You have it, coquin.”

“It is Fanchette Becquet, then--the Infanta’s first femme de
confiance.”

“Ah, rogue!” The duke frowned--then sighed again. “That is to bring
corruption very near the fount of innocence.”

“Not corruption, monsieur, but salvation. If I have sacrificed myself
to serve your Highness----”

“O--la--la! O to be sure! You are a very disinterested scamp. But that
sort of sacrifice will never get you into heaven. And what was
innocence doing to risk its salvation, my friend?”

“Has your Highness formed no opinion?”

The duke shrugged his shoulders, pettishly, wearifully.

“You smile, and hint, and shuffle round the truth, as if you would
seek to have me understand it without compromise to yourself. Why the
devil can’t you speak out?”

“What encouragement have I, when my motives are misconstrued into
spite and jealousy? I was told once how this envious spirit of mine
might get me into trouble. With deference, monseigneur, I think you
sometimes hardly recognise your true friends.”

“Maybe, Charlot; and maybe I did you wrong. Only, if you are one and
the best of them, as I do now incline to believe, in honesty speak out
and prove it. Be candid as the day: I bid you; I beg you, Charlot my
friend.”

“Well, then, I start on this: you sneer at my disinterestedness, as
illustrated by this little affaire; but I will tell you I have a true
passion for this girl; I desire to monopolise her affections; and yet
I have bidden her so to contrive as that she shall fall under
suspicion of an intrigue with the chevalier Tiretta.”

“O, just under suspicion? That will not harm you.”

“Monseigneur well knows that what is begun in play will often end in
earnest. I risk that--and why? Out of devotion to your interests. Here
is a case--which I will put so far specifically. A lover sends a
friend to plead his cause for him--a mad thing to do, and the madder
the more persuasive the friend. We know the proper advocate lives in
his part; the cause is just worth him and no more; if he wins he takes
the credit--and the fees. But supposing there are those among us who,
having recognised the danger, are decided that the advocate must be
foiled in his design at whatever cost. There is nothing for us then
but so to brand his character that he will be forced to withdraw
prematurely from the case. Your Highness smokes me?”

“Par exemple. That is where your little cocotte comes in.”

“That is where Fanchette comes in--and with what result as regards the
subject of the real intrigue? Why that she learns at last with
indignation that what is offered her is but the reversion of a passion
she believed so single to herself; that a thirst she deemed divine is
content to slake itself in the common ditch----”

“You flatter your Fanchette and your own taste, Charlot----”

“That, in short, her god of gold is revealed a god of brass, I thank
your Highness. So this M. Tiretta, if I have judged aright, falls from
his estate of perfection. After all, a woman wears a lover as she does
a robe--exclusively, that is to say; a thing for her sole possession.
Fashions grow out of fashion when the lesser ape them.”

The duke, meditating darkly awhile, rose from his chair, and went
pacing frowningly to and fro.

“So,” said he, stopping suddenly in his walk, “I am to understand that
you have taken these means on your own responsibility, and that you
consider yourself justified in taking them. Why?”

“Because, in doing so, I believe myself to be acting as your
Highness’s true friend.”

“But why, man, why? In what lies your justification? That is what I
want to know.”

“In my little friend’s reports.”

“Of an intrigue?”

“Of an intrigue in the making, at least.”

“And now nipped in the bud?”

“If you authorise the process.”

“She knows nothing as yet of this amiable scheme to disenchant her?”

“Nothing. But the ground is all prepared.”

“You do not, sir, imply for a moment that my daughter----”

“Mademoiselle is as guiltless as the angels. I stake my soul on it.”

“I should have preferred something of more value. But let that pass.”

“You approve the scheme, then?”

“If necessary. But I trust that folly is ended; that all will be well
henceforth. Nevertheless I applaud your true vigilance, my friend.”

“Upon my conscience, monseigneur, I think you should. Admit that I
have manœuvred well both to circumvent scandal, and to make his own
treachery recoil on the head of the betrayer.”

“That I could hold that forfeit. But the charge is too shadowy; and he
is the archduke’s protégé. Still, the time may come. Now, the man
must be got rid of--and without delay.”

“You will see to that, I think.”

“And in the meanwhile the Infanta remains with us, here at Parma.”

“Under watch, if I might suggest.”

“Charlot?”

“Your Highness?”

“I think, perhaps, it would be as well to put your scheme at once to
the proof.”

“I will instruct Fanchette forthwith, sir.”

“Yes, that is right. It will, perhaps, relieve the situation.”

His mind cleared, he hummed a little stave, and turned roguishly on
the other:

“I hope you will not find that the little cocotte, like your other
advocate, has accommodated herself too realistically to her part. That
were a cursed return for your trust in her.”

“I took it into the reckoning, sir. If she has, my own with her will
come as soon as she has ceased to be of use, that is all.”

“O, shocking, shocking! Come, go call la Roque, and we will forget all
this tedious stuff over a game at ombre.”




 CHAPTER XVII.
 THE LOST PRESENCE

It is a pathetic paradox that we never truly acquire anything until
we have lost it. To possess rightly what is ours we must be deprived
of it, must come to view it down the perspectives of the past and
gone, to enable us to get its real proportions into focus. That would
seem to imply that, as the mystics teach us, matter is the illusion
and imagination the reality, since loss opens our mental vision to a
thousand truths, to which while possessing them we were blind. The
miser, robbed and pauperised, realises too late the countless
opportunities for happiness he has forgone; the desolated lover knows
at last the devotion which risked death to pleasure him, rather than
deny to the lesser faith that proof which, to its own, more strong and
pure, was inessential. So it often is that to die is to live for the
first time as one’s true self, even in the hearts of those who
cherished us.

Ah, death, who clears the vision; in whom all revealed truths
corradiate--give us back the child, the friend, the lover, whose worth
we never really estimated until you opened our eyes to all that it had
meant to us. The qualities we were impatient of because we could not
understand; the motives we misinterpreted; even the small vitalities
that often worried us, got in our way, seemed importunate and
tiresome--what would we not give at last to hear again one tone of the
insistent voice, to feel again one touch of the restless hands, whose
very tyranny expressed a fearless confidence in the love that would
not see. But it may not be; our knowledge comes in loss; and were
these to be restored to us, the veil of flesh would again close in and
blind our vision to their truth.

That lost presence! If with all our memory of its faults it can figure
so ineffably dear to us, be so comprehended at last for its lovely
indispensability, how must it live in a heart which has never learned
to associate anything with it but the gentlest perfection of form and
nature. So the widowed heart of Tiretta regarded its deprivation. With
him the larger knowledge was but as the knowledge of a transfiguration
from Love the saint to Love the goddess.

At first he could not realise that she was gone--even from the house
that her voice and light step had made so beautiful. That she could
have gone out of his life would have seemed a desolation too monstrous
for belief. And yet he had known throughout on what a precarious
tenure he held his lease of light, and how wilfully, how infatuatedly
he had blinded his soul to its impermanence.

It could not but be blinded still, while the glamour of that last
meeting hung in his brain like an intoxicating incense. In his ecstasy
of sure possession there was no room at the moment for doubts and
apprehensions. It was only when he came fully to grasp the fact that,
in the official view, he was wholly done with her, that she had been
taken from him like a patient cured, and that no reason existed in the
world why they should ever meet again, that a sense of his own
incredible position seemed to break in upon him. She was not gone for
a day, a week, a month; she was gone, so far as their intimacy was
concerned, for ever. Henceforth her august and his obscure destinies
separated, to flow continually wider apart; no road of his conceivably
led to Parma, where she was established not again to return.

Not to return! He had to grip himself to realise that stupendous fact,
to get at last on terms with the conscience he had so long eluded. And
then, flowing, flowing in from that outer darkness to which it had
been relegated, came the deadly spirit of guilt and remorse; and he
awoke to blank amazement of his dream, and whither it had brought him.

Now he had to stand up, a desperate creature, and parley with his
soul. What was he going to do in this crisis of his affairs? The just,
the expiatory thing, since, mercifully, it might be said, heaven had
snatched him from his self-delusion in time to make atonement
possible? If hitherto the odds against him had been morally
overwhelming, here was the psychologic moment of respite, the
breathing, the renewing time, when he could still withdraw with some
honour to himself. And so, what of her, sacrificed in her innocent
trust, like piteous Iphigenia, to appease the anger of the gods? No,
it was unthinkable; he was not hero or coward enough to condemn his
own soul to that renunciation, let the gods visit his weakness on his
head as they would. To go; to let her believe him faithless,
spiritless, believe his love, to which she leaned in wistful
confidence, a thing of straw? He could not do it, not though reason
pointed to it as the wise and noble course. What had he to do with
reason, whose bliss had been in defying it? He had sinned to his
friend already beyond redemption; would it mend his salvation to play
the traitor to his love?

O, his love--his beautiful love! If it had been madness before to
relinquish that dream, how much more impossible was it now, when loss
had made of it an immortal ecstacy, had transported it from earth to
heaven, had exalted its little Madonna of the white feet to those
starry heights where no breath of gross desire might reach her. Now
she belonged to him tenfold by right of that immaculateness; he was
jealous of her virgin fame, since she was enthroned there by his
will--a tender thing, no longer for the rough wounding of man’s
passion. Let her thus dwell for ever in the skies, serene and chaste
and adorable. The world was free to kneel with him and worship; though
her chosen one, he would demand no closer privilege for himself.

But they would not let it be; they had haled her from her heaven,
meaning to despoil her; and what alternative had he then but to claim
her bodily for his own? Friendship, good faith, policy--what were all
these as against his age-long title, the wild mystic compact made in
those far green gardens? That was the older, the more binding troth,
of which, when he accepted his credentials from the archduke, he had
guessed nothing. Now, if honour bound him, it was there. He could not
help it if the humour of the thing jumped with his inclination.

He would recognise all this sometimes for the casuistry it was; but
mostly, so strangely was the mystic in him blended with the
rationalist, it would possess his mind with all the force of an actual
memory. But it mattered little, after all, with what he chose to salve
his conscience, since, angry or half-healed, he found no solution in
it of his difficulties.

Those were to know what to do, now the inevitable, against which he
had made no provision, was upon him. He had sung like the improvident
grasshopper, and the winter of his rapture found him unprepared. Was
it still possible they might communicate, and arrange some plan of
action? And, if so, what plan? At the least it must be a mad and a
desperate one, staking their all on the cast, hopeless from the first
of compromise. Yet he was ready, if she was brave. He must learn that;
must force the knowledge somehow. Or would she find means to provide
him with it unasked? Not for one moment would he believe in the
reality of her asserted reconciliation to her doom. He was as sure of
her true heart as he was of his own imperishable constancy. Yet what
to do?

He did nothing. As, I opine, all but the resourceful heroes of romance
would do under like circumstances, so did he--he temporised.

He could not bring himself to believe, indeed, that their separation
was final. He was always in the hope that, the formal betrothal
achieved, she would be allowed to return to Colorno; and he was
doggedly resolved, pending such blissful restoration, not only to
outstay his welcome, but to ignore the broadest and least delicate
hints, of which the marquise was not sparing, that he might with
advantage to everyone be gone.

His amiable persistency even had its effect at length on the rude old
lady; especially when, for diplomacy’s sake, he brought the persuasion
of his voice to bear upon her still responsive susceptibilities. The
suggestion that, the main theme withdrawn, he could find even freer
inspiration for his songs in her ripe understanding came so to
captivate her that in the end, from suffering his flatteries, she
quite coveted them--and, finally, she made love to him.

Thereat, a little alarmed, he drew back; and perhaps so obviously as
to precipitate his own downfall. But of that in a moment.

In the meanwhile he spent the most of his days in wandering about the
now desolate grounds, his heart a prey to vain longings and vainer
expectations. No word or sign came in all this time to solace or
decide him; he walked, the very spirit of loneliness and brooding
melancholy, a being most pathetically haunted.

Once he went to Aquaviva’s gardens; and talked graciously with the
little Bissy because he was a pet of hers; and spent a sweet sad hour
in the orange grove, absorbed in one delirious memory. But mostly he
frequented the palace walks, retasting unforgettable delights. He
could have kissed her lilies one by one on their open mouths; to stand
approximately in her footprints was a fatuous joy to him; often he
stole to her vacant windows, and committed his soul to their sweet
inaccessible mysteries.

The children he rather avoided. They worried him with their unfeeling
prattle. Yet still he lingered on. It could not last much longer; and
he knew it could not. But what was to be the end?

He never doubted her love--not for one instant. He pictured her, like
himself, waiting, waiting for the deliverance that would not come, for
the reunion that hard fate debarred them. She would yield herself to
him, she had said, when hope was gone; he had but to call and she
would fly to hide herself in his breast. So it was hope that parted
them; yet how was he to banish hope and still regain her? It was upon
hope he lived.

Once he wove this sorrowful exaltation of his into a rhapsody of love
and loss, the sense of which may be rendered in the following lines:

  “Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;
  Love reigned, and Death stood still;
  The world paused at its burgeoning
  Of may and daffodil.

  “Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,
  Time blossomed over Time;
  It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,
  That earth to heaven would climb--

  “It seemed, all wrath, all hate were fled,
  And sole bright sense remained;
  That something evil had been sped,
  And some new knowledge gained.

  “Then no fruits were, but endless bliss
  Of Love that knew no sting,
  And laughed him on from kiss to kiss,
  Like bees a’honeying.

  “The rains were gone, the skies were blue,
  Nor any cloud had birth
  Save but to drop a gentle dew
  Like balm upon the earth.

  “Nor grief nor grievance ere could be
  In fields so fair bedight;
  And, above, the fields of eternity
  Soft blossomed through the night.

  “And there the moon, the witch of dreams,
  Her web of slumber wrought,
  Till in its soft and silken beams
  Ten thousand stars were caught.

  “And there the moon with shining eyes
  Her silken web prepared,
  To catch the stars like fireflies,
  And kiss them, being snared.

  “O! sweet it was in woods and bowers,
  And no fear to conceive;
  But meal of honey gave the flowers
  And dew the cups of eve.

  “O! sweet it was. O! sweet it was.
  No sweeter could befall,
  While love the end was and the cause--
  God knows what changed it all!

  “A kiss too much, too full a sigh--
  The vessel brimméd o’er;
  And the creaking wain of Destiny
  Moved onwards as before.”

And so he lingered on amidst the golden ruins of his paradise,
wondering, as if his brain were stupefied, over what he had done to
bring it thus in a moment about his ears.

He was not permitted to wonder long. Whether it were that she soon
realised the hollowness of his attentions to herself; or the real
peril of his continued presence in the neighbourhood; or, which is
most probable, that she was wearied with the whole business, the
marquise took steps to make his further stay in the palace impossible
to him. Once resolved, she went about the business after her
uncompromising fashion. She opened upon him one night without
relevance or preface:

“Like Cupid, monsieur, you are everyone’s match-maker, it seems, and
nobody’s gallant. And yet sometimes I wonder.”

“Over what, madame?”

“Why as to there being possibly a subtler purpose in your advocacy
than you let appear.”

“What purpose, for example?”

“Call it the purpose of the first-fruits, such as it is said our
provincial monseigneurs claim on unions to which they give their
blessing.”

He drew back as if he had received a blow in the face. But she went on
with perfect serenity:

“There was, for instance, that little volage Fanchette--now in Parma
with her mistress--whom you made happy with her gentleman.”

“_I_ made happy?”

“Did you not? Or was it only that, having taken your fee, the case
resolved itself without your help?”

He rose from his chair, as pale and grim as death.

“What purpose can you have in thus insulting me?” he said.

She gave a high little laugh, quite placid.

“Insult! Such as you! O, I can assure you, monsieur, your methods have
not failed to interest us. You have been very discreet; but walls have
eyes as well as ears. Do not think I blame you for insisting on your
price; such devotion deserves to be paid in kind.”

“You lie,” he said, quite quietly now. “I have only that to say.”

“Eh!” she cried. “It was not for that, then, that you intrigued with
her? Or was it possibly that you thought to use the girl as
stepping-stone to higher things?”

His amazement showed in his face.

“I have neither used nor abused her,” he said. “I know nothing
whatever of her affairs of the heart. It is a base and wicked slander,
whoever uttered it. I say so much and no more, because my honour
demands it. You will permit me to withdraw, madame. I quit the palace
to-night.”

“That is as you please,” she answered, unruffled; and he left her.

He had no alternative, his raging heart assured him. He must go at
once, whatever his departure might portend to his hopes. But to stay
on here thus vilified, thus enlightened, was impossible. O, into what
foul passes had his sin allured him! And that they could have been
existing all this time, unsuspected by him, like filthy slums
environing the places which her very footsteps had made holy! The
thought of them, of himself in such connection, was a profanation to
her memory. His soul cried out to him to claim and bear her away, to a
purer atmosphere, to a lovelier knowledge--into the white grave
mysteries of the North.

Whither first? As he halted a moment, undecided, a palace functionary
pursued him with a despatch. He opened it and read. It was from the
archduke, recalling him peremptorily to Vienna.




 CHAPTER XVIII.
 AN INTERVIEW

“I would have laid down my life for my friend: my friend asked of me
a harder thing.”

He stood before the prince, his head erect, his hand motionless upon
his sword hilt. Joseph, sitting, as quietly, in the chair he had
pushed back from the table, regarded him steadily,
dispassionately--even, at last, with an odd touch of pity in his
expression. The season was early August; the place, a private cabinet
in the old imperial palace called the Burg.

“So much I have inferred,” said the young archduke, his voice not cold
but even, “from the Duke of Parma’s recent advices to me recommending
your recall. I had not known before, Tiretta, that a soldier looked
upon the vindication of his honour as so difficult a task.”

He noted, with an observant interest, the spasm that twitched the set
features at his words. He was in all things curious and analytical.

“I have deserved this,” was the low answer. “Stab, sir, and turn your
creese in the wound.”

“You do me an injustice,” said Joseph calmly. “It is to the scalpel,
not the sword, that I would have you reveal yourself. If I probe, I
probe for instruction. The soldier’s code, for instance--is it not a
strict one? What harder thing did I ask of you than to obey orders? I
seek simply for information.”

“No need to. I am a villain.”

“Tut-tut, my friend! That is merely to beg the question. You know my
views very well. A man is not to be summed up in that convenient
fashion. Is it, for instance, the assertion of a villain that he would
sacrifice his life for his friend?”

“Would to God I could do it, and so cut the knot!”

The eyes, watchful, inquisitive, in the pale narrow young face,
canvassed the speaker curiously.

“Well,” said their owner at length: “will you not answer my question?”

“You ask me, sir, what was peculiarly hard to me, a soldier, in that
mere call to obedience? Nothing, I answer. That you could send me into
the fight, having first broken my sword in its scabbard--that was the
hard thing.”

The prince seemed to ponder a little, sitting without movement, save
for a slight corrugation of his brows.

“No, I do not understand,” he said presently. “You would seem to imply
that I wilfully dedicated you to destruction.”

“Wilfully, yes. I do not say consciously.”

“Can will be unconscious of itself?”

“In princes, sir, because no one dreams of questioning it in them.
There can be no conscious force without conscious resistance.”

The young philosopher considered again, as appraising a plausible
theory.

“Very well,” he said. “Then, to return from the abstract to the
particular, what is represented in fact by this symbol of the broken
sword?”

“My broken honour, sir, for which you were responsible.”

“No, you must explain.”

“What--have you forgotten the incident at the ford, from which all
this luckless mission derived? To send a convicted pander to sing his
employer’s praises! God in heaven! Who but a prince could have failed
to foresee the end?”

“Well, sir--continue. I begin, I think, to perceive.”

“Not justly, sir, nor the whole. I sang your praises; I was loyal to
my friendship and my humiliating task. Never doubt that for one
instant. But what was the force of an advocacy so recommended? What
any but a prince might have foretold. I was scorned, I was repudiated,
and rightly, because my honour was in question; and that I could not
endure. It was above all things dear to me, and I wrought to exculpate
it. I could not have gained a hearing without--and that is my excuse
and my crime.”

He ended, breathing deeply. Still the unwinking eyes canvassed him,
and without emotion, it seemed.

“You sought to convince her of your honour?”

“I had no alternative.”

“By converting it, so vindicated, to a dishonourable purpose?”

“I never ceased to extol your Highness’s noble qualities--no, not to
the end.”

“The end!”

For the first time some emotion showed itself in Joseph’s face. He
started, as if he would rise; but leaned back again, resolute to
control himself.

“You may question my honour, sir,” said Tiretta. “In the name of God,
leave hers unsullied by a thought.”

Steadfastly, for some moments, the two regarded one another; then
Joseph rose from his chair, and, walking to a window, stood looking
out upon an inner court of the palace which it commanded. Presently,
without turning, he spoke:

“You are very severe on princes, my friend; yet it seems they can be
guileless in their trusts.”

“If, sir, by guileless you mean despotic, they are the most trusting
souls on earth. So might we all be, if a wish with us overruled,
without question, every possible or impossible objection. How can
princes enter into common human feelings when they have had no least
experience of them? To feel, one must suffer and be denied.”

“Do I not feel? I think I could convince you.”

“You feel for yourself, sir--I do not doubt it--in this
disillusionment about one you had thought to be your true friend and
servant.”

“I feel for you, Tiretta.”

He had turned as he spoke, and now came forward, until he stood face
to face with the man who had wronged him. There was a look in his eyes
strangely like compassion.

“Truly I can feel for you,” he said--“as for anyone who lets his heart
go out towards the unattainable.”

A shadow seemed to fall upon the soldier’s face.

“So speaks the prince,” he said--“generous and fine-minded; but still
the prince. Can a prince be slave to love, sir?”

“History would seem to say so.”

“Ah! He may rule everything else, but not that: he cannot rule what,
in common with all men, he is subject to. A prince in love is just a
man in love. He, too, may suffer the unattainable.”

For some moments the archduke stood silent; then, slightly nodding his
head, made answer:

“True, Tiretta--that is quite true. I cannot command love. I might
possess, and murder to possess its form: still not to me but to the
shadow of the dead would belong all that was worth possessing in it.
Have you deserved death? I do not know. I only know I would not have
the thing I seek made unattainable; and that would it become, were I
to kill you. Yet what to do? Tell me, my friend, for I am in your
hands.”

“In mine!”

Emotion, sudden and startled, shook the inflexible voice.

“Tiretta!”

The young prince put a hand, quite movingly and unexpectedly, on his
erst-favourite’s shoulder. The action, generous and manly, spoke the
real heart under all its philosophic veneer.

“Admit,” said Joseph: “have you not a little exaggerated the cause in
order to justify the end? The name you gave yourself----”

“It was given me, sir, by implication.”

“By whom or what? The sweetest and most innocent lips in the world?
You wrong them, I am sure, even more than you do yourself or me. But
the fault was mine, you say; yet I had always honestly thought you
insusceptible to such emotions--a dreamer, a wooer of abstractions.
Well, I was mistaken, it seems. Your strength was unequal to the task
my faith in it imposed on you. Which of us was most to blame--I in
directing, you in accepting? What need to quarrel about that now? We
have made a botch of it between us, and the thing for us to discuss is
how best to mend a lamentable case. Will you not tell me the whole
truth, Tiretta, my friend?”

“Before God, I will.” The man was profoundly touched.

“Then, say, are you to her what she is to you?”

“That were impossible.”

“Nay, you equivocate.”

“On my soul, then, I believe that, heaven helping us, she would give
me her hand to-morrow.”

A slight tremor seemed to take the archduke’s features. He stood back,
quitting his hold on the other. A minute’s tense silence ensued.

“Well,” he said at length, just repressing a sigh. “I repeat I am in
your hands.”

Again, impulsively, he advanced and renewed his caressing touch.

“There can be no issue but one. You know it, Tiretta--man, you know
it. We are all in the bonds of fate, and helpless. Now, listen and
believe me. If it were possible, I would yield her to you. It is not
possible. Then would you condemn your friend to a loveless match?”

“What would you have me do?”

His voice was quite wrung and broken.

“I would have you,” said Joseph, “atone, in the only way you can, the
wrong you have done, not to me but to her.”

“I am to go--never to see her again--to leave her believing me
faithless?”

“Better a faithless lover than a faithless wife. So only can you heal
the wound you have inflicted. For her sake, Tiretta.”

“Why do you not call in your guards, and have me silenced for ever? I
will make no resistance.”

“Because I am human, though a prince, Tiretta.”

For a while, desperate, still mutinous, the man’s torn soul fought out
its tragedy of renunciation. And at last impulsively surrendered. With
bowed head, he spoke the words:

“You have a noble mind, sir. If you will not retaliate on me as you
might, death is always somewhere waiting for the soldier. I will go do
what I may to seek an honourable one. And so heaven forgive me and
requite your Highness!”

He took the gracious young hand in his, put his lips to it, and,
turning, left the room, walking with blinded eyes and upright head,
like a prisoner who passes from the dock to the condemned cell.




 CHAPTER XIX.
 “MARIANA”

The real tragedy of separation is not for the banished lover; it is
for the desolate home-keeper, who knows no distractions of change and
movement to solace her aching heart. He, at least, has his freedom,
his new interests; she, none but the old, grown now so flat and
unprofitable since the glorifying light was once flashed upon them and
withdrawn. How darker than darkness looks a room when the lamp is
blown out; how stale and charmless seems life the morning after the
play; how remote from the witching darling of last night’s masque
appears this love-sick Chloe, yawning biliously over her untouched
breakfast plate! Perhaps Strephon this morning also looks a little
“off colour” and feels a little sick; but he has the imperative duties
of office to call him to a sane resumption of life’s prose, and no
doubt by lunch time he has earned himself a vigorous appetite, no less
hearty for the sentiment which has intervened between his chop of
yesterday and his curried prawns of to-day.

But, for poor stay-at-home Chloe, some zest has gone for ever from the
old placid satisfactions; she cannot recover at their past valuation
the humdrum routine of things; she has seen the commonplace
transformed, and henceforth life to her, to be life, must reveal
itself on a higher plane. So she still toys with her food at luncheon,
and again at dinner, and sighs over the insufferable dreariness and
monotony of that social existence which once made her full content.

“What made the assembly shine?” O, what, indeed, poor Isabel, since
your days have fallen into so sad a melancholy, and the light has fled
from your haunted eyes? “Because Lorenzo came not?” Alas he did not
come, he did not speak; and to what was life reduced, lacking his
voice and presence. So, thinking the same thought of unaccountable
neglect, these divided lovers mourned apart. Sometimes in her heart
she would upbraid him, calling him false and cruel; but more often she
accused herself, saying she had been his ruin, his evil genius, and
again bemoaning her own fatal weakness in not flying with him when he
had bidden her. Yet, granted they were well parted, he might have
salved her anguish with something kinder than this killing silence.
Had he so soon forgotten her--forgotten how she had bidden him call to
her, when all hope was gone, and she would fly to him? No, she could
not, she would not believe it. It was only that he did not realise how
cruelly souls condemned to pining inaction might suffer. Out in the
free air it was so hard to enter into the feelings of the dull
prisoner hidden from one’s ken. She made every loving excuse for him;
and still, poor thing, she hungered for a sign, and, hungering,
trembled at the thought of her own wickedness.

For was she not a plighted bride--enslaved by token of the hateful
golden fetter clasping her finger? She wore it in public, to the duke
her father’s vacuous content; but at night she would fling it from
her, and kneel to her basil, and kiss its perfumed leaves, and moan
out her passionate penitence for even that show of disloyalty. She had
brought this, her treasure of treasures, with her, and it was her one
comfort and reassurance in all the grievous time.

One day it came to her, did he know of the formal betrothal? Perhaps
he had looked to her love’s high courage to resist to the last, and,
learning the mortal truth, how at the first onset she had failed him,
had renounced so frail an ally. O, in that case, how could she let him
know that her heart had never once wavered in its fidelity to him--let
him know that, whatever bitter fate forced their steps apart, she was
his, in everything but seeming, to all eternity?

Poor child; she was always more loving than wilful--no forceful
heroine to command her own destiny. She waited for the call, only
bewildered as to what to do to evoke it. She could obey, but she could
not initiate. Perhaps, at first, she had hoped, like that other, that,
the ceremony once achieved, she would be allowed to return to Colorno.
If so, it did not take long to disillusion her. At the first hint of
such a wish the duke, angrily suspicious, half revealed himself:

“Understand, your salad days are over, and for ever. Henceforth you
await here the completion of the contract which is to make you woman
out of child. All romantic follies of the past must be forgotten. You
renounced them, in all faith and honour, when you accepted his
Highness’s token from my hands.”

She shrank back, as if detected in her guilt; and Don Philip
continued:

“I look to you not to force me into some very drastic measures to cut
this trouble at its root. Think well of what I say, for much
concerning another welfare than yours depends on it.”

He had found the way to silence her. She could not misread the hint,
or blind herself to the understanding which lay behind it. _His_ life
lay at the mercy of her conduct. If she would preserve it, she must
assume a placid resignation, seem to repudiate the very suggestion of
any _arrière pensée_ in her proposal.

The shock was stunning, but, having surmounted it, she bent herself
with piteous eagerness to play the deceiver’s part. Her fear went on
tiptoe; she smiled and sang in the duke’s presence, so that it was
pathetic to see her--a thing to turn one’s eyes from. He may have
approved the effort; yet in truth she could not so suffer without
betraying a sign. To clinch the matter, he decided to play, in
collusion with another, his reserve card.

One day, the Infanta being present, his Highness began, on some
pre-arranged provocation, to banter La Coque upon his former jealousy
of a rival musician.

“Admit he sang divinely,” he said.

“In truth, monseigneur, I saw but little divinity in the man.”

“O, you would not, chirruping with your nose to the ground!”

“That’s as it may be. I fear no test, before an impartial judge.”

“What; you would back yourself in a competition of voices?”

“Aye, and of improvisation--this day, this moment, if you will. Let M.
Tiretta be summoned, and give us both a fair hearing.”

“Coquin, you dare the challenge, knowing he is gone.”

“On my faith, no, sir. I believed him at Colorno. Whither is he
vanished?”

“To the devil--to Vienna--to anywhere, for what I care, so he remains
to shock our sense of decorum no longer. Truth is the rascal claimed
too many of the prerogatives of the troubadour--free sport among the
petticoats for one. The scandal grew notorious. There was a wench, for
instance--but ware, bully-boy! I tread on dangerous ground.”

“_My_ ground, sir?”

“How he threats us with his brow! Spare us, good Charlot--I but quote
the common report. Yet admit the fellow had an endearing way with
him.”

“Curse him!”

La Coque was half caught in the snare of his own setting. He stood
glowering sulkily, while Don Philip, with a little stealthy sidelong
glance at his daughter, turned with a snigger to some other of his
suite.

A flush of colour to her cheek; a just perceptible lift of the
lip--the duke was scarce intelligent enough to read the signs.

That they could think her capable of being trapped by such a shallow
artifice! Her heart swelled in her breast over the base wrong to him,
the despicable meanness to herself. O, how fine and proud he appeared
by contrast with these ignoble minds, how remote from them in his
living intensity, his spiritual dignity! She would not even condescend
to defend him in thought against a slander so gross and obvious. Its
effect was to confirm her tenfold in her faith.

“She is pricked,” thought the duke. “We may leave the poison to work.”

But the poison was not as he surmised: it was shame, not for the
slandered but the slanderer, that burnt in her veins. Her father! That
he could have debased himself to such methods! All in a moment he
seemed revealed to her for what he was, a prince with a clown’s heart,
a whited sepulchre, behind the mask of elegance a soul like a
shrivelled kernel, without life or savour. She turned from him, in a
very sickness of repulsion.

But that night, as Fanchette was preparing her for bed, she rose
suddenly from her chair, and, turning upon the maid, clasped her
convulsively by the arms.

“Tell me of him, or I shall die,” she said.

The girl for the moment was completely taken aback. She did not know
what to answer, and could only stare and gasp. The feverish clutch
closed more urgently upon her.

“I have no friend but you in all the world, Fanchette. Have I not been
kind to you? O, be kind to me and tell me! You know very well--you
have always known, I think. Forgive me if I pretended not to
understand you. I tried so long to fight against it; and I could
not--and my heart is breaking.”

Startled, unnerved as she was, Fanchette could not but be touched by
that piteous appeal.

“Hush!” she said. “What do you want to know? There, sit upon this
couch, and speak low, while I kneel to you. So. Now, tell me, are you
always thinking of him?”

“Always, always, Fanchette--all the weary day and night. Why does he
not send me one least little message?”

“It is said he is gone to Vienna.”

“O, cruel!”

“Would you kill him with your rashness? Do you not know he is
suspected?”

“Fanchette!--my God! Tell him to keep away. You must--you can find
means.”

“What is the good, when by your every look and act you betray him.”

“I will not--O, I will not! But to hear him so slandered and
maligned--it is hard to suffer and to smile.”

“Do they slander him--are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“O, nothing!” She gave a little affected laugh. She was beginning to
consider her part. “Only it does not do with us to idealise our
fancies too much.”

She failed, for all her effort, to meet the inquisition of the true
grief-stricken eyes.

“Fanchette!”

“O, we know how gossip is to be discounted. For myself, at least, I
never took him seriously.”

“In what?”

“It is only natural to propitiate the maid if you would come at the
mistress.”

“Did he make love to _you_?”

“O, that is too definite a term! He said enough to put me on my guard
against him--that is all.”

“You need not have been so scrupulous. He is ever courteous and
considerate--attentions that woman in her vanity is always too ready
to accept as single to herself.”

“O, I took his for what they were worth! I was under no delusions as
to their value.” She tossed her head. There was a spot of anger on her
cheek; some venom in her tone. “I am sure I had no intention,” she
said loftily, “to disabuse your mind about him.”

“No one could do that but himself,” answered Isabella proudly. “Though
all the world slandered him, I should not listen or believe.” She
drooped her sad head, knotting and unknotting her fingers. “I hoped I
had a friend,” she said; “but I think I am quite alone.”

Fanchette sulked a little, though with a certain bewildered contempt
in her mind. How was one to circumvent this loyal fool, so obdurate in
her love’s faith? If all evidence was so to be discredited by her,
what was the use of their conspiring to produce it? And as she
thought--even with some grudging sympathy with a pertinacity which
was, after all, characteristically feminine--two soft arms came about
her neck, and two soft entreating eyes looked into hers.

“Fanchette; in pity tell me, _what_ am I to do.”

The girl sniffed, and caught her breath. If she had but little heart,
the emotionalism in her was always a responsive quantity. She
answered, almost hysterically:

“O! what is the good of asking me? He is gone, I tell you--some say
summoned by the archduke to answer for his conduct. Perhaps he is dead
by now.”

She saw the roses quit the cheek, and clutched at the slender form as
it swayed backwards. She was full of passionate remorse and alarm in a
moment.

“Mistress--dearest, it was a lie. Look up--listen to me--I am a wicked
heartless wretch! He is not dead--I know it--I was told by one who
knows it. He has been to Vienna, and left again: it is thought he has
gone to the wars.”

She wept, and upbraided herself, and fondled the scarce animate form,
calling upon it to speak, to forgive her, not to die and curse her to
eternal despair. And presently her urgency prevailed, and a tinge of
colour came back to the white face, and the ghost of a voice reassured
her:

“Without one word to me?”

She took her in her arms, and rocked her, soothing and protesting in
one:

“They are all alike for that. Loin des yeux, loin du coeur, is it not.
There, don’t give way so. It is wiser anyhow that he should disappear
for the time being; and like enough he sees it, and sees clearer than
you. If he’s all your fancy paints him, he’ll come back again when the
dust he’s kicked up has settled; and in the meantime--” she ventured
to coax, trusting to the impression she was making--“I’d try to forget
him, dear mistress, an I were you--if for no better reason than to
prepare yourself against emergencies. He’s not strong enough to fight
against a throne, and if he hasn’t realised that by this time, a
little reflection will be sure to convince him. And then it isn’t as
if you were asked to make your choice between honey and gall. His
Highness by all accounts is a very proper man, tender but self-willed,
as we women like, and with all the advantage of youth on his side----”

She submitted, falling silent, to the quick passionate rebuff which
her words evoked. Isabella, putting her aside, rose to her feet and
stood breathing spasmodically, her hand crushed to her bosom.

“There,” she said, panting a little: “you have said enough. I have
been weak and foolish; and I am ashamed. Forget everything I said,
Fanchette, and let me forget it. I am very tired, and I wish to
sleep.”

With a face of formal duty, the maid rose from her knees, and, very
stiff and punctilious, completed her young mistress’s night toilette.
Not another word did she speak; until presently the parting
benediction, which she uttered in a voice so cold that it might have
been mistaken for an anathema.

And Isabella? Once alone, she crept and found her basil-pot, and
sighed her love’s orisons among its muffling leaves, where still the
envious flowers delayed to show, and eased her sore heart in silent
tears.

Gone to the wars? And without one word or sign to her? Perhaps to be
slain, and so to leave her for evermore bereaved and desolate. O, was
it true--was it? Did he want to die, perhaps, because his hope was
already killed? She had killed it; it was her silence that had driven
him to despair. The anguish of that thought was exquisite. He had
trusted to her, and she had failed him. O, for some poison in these
gentle leaves, to breathe and sleep and die upon her love! She never
once doubted his fidelity--not once. All those cruel calumnies had
left her unshaken. Her pure heart was incapable of such treachery.
They might as well forbear to hurt a faith that was immortal.

In the midst of her agony a thought stole upon her like balm. A
report!--it was nothing more than that. Was it possible that he
himself had given it currency, in order to throw dust in their
eyes--that, under cover of it, he had returned to Parma, and was
somewhere in hiding, waiting till he could communicate with her? There
was life, passionate, exulting, in that reaction to hope. How could
she ever have believed he would abandon her so, after what had passed
between them--her lord, her noble heart? She was a poor trustless
thing, unworthy of his choice.

Steadfastly she strove to keep that dear belief before her eyes; and,
little as it was, it was enough to steel her to endure the long long
days of waiting. For still they passed and passed without a sign,
drawing her hour by hour nearer to the fate she so unspeakably
dreaded. She did not ask herself by what miracle she was to escape her
doom. She felt only that to see him again, to rest upon his heart,
were to solve all difficulties.

And so the year sped on. To Fanchette she betrayed no more of herself;
only her basil was her only friend; and she would speak softly to it,
and with pretty wooings ask it to blossom soon--very soon now, lest
its tardiness should prove their undoing. It was odd and pitiful how
she had come to regard this plant as the sure symbol of their destiny.

About the court, those who knew, and watched her privately, believed
her to be truly reconciled. She was very quiet and gracious with all;
they took her sweet seriousness for first flower of the solemn
election to which she was called, as one fits oneself with gravity for
the sacrament. And yet she was guileful--a most wilful and passionate
rebel under her seeming repose, since Love had first taught her his
outlawry. Only she had learned discretion of necessity; she could play
a part with her spies, and lead them on to false conclusions. Because
for her love’s dear using alone she preserved the perfect treasure of
her truth and loyalty. What did anything else matter?

Once or twice during this time she received a letter from her royal
betrothed--documents of the heart inevitably a little pompous, but
kind and manly. There was no least allusion in them, of course, to a
dismissed episode, no condescending to a reference to so
inconsiderable a spark in the orbit of the imperial system as a
certain M. Tiretta. Had there been, Isabella might have cast them
aside, the formal pretence of reading once achieved, with less
impatience than she did. And yet, in honest truth, they were more than
she deserved.

And still the year, like a celestial lamplighter, ran down its golden
ladder from the topmost heavens; and as the sun dropped daily from its
high estate, and the earth grew slowly chill, so into the girl’s heart
stole ever more and more the killing frost of hope deferred. All her
first despair crept back, and now with renewed terror that it must
indeed be as Fanchette had hinted, and that he was gone to
fight--perhaps was even now lying stark and dead upon some
battlefield, or weeks-long buried under the bloody sods. For all her
frantic longings and strained listening, no reference to him in her
father’s court had ever again, since that shameful day, reached her
ears; and there were already wedding rumours in the air.

Then, in the loneliness of her room, she fell upon her knees and
called miserably upon death, if he had taken her love, to take her
too--to save her from the unspeakable anguish of the fate with which
she was now nearly threatened.

And death responded, after his manner with those who impiously take
his name. He saved her, as she prayed him to, but, inasmuch as her
plea to him was conditional on a life, with a life he answered.

Early in December came the news that the Duchess Louise-Elizabeth had
been seized with the smallpox at Versailles; and within a few days she
was dead.

Isabella had her desire: the wedding was indefinitely postponed.




 CHAPTER XX.
 THE FACE IN THE CROWD

Isabella had loved her mother, truly if rather fearfully, and in
return had been loved by her with as condescending a devotion as a
spirit so incessantly restless and ambitious as that of Louis XV.’s
eldest daughter could lavish on a child not born into the first order
of creation. How the indomitable sick woman had rejoiced in that early
fulfilment of her hopes, when the Austrian ambassador had come to put
an end to her doubts and apprehensions, her communications to her
husband show. She was jubilant; and so was impure old Bien-aimé, who
wrote the most touching and beautiful letter to congratulate his
son-in-law on the event, a letter full of sentiments “de les exprimer
pourrait les diminuer.” And now, before she might see brought to
ripeness any one of the countless schemes she was perpetually
revolving in her feverish brain for her family’s aggrandisement, she
had herself dropped in a moment from the tree like a rotten medlar.

The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses
than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very
retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible
to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her
fate--with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The
thought that during all this time, while her mother had been
sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning
in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the
deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at
the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible
remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that
one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct
responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been
seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse
her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream
which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was
ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were
allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy,
for the repose of her mother’s soul?

To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally
turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had
ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress,
she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of
hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now
she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly
wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that
attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it,
because his method had been simply characteristic.

It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality
of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied
some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the
stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of
all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned
by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when
its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather
than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to
the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest
appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.

And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than
devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years
had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had
purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for
Versailles--an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he
came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey
would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all
cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the
breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by
night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with
scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the
ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to
scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from
Marly--whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the
terror--that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words
“mes yeux baignent de larmes.”

So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home,
and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of
the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers
suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as
if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite
unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he
seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone.

His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality
of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who
succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that
that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the
stimulus of such local distractions as offered.

Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching
such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts
to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented
by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes--those standing
at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance,
and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction
from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in
the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same
sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a
hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles
the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of
their kinship with it.

Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position
as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might
command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty
departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the
quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least,
some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from
the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared
great and unforgettable--and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of
Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp
upon her times--he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own
nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and
elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them,
like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast,
Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is
certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was
also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused.

In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget
his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but
so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a
wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a
mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive
disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because
we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his
grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two
played with strings in another sense, composing between them a
touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to
which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all
immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double
the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly
melancholy preoccupations.

To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the
improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on
his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him
shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but
marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find
sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind
herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus
console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to
be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the
conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify
to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.

Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had
continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and
loving support, needed by him less and less--even at last, as he
developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected--a sense
of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the
verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a
confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s
trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet,
the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to
grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter
desolation.

One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor
little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a
sunless corner.

“Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is
dead.”

“Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which
fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in
an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left
beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome,
might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up
aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn
breaths. Her baby--theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide
eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in
its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her,
coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer.

“Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever
to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to
water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so
cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.”

And she walked haughtily away, scornful of the storm she knew her
reproof would evoke in that hysteric bosom; careless of how her words
might rankle and give forth poisonous humours.

But that night she dreamed that she awoke and saw her lover stand
beside her; and his face to her ghast eyes appeared all thinly laced
with blood; and in his hand he held a shrunk and withered plant.

“Dead!” he moaned: “O, faithless and untrue, look here! Dead, dead!”

And so wailing, while she strove madly for speech, he passed and
faded, seeming to melt away into the darkness; and, struggling, she
awoke in truth, her cheeks all wet with tears, and held out wild
entreating arms.

“No!” she whispered: “Beloved--no, no! Not to take it with you--not to
kill me like that! I will be true; I will never sin to it or you
again.” And so she lay sobbing, a great fear and rapture at her heart.

Then, suddenly, listening, with panic pulses, she rose, and, the cold
moonbeams playing on her white breast and feet, stole to a shadowy
corner, and gasped with joy to find _it_ still was there, and felt the
soil to see that it was moist, and let her tears drop on the shrunken
leaves.

She remembered all this the next morning as something that strangely
hovered between fact and fancy--a half actual, half dreaming ecstasy
like a sleepwalker’s. But, while she could not kill the impression of
joy it had recreated in her, she still strove to remain faithful to
her resolution of duty to her mother’s memory. That was an impossible
compromise, of course; but it sufficed the situation, while matters,
owing to the mourning, hung in abeyance.

On the 2nd of February, following that fatal December, a solemn
requiem mass for the repose of the soul of Madame Louise-Elizabeth of
France, eldest daughter of the King, Infanta of Spain, and Duchess of
Parma, was sung at Paris in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There were
present the Dauphin and Dauphiness, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire,
younger sisters of the deceased, and a host of court notables. The
funeral oration was pronounced by the Bishop of Troyes, who, says the
chronicler, “found nothing to say about the deceased except the usual
banalities, and who even pushed hyperbole so far as to eulogise Don
Philip, representing him as one ‘adorned with every talent which makes
for the first success, with every quality which merits it, unshirking
the least labour which assures it.’”

That flattery, when it reached the ears of its object, may likely have
stimulated him to an emulation, and more than an emulation, of the
“pomp and circumstance” of the Parisian “service solennel.” Anyhow, to
the public obsequies of the late duchess, which were announced to be
held in the Church of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, on the
27th March following, all the ingenuity of symbol and device of which
an upholstering brain was capable was brought into play, with a result
calculated to impress the most flippant with the dignity and majesty
of death as interpreted by a master in the art of “make-up.”

To quote, somewhat loosely, the words of the same chronicler: “The
interior of the church [a fine Renaissance structure, in the Greek
form, dating from the early sixteenth century] was hung with black
cloth embellished with a mosaic of bones and tears. Six Corinthian
pillars fluted with silver had been erected at intervals round the
nave. Medallions, representing the virtues of the princess, and
ornamented with inscriptions and ermine-lined draperies, filled the
intercolumniations of the arches both great and small. The octagonal
catafalque set in the midst bore the arms of Madame on a field of
tears and fleurs-de-lys. Below this rose a pyramid draped with black
velvet, having on its summit a crown veiled in crêpe; while around
were grouped six white marble statues representing Religion, Faith,
Hope, Charity, and two others that stood for Death. From the vaulted
roof hung a great baldaquin ornamented with five sable plumes.

“The presence of the court bishop, the stately and melancholy
intoning, combined, with the throb of the organ, the wailing of the
stringed instruments and the countless lights, to give to the ceremony
a majesty worthy of the Infanta.”

Rather an abrupt pull-up that, as if the author in the midst of his
declamation had been hit suddenly in the middle. But enough has been
described to illustrate the fertility of the brain responsible for the
decorations.

On the day of the service, the streets from an early hour were
thronged with sombre-clad citizens all hurrying to anticipate all
others in the securing of the best places for viewing and hearing. It
was a cold clear morning, and the soaring dome of the church,
surmounting its four shallow cupolas, seemed to glitter very remote
and quiet up in its blue vault. More than all the glooming symbols in
the depths below it spoke the free tranquil thought of immortality,
lovely and consoling; and so it seemed to two sad unmothered eyes,
that caught a glimpse of it through the window of the state coach, as
that solemn vehicle approached the porch.

By now all business was suspended in the city, a tithe of whose
population was packed away within those close and throbbing walls,
while hundreds, unable to gain a footing in the building, crowded the
Piazza and all the approaches outside, awaiting the arrival of the
ducal party.

Among these watchers was a young gentleman, who had come riding in
that morning from Mantua thirty miles away. He had left the old
Virgilian town at midnight, being hard pressed for time, and had
entered Parma to the clang of tolling bells, many and monotonous. The
sound at first had knocked upon his heart with a strange foreboding,
and he had reined in, with a thick catch at his throat. What did this
melancholy music portend--and these sombre crowds, all silent, all
intent, all streaming in one direction?

  “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.




 CHAPTER XXI.
 ACROSS THE BRIDGE

With the 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, _I_ should 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.




 CHAPTER XXII.
 ANTICIPATION

It is 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, _I_ am 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!”




 CHAPTER XXIII.
 “IN THE SILENT WOODY PLACES”

Bissy had 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 the _lesso_, or anæmic meat boiled
down to produce it, sometimes a cut of _manzo_, which was hobbledehoy
calf, cabbage served alone, and always _ricotta_, 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 old _contadina_ who 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: was _she_, 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 their
_ménage_--without puzzling their brains as to what he might be. Parma
was almost _terra incognita_ to 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 pastoral
_naïveté_ wonderfully 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 of _their_ veins.”

“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
that _cagna_ Fanchette 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!”




 CHAPTER XXIV.
 RAPTURE

“It is 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, “that _I_ could 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.




 CHAPTER XXV.
 DELIRIUM

“The balcony 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, Make _him_ happy.”

“What do you mean, if it were not you? O, God! what have I done to
forfeit my love?”

“To _forfeit_, 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.

“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!”




 CHAPTER XXVI.
 WITHIN THE PRESBYTERY

The northernmost of the five gates of Parma discharged direct upon
the highway that led to Colorno. At intervals from this _embouchure_
came shooting as it were the _disjecta membra_ of 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 sixth _valet de
chambre_ would 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 her _salon_ no 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 pretty
_vifs remerciments_ that 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
the _assassino-prezzolato_ was stamped on his every feature. He was
well enough dressed to pass for a _fanfaron_; 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.”




 CHAPTER XXVII.
 THE CRY IN THE GARDEN

The clocks 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.




 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 A POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

  “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.”

In that 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 chief _femme 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!




 CHAPTER XXIX.
 AT REST

  “Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
   For simple Isabel is soon to be
  Among the dead ...”

She was married early in September. When she had been told that it
was to be, she had simply acquiesced, quite quietly, quite gravely.
“To make _him_ happy”--she had not forgotten the wistful words--almost
his last--and the withholding of the sign was proof that the sacred
injunction was not rescinded. If his dear ghost still held her to that
sacrifice, there must be reasons for it hidden among the inscrutable
silences. Perhaps that way alone lay the end she so wearied for. If
this poor residue from all which exalted life above its material
perishableness was enough for Joseph’s content, she valued it too
little to grudge it him. Let him be happy with it, if he would and
could.

And so she was married, quite quietly, as befitted her mourning, in
the ducal palace at Parma. The ceremony was performed by proxy, the
Prince of Liechtenstein representing his royal master, and immediately
following it the new archduchess set out for Vienna. It is enough for
our remaining purpose to record the whole-heartedness of her reception
there by that susceptible young man, her husband, who had only once
before in his life seen the face which was now to awaken in him the
liveliest emotions of love. Isabella much more than justified the
archduke’s earlier impression of her: he found her beautiful and
desirable beyond all expectation, and he laid his soul then and there
at her feet, with assurances of its eternal dedication to her love and
service.

Eternity was a big, sad word in that connection of expediency, and
tragic, because it could never be more than a one-sided compact. She
had nothing but a temporal gift to offer him in exchange for it, but
she lent to that what grace she could through the pathetic sweetness
of its giving. He deserved only kindness of her; _he_ had had no
voice, no hand, no knowledge, in the deed which had been his gain. And
what a little gain, after all! It seemed hardly worth all this
plotting, all this wreck of lives and ruin of souls to end on such a
paltry acquisition. It were as though a party of musicians had fought
for the possession of a delicate instrument, with which in the
meantime they had been belabouring one another.

It is said that on the bridal evening, when left alone together in
their room, the young wife turned to her husband with some expression
of this thought upon her lips. She had been looking from the window,
into the blown star-lit darknesses of a night such as that which had
imprinted for ever its death-shadow upon her soul, and the emotion of
that piteous memory was alive and terrible in her. She looked into his
face, an intense and appealing sadness in her own, and clasping her
hands as if in prayer, spoke to him:

“I will try to be to you a good wife, during the three years we shall
remain together.”

“How?” he answered, amazed: “what is this arbitrary limit?”

“I do not know,” she said, sighing: “only something tells me it will
not be longer.”

What had he to do, then, but, in his exultant happiness, laugh to
scorn her fears, take her to his impassioned arms, declare the
immortality of their union? She was overwrought, he said, oppressed by
fancies born of change and recent sorrow. In the creative fire of love
all those dismal spectres would pass consumed, leaving new life and
hope to spring from out their ashes.

She shook her head; but he would not be gainsaid. The confidence of
the autocrat was in him; he read in her mood nothing but the
diffidence of a young soul temporarily overweighted by its own
aggrandisement. There is no reason for supposing that he knew anything
whatever about the real state of affairs; there is every reason for
surmising that the truth would have been jealously withheld from him.
He never once, in after months, alluded to Tiretta, or appeared to
have kept in mind the part played by that romantic agent of his in the
sequence of events. It is possible that, even had a hint of the truth
been conveyed to him, he would have scorned to attach any consequence
to the story. The _cicisbeo_ of his day was almost as formal an
institution in society as her ladyship’s pet lap-dog or _confessore_;
sometimes, even, he was solemnly inducted in family conclave; and not
seldom he was quite the most harmless member of the domestic circle.
The first condescension of an archduke and destined emperor was
sufficient to sweep all such ephemeral fancies into oblivion.

Well, if princes must be princes in these matters, Joseph had got, let
it be admitted, the best that he deserved. I think so myself. I feel a
little impatient, I must confess, of that enamoured philosopher, who,
having sent as it were a professional appraiser to value his fancy,
could behave to her, when acquired, as if she were the prize of his
most single and determined devotion.

But he was really devoted to her--even passionately so; and if she
repaid him with duty rather than affection, he was not the man or the
philosopher to complain. He knew well enough that there must always be
something lacking in unions of policy, which nothing but a miracle of
chance could make soul-unions; and Joseph could not be unjust or
unreasonable--save, perhaps, when he regarded the quality of his own
reason and found it pre-eminent. So he was satisfied to remain the
positive pole of love to his wife’s negative.

For the rest, the young archduchess did all, or almost all, that was
expected of her. She was a dutiful wife, a gentle mistress, a timely
mother; and if the one babe she bore to her husband was of her own
sex, not her disinclination to oblige, but nature, was responsible for
the reservation.

Infanticide, by unsophisticated girls, is often due to terror and
repulsion over the totally unforeseen. On a higher plane we find the
fruit of lovelessness regarded by its bearer with cold alien eyes.
That is far too harsh a description of Isabella’s attitude towards her
little infant; yet the thing seemed oddly strange to her, something
queerly remote from her own knowledge and volition--a changeling, as
it were, that had been deposited by her while she slept. It attracted
her; she was curious about it; but in a detached way. It gratified her
most in its relation to the task she had set herself, and which was
now accomplished. She had given a potential heir to the throne; she
had made _him_ happy. Surely, now, she might look with confident eyes
to her release. This poor physical residue of her had played out its
part.

It had, in truth; and so we approach the end. There is no need to
linger over it, now the little ground is cleared, and the other actors
in the drama are put away like inessential shadows into the
background. It is the passion of the moonlit garden once more--the
rapture and the meeting.

It had been evident that the young wife was drooping; it had been
increasingly evident since the birth of her child. Always frail and
delicate, marriage, it seemed, had never with her, as with some
fragile constitutions, stayed the tendency to decline, but had rather
confirmed and increased it. Something was gone from her, indeed, which
no vital force of love could replace. She seemed to fade where she
stood, like a spent lily. As the months drew on she grew weaker and
still weaker. Her husband saw, but without understanding. It was a
transient indisposition in his eyes. Autocrats are incredulous of
death. One night at the opera she fainted. Some moment in it had
stabbed her with a too-poignant memory. There was consternation then;
but she rallied--yet never to the ground she had lost, and was still
steadily yielding. She grew to be the shadow of herself; yet not so
much the shadow as the phantasm. Her beauty did not go, nor her young
symmetry; only it was strangely refined, as if some light within shone
through dissolving walls.

And yet she was never but gentle and lovely-sweet with all; very
patient, uncomplaining, but always without merriment or laughter.

And so one day there dawned upon her the third anniversary of her
lover’s death.

On that day she would not look upon her basil. For a week past she had
put it aside where her eyes could not encounter it. There had been
signs, which yet the wild longing in her heart could not find courage
to verify. Now she dared not put them to the test; she dared not risk
the ruin of her hopes until the last possible moment of endurance.

It came with the dying day. In the last lingering hour of light she
hurried towards the spot. Something greeted her even in the instant of
her approach--something like a sweet hand held out. She gasped; she
gave one little cry of rapture so intense that God in His high place
must have wept to hear it. The little bush was mealed over with
fragrant flowers as thick as snow.

That night she was to sup with the archduke privately in the
Schönbrunn palace. As she came in to him, he seemed conscious of some
change in her which was like a startling revelation and recovery. It
was the nixie of the pool he saw again--girlish, radiant, captivating.
Her cheeks were like fresh roses; she sparkled over with merriment and
audacity. A little staggered at first, he rallied quickly to the
delight of the challenge, and responded buoyantly to her mood. He was
jubilant in what he believed to be the first definite sign of her
restored health. That, and not that alone. Was it conceivable that he
detected here a hint that she might come to be to him something that
she had never quite been yet--something which he only seemed now to
recognise for the first time as a fully achieved desire, a fully
satisfied hunger, a perfect realisation of a dream which had hitherto
lacked its best fulfilment? He thought he would sacrifice much
philosophy, much pride to ensure that gain. To be to her at last not
the husband but the lover! As soon as possible, that they might be
alone, he dismissed the attendants.

It was a lovely moon-drowned night. The long windows of the room
opened upon wide spaces of tranquil garden, whose trees and beds and
slender rosaries were but soft accents on the universal glow. All
liquid and milky-green, it might have been some under-world of strange
waters from which they looked up, to see the bright globe just misted
through that deep transparency. Somewhere a fountain falling, with a
little flop and tinkle, gave voice to the illusion. The dewy lawn
looked a though frosted over with moonbeams. It was a long fairy
track, fading into ineffable mysteries.

Isabella sat fronting her husband--fronting the open windows. She had
been talking to him, sweetly, remorsefully--as one, on the prick of
departure and longing for home, might talk to a generous host whom yet
one was already forgetting--when all in a moment she fell silent.
Something in her face startled and thrilled him. It seemed
transfigured, lit up with an immortal joy. The eyes were gazing, not
at him, but past him, out into the garden, as if along that luminous
track some vision were advancing into their ken. Suddenly and
soundlessly she rose, and, still fixedly gazing, went swiftly past him
out into the night. One faint movement he made to detain her, but
ineffectually. He was conscious of an inexplicable awe--a strange
paralysis of will and motion. And then he heard a cry--as it were a
cry of intense and loving rapture, and, instantly disenthralled by it,
he started to his feet and turned. She was running into the moonlight,
her arms held out as if in a very ecstasy of welcome--and yet there
was nothing there. But in the moment that he moved to pursue her,
actually as if she threw herself without stopping into some spirit’s
lovely keeping, she pitched and fell headlong.

When he reached her, she lay in that drowning tide of light like a
spent phantom of the mists. A smile of utter rest was on her lips. She
was dead.

 “Fair Isabel: poor simple Isabel.”

 THE END.




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ ecstacy/ecstasy,
orange-grove/orange grove, etc.) have been preserved.

 [End of text]




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