Idalia/Volume 1/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
"AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE."
"It was a superb thing—magnificent!"
The most popular personage in the English Cabinet was standing on the hearth-rug of his own library of his wife's chateau of Liramar, South Italy, where he had snatched a brief autumn holiday, nothing altered and little aged since some twenty years before when the beggared Border-lord, in the pride and liberty of his youth and his ruin, had won the great Minister's liking for life, by—a defiance.
Erceldoune laughed, a little impatiently.
"Nothing of the kind! Any other man in the service would have done the same; simplest duty possible."
"Simple duties get done in this world, do they? Humph! I didn't know it. I suppose you expected, when you gave the word to fire, that the brutes would kill you—eh?"
"Of course! I can't think now how they missed it. I ought to have been riddled with bullets, if they had aimed properly."
"I believe he's half disgusted he wasn't wholly dead, now!" said his lordship, plaintively. "It was a superb thing, I tell you; but don't you do it again, Erceldoune. The trash we write, to bully and blind one another, isn't worth the loss of a gallant man's life. We know that! A terrible fellow went and said so too, in the Commons, last session; he was up, and nobody could stop him. He told us, point blank to our faces, that though we posed very successfully for the innocent public, we might as well drop the toga and show the sock and buskin before each other, as the attitudinising didn't take in the initiated, and must be a fearful bore always for us! Clever fellow. Tremendous hard hitter; but he wants training. By-the-way, the Principalities paid us down a heavy fine as indemnity for that outrage; half the money comes to you, clearly."
"I thank you, my dear lord, I have no need of it."
"Eh? What? I thought you were poor, Erceldoune?"
I am; but I have never been in debt, and I want nothing. Besides, if you will pardon my saying so, I don't admire that system of ' indemnification,'" pursued Erceldoune, giTvng himself a shake like a staghound where he leaned against the marble mantlepiece. "A single scoundrel, or a gang of scoundrels, commits an insult, as in this case, on England, or any other great power, through the person of her representative, or perhaps merely through the person of one of her nation; the state to which the rascals belong is heavily mulcted, by way of penalty. Who suffers? Not the guilty, but the unhappy multitudes, peasants, traders, farmers, citizens, gentlemen—all innocent—who pay the taxes and the imposts! With an outrage from a great Power, if accidentally committed on a traveller by a horde of thieves, you would take no notice whatever; if one were obviously done as a political insult, you would declare war. But when the thing happens in a small state, she is punished by an enormous fine, which half ruins her, for a crime which she could no more prevent than you can help in Downing-street the last wreckers' murder that took place in Cornwall. Pardon me, but I fail to see the justice or the dignity of the system; and for myself, when my own conviction is that the assassins who stopped me were not Moldavians at all, what compensation would it be to me to have the money wrung from a million or two guiltless people, whose country the cowards chose to select as their field? If you wish to avenge me, track the dastards, and give them into my power."
The statesman listened as they stood alone in the library, and looked at his guest, with humour lighting up his blue eyes.
"Erceldoune, if you hadn't that stiff-necked Scottish pride, which would make you knock me down, in all probability, if I offered it, I would give you three thousand a year to live with me and speak your mind," laughed his lordship, meaning his words too. "You are a miracle in your generation; you're not a bit like this age, sir; not a whit more than the Napiers; you speak rarely, and never speak but the truth; you have to choose between your life and your trust, and, as a matter of course, give up your life; you are moneyless, and refuse money the state would tender you, because you think it gained neither by justice nor dignity; you have dined at my house in town, you have stayed in my house in the country; you know that I like you, and yet you are the only man of my acquaintance who has never asked me for anything! On my life, sir, you don't do for this century."
"Unfit for my century, my lord, because I value your friendship, and honour your esteem too highly to regard both only as ladders to 'place'?
The minister stretched his hand out to him with one of those warm silent gestures of acknowledgment, very uncommon with him, but very eloquent. Too sweet and sunny a temper to be a "good hater," he was a cordial Mend; how true and steadfast a friend those only knew who knew him in private life.
"Well, the State at least owes you something," he said, after a pause. "You must let us pay oar debt. Messengerships never do lead to anything, but that is no reason why they should not in your person. There are many half civil half military appointments for which your life has fitted you, and which you yourself would fill better than any man I know; the govenorship of some good island, for instance."
Erceldoune was silent a moment, leaning against the marble.
"I thank you sincerely, but I want nothing, and I have too much of the nomad in me to care to relinquish my wandering life in saddle. Give me no credit for asceticism, or renunciation; it is nothing of the kind. I should have been born a desert chief; I have never been happier than in the Kabyles' 'houses of hair,' living on couscoussou and camel-flesh, and waiting for the lions through the night with the Zouaves and the Arabs. If you think, however, that I have really done enough to have earned any preference from England, I will ask you to send me on service, as soon as I am myself again, to South and East Europe, with your authorisation to take leisure in returning if I desire it, and full powers from the government to go to any expenses, or impress any assistance I require, if I should be able to discover the persons, or the track of the assassins."
"Certainly, you shall have both to the fullest. extent. You shall have the authorisation of the Crown to act precisely as you see fit; and spare no cost, if you can get on the villains' trail, in bringing them to justice. I fear you will be baffled: we don't know enough to identify them; they seconded us well in France, and everything was tried, but failed. It was in Paris you had seen the man whose voice you recognised, wasn't it? Would you know him again?"
Erceldoune ground his heel into the tiger-skin of the hearth-rug as though his tiger-foe were under his feet: he longed to have his hand on the throat of the silky murderous brute.
"I would swear to his voice and his laugh anywhere a score of years hence; and I should know him, again, too: he was as beautiful as a woman, though I did not take his measure as I should have done had I guessed where we should meet."
"The object, of coarse^ was purely political, and there are thousands of men—Carlists, Ultramontanists, Carbonarists, Reactionists, Socialists, and all the rest of the Continentalists—who would have held that they only obeyed their chiefs, and acted like patriots in shooting you down, for the sake of your papers. Well, you shall have your own way, Erceldoune, and all you ask—it is little enough! Lady George!" broke off his lordship, vivaciously, as a party from the billiard-room entered the library, "here is Erceldoune so enamoured of the country he was murdered in, that he is asking me to have him sent off there again! These Messenger fellows are never quiet: he says he ought to be an Arab chief, and so he should be."
He only wants the white haick to look like one," smiled Lady George, a lovely blonde, dropping her azure eyes on him with an effective side glance—wholly wasted.
Erceldoune, to his own infinite annoyance, had found himself an object of hero-worship to all the brilliant beauties down at Liramar, where he had been bidden by the great Minister as soon as he was able to leave Monastica, and where that unworn octogenarian was himself taking a rare short rest in the November of the year. His lordship was imperative in his summons to his favourite courier, to whom the southern air was likely to give back the lost strength which was still only returning slowly and wearily to muscles and limbs whose force had been "even as the lions of Libya."
The story of his single-handed peril, his choice of death rather than disloyalty to his trust, in the silent ravine of the Moldavian pine-woods, had sent a thrill of its own chivalry through the languid, nil admirari, egotistic, listless pulses of high-bred society. Erceldoune was the hero of the hour if he chose; and the Border Eagle might have folded his strong pinions under the soft caress of a thousand white hands. Bat he did not choose: he had never cared for women—they had never gained any hold on him. Steeped in vice in his earliest years, sensuality had little power over his manhood; and the languid intrigues, the hollow homage, the "love" of the drawing-rooms—pulseless, insipid, artificial, frivolous, paré à la mode—were still more contemptible, and absolutely impossible to him. Nor was fashionable life to his taste: its wheels within wheels ill suited the singleness of his own character; the feverish puerility of its envies and ambitions woke no chord of sympathy in him; and its hot-pressed atmosphere was too narrow, and too rarefied with heat and perfume, for the lungs which only breathed freely on the moorland and the prairie, on the ocean and the mountain-side. A man once bound to the great world is a slave till the day of his death, and Erceldoune could not have lived in chains.
"You are very like one, of the eagles of your own Border, Sir Fulke," said a French Duchesse at Liramar to him. She had been a beauty, and now, at forty, was a power—the customary development of a Frenchwoman.
"In love of liberty, madame, and solitude? Well, yes."
He thought how he and the golden eagle had fallen, much alike, and the thought crossed him vaguely, should he ever live to wish that the shot, like the eagle's, had told home?
"Yes, and if I were twenty years younger, I would tame you!" said the Duchesse, with a malicious smile. "Ah! how you would suffer, how you would beat your strong wings against the chains, how you would hate and worship, in one breath, your captor, and how you would pant out your great life in torture till you sank down at last in slavery as intense as your resistance!"
"I! You do not know me much, Miladi."
The Duchesse gave him a perfumy touch with her fan as she swept away.
"Bah! M. Erceldoune, I know your tribe and I know their tamers. You will find a worse foe than a bullet, soon or late. Your assassins were merciful to what your love will be—when you love. See if I am wrong!"
And with a laugh of compassion and of mocking prescience the prophetess of dark omen went to her whist-table, where she played as well as Prince Metternich; and Erceldoune passed on his way to the smoking-room, a contemptuous disdain working in him;—"love!" he had never known it, he had never believed in it, the frank boldness of his nature had been proof against most of its seductions, and he only recognised in it a sophistical synonym for women's vanity and men's sensuality, or vice vera; and, take it in the long run, he was undoubtedly right.
His passions were great; but they had never been fairly aroused; and he had, or thought he had, them under an iron bridle, like some Knight of St. John, half priest, half soldier, stern warrior and ascetic monk in one, his soul, like his body, mailed in steel, and wrestling with the vile tempters of the flesh, as with twining serpents that sought to wreathe round and stifle out his martial strength, and drag it downwards into voluptuous fumes, and enervating shame, and weakness, that would disgrace his manhood and his pride, his order and his oath.
Yet vague, dreamy, half soft, half stormy thoughts swept over him of some love that this world might hold, with all the delight of passion, whilst loftier, richer, holier, than mere passion alone, which wakes and desires, pursues, possesses,—and dies. He believed it a fable; he was incredulous of its dominion; it was, he fancied, alien to his nature; he neither needed nor accredited it; yet the dim glory of some such light that "never yet was upon sea or land," half touched his life in fancy for a second. For, where, he sat in the lonely smoking-room, with the smoke curling up from the meerschaum bowl which had turned the bullet from his heart in Moldavia, and floating away to the far recesses of Rembrandtesque shade,—out from the shadow there seemed to rise, with the lustre in the eyes and the unspoken tenderness upon the lips, the face of the one who had saved him.
The face of a temptress or an angel?
Erceldoune did not ask, as he sat and dreamt of that memory called up from the depths of thought and shade; then he rose with an impatient disdain of himself, and strode out into the white, warm, Mediterranean night.
Had he refused to surrender his life to any living woman, only to have it haunted by a mere phantom-shape, a hallucination wrought from the fever-fancies of a past delirium?
The great Minister went home; the gathering at Liramar remained with the hostess—Erceldoune with them; the sea breezes were bringing him back, their old force into his limbs, and the mellow air was driving away the danger which for a time had threatened his lungs from the deep chest^wound where the ball had lodged. In physics he did not believe—he never touched them; air and sea-water were his sole physicians, and under them the fallen Titan rose again.
"I took too much killing!" he laughed to one of the men as they drifted down the waters lapping the sunny Sicilian shores, in the brief space which severs the day from the night. He had reported himself ready for fresh service, and the Messenger who was to bring the Italian bag to Palermo would deliver him despatches for the Principalities and Asiatic Turkey. Erceldoune was impatient to be on the move, and feel himself in saddle once more; while in inaction, too, he was no nearer on his quest—of those who had attacked his life, and of the one who had saved it. Phantom, hallucination, delirious memory, be it what it would, the remembrance which haunted him, and which he had no single proof was anything more tangible than a fever-born fancy, was strong on him—the stronger the more he thrust it away. The woman who had rescued him, and who had since been lost to him in the darkness of mystery and the wide wilderness of the world, he could not recall, save by such intangible unsubstantiated recollection as had remained to him from unconsciousness; common reason told him that it could be but a folly which haunted the brain from the visions of his long peril, but reason failed to drive it out, or shake the first impression which had ever wakened or seized his imagination. The idea which pursued him, the face he had painted in the monastic solitude of the convent, had become to him a living reality; he resisted it, he trampled it out; not unfrequently he recoiled and shuddered from it, as from the phantasia of impending insanity: but it remained there. Her face rose before him from the sea depths, when he plunged down into the dark violet waves, and let them close above his head; he saw it with every gorgeous sunset that flushed the skies with fire; he remembered it with every hour he spent alone lying on the sands, or steering through the waters, or waiting with his ride for the sea-birds on the pine-crowned rocks. He could not banish it; and he used no sophism or half-truths with himself; he knew that, vision or reality, which ever it was, it had dominion over him, and that the search he so thirsted to make for his assassins was not more closely woven with his thoughts than the quest of what was but "un ombre, un reve, un rien"—a phantom and a shadow.
The boat dropped down the Mediterranean that night, while the sun was setting, drifting gently through the blue stretch of the waves, while the striped sails were filled by a west wind that brought over the sea a thousand odours from the far Levant, and the voices of the women idly chaunted the "Ave Maria, Stella Virgine!" Erceldoune was stretched in the bottom of the boat, at the feet of a fair aristocrat, who leaned her hand over the leeward side playing with the water, and letting the drops fall, diamond bright as her rings, glancing at him now and then the while, and wondering, as she had wondered long at Liramar, what manner of man this was, who confessed himself poor and a mere courier, yet bore himself like a noble; who had the blood of an ancient race, and the habits of a desert chief; who was indifferent and insensible to all women, yet had, for all, a grave and gentle courtesy, for the grape-girl among the vineyards yonder, as for her, the patrician and the queen. of coquettes, leaning here. He was unlike anything in her world—and Lady George would fain have roused in him the forbidden love which she, proud empress though she was, had learned, in her own despite, as her own chastisement.
But Erceldoune lay looking eastward at a lateen-boat cutting its swift track through the waters; so little had her beauty ever caught his eyes, that he never even knew that he had roused her interest. Vanity he had absolutely none; and as for pride in such uncared-for, unsought victories, he would have as soon thought of being proud that a bright Sicilian butterfly had flown beneath his foot, and been crushed by it.
"How beautifully she cuts her way!" he said to the man beside him. "Look how she dips, and lifts herself again—light as a bird! She will be past us like lightning."
Lady George glanced at her rival across the sea; how strange it was, she thought, that any man should live who could look at a lateen-boat rather than at her!
"As with a bound
Into the rosy and golden half
Of the sky,
I suppose," she quoted listlessly.
Their own vessel floated lazily and slowly; the lateen-craft came on after them, as he had said, turned into a pleasure-boat, and draped with costliness, and laden with a fragrant load of violets gathered for distilling, piled high, and filling the air with odour. The skiff passed them swiftly;—half-screened by the rich draperies, the tawny sails, and the purple mound of the violets, and turned half from them, and towards the western skies, as the boat flashed past in the haze of light, he saw a woman.
With a loud cry he sprang to his feet, the vessel rocking and lurching under the sudden impetus;—he had seen the face of his dreams, the face of his saviour. And the lateen-boat was cutting its swift way through the waves, away into the misty purple shadow out of reach, out of sight!
"Neuralgia?" said one of the men. "Ah! that is always the worst of shot-wounds."
"You are ill?—you are in pain?" asked Lady George; and her voice was hurried and tremulous. Erceldoune set his teeth hard, his eyes straining into the warm haze where the lateen-hoat was winging her rapid way, out of reach, while thier own lay idly rocking on the waves.
"Pardon me—no," he said, in answer to them, for the man's nature was too integrally true to seek shelter under even a tacit acceptance of an untruth. "I saw one whom I recognised as having last seen in Moldavia the day the brigands shot me down. I fear that I foolishly startled you all?"
They thought it nothing strange that any link with the memory of his attempted assassination should have roused him; and he leaned over the boat's side following the now distant track of the light lateen-skiff with his eyes,—silent in the wild reasonless joy, and the bitter baffled regret, which swept together through his veins. The face that he had dreamed had bent over him in his anguish and extremity, was then a truth, a living loveliness, a life to be found on earth—no fever-born ideal of his own disordered brain; he had seen again, and seen now in the clearness of reason, the face of the woman who had been his ministering angel. Yet, as she had been lost to him then, so she was lost to him now; and as the sun sunk down below the waves, and the sadden southern night fell shrouding the Sicilian boat in its shadows, the phosphor light left in its track and the odour of its violet freight dying off from the sea and the air, he could have believed he had but been dreaming afresh.
Was he mad? Erceldoune almost asked himself the question as he leaned over the vessel's side looking down into the purple shadows of the water. High-born, by the beauty of her face, and by the luxury with which that little skill was decked, how should she have been in the wild solitudes of the Moldavian forest? Compassionate to his peril and extremity, would she have cared nothing to know whether death or life had been at last his portion?—and could an act of such noble and pitying humanity have needed the veil of mystery and denial in which it had been shrouded by the serfs' repudiation of all knowledge that any save themselves had found him?
Yet, the face of which he had dreamed, he had seen now in the evening light of the Mediterranean-the mere phantom of a delirium could not have become vivid and living thus. A heavy oath was stifled in his teeth, as he stood with his eyes strained to pierce the cloudy offing. Why had he not been alone, that—a few yards more sail flung out to the winds, and his own hand upon the helm—his boat could have given chase down the luminous sea, and have swept away with hers, no matter at what cost of sand-reef or of shipwreck, into that golden mist, that twilight darkness!