Idalia/Volume 3/Chapter 9

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER IX

"I LEAN TOWARD THE STROKE WITH SILENT MOUTH AND A GREAT HEART."

Conrad Phaulcon slowly gathered himself from the ground, faint, blind, Staggering from the forcE with which he had been thrown, and looked on her where she had fallen senseless—her proud head sunk on the grey wood-ashes, her face white with the whiteness of death. He thought her dead: and a mortal dread fell on him, a mortal chillness froze his heart. In his own cruel, tyrannous way he loved her still, and he thought that he had killed her. Moreover, she had been faithfUl to him. Listening aud watching there, he had found that she had kept her bond to him, and had not betrayed him. The evil against her died out from him; a shame that was almost remorse stole on him. Senseless there, like some fair statue shattered down by a hand that stayed not for sake of beauty or of genius, she smote his conscience, all duLLed, and crushed, and buRNt out though it was. Throughout their lives he had Betrayed, and oppressed, and goaded, and dishonoured her; throughout them she had done him good for evil, and been true to him against his own untruth. This strength and this fealty pierced him harder, because of their utter unlikeness to the cowardice and the greed of his own nature.

With hands that trembled, and tears that stood thick in his eyes, he touched her, and sought to revive her; his temper was the temper of a child, and he had a child's fleet facile emotions, a child's wanton cruelty and worthless repentance. Like a child, he could wring his bird's throat without mercy, and weep useless tears when the victim lay cold and huddled in death.

After a while sense returned to her; her lips parted with slow struggling breaths, her veins grew warm, her eyelids quivered and opened heavily to the glare of the resinous flames. She knew him where he bent above her, and lifted herself with a sudden breathless shuddering force.

"Go, go, go! Never dare to come again in my sight!"

He lingered, scared and awed by the words and the gesture that were like an imprecation upon him, by the blaze of her eyes as they unclosed, wide and wild, to tho tawny light.

"Go, go!" she cried afresh. "You could hear what he called me, and yet hold your peace! Go—there are wrongs gods themselves could not pardon."

He knew it; he turned slowly away, and went from her glance, from her presence.

She rose faintly, and reeling slightly; looking out at the darkness that closed her in, whilst for all the world without the morning sun was shining. She was like one drunk with alcohol; hor brain was stunned, yet her force intensified; the power and the vitality in her were strong almost to ferocity—the ferocity of that unbearable suffering which in in itself a madness. Like some lithe-limbed leopardess stung to bloodthirstiness by the shot that had struck it from an unseen hand, she passed swiftly across the depth of shadow, to tho place where the boy Borto lay sleeping still in the intense slumber of long fatigue.

She laid her hand upon hím. "Wake."

He did awaken, and sprang wonderingly from his bed of dry sea-grasses.

"Illustrissima! What is there?"

"There in need of you."

"I am ready." The fair, pale, boyish face had the calm keenness of the Napoleonic type. "It is——?"

"Treason."

"Ah!"

His eyes caught the meaning, his mouth the smile, that were on hers.

"Treason—against me; if to me, so to all; so to Italy. A traitor never sins once. Seek Lousada and Veni; seek your brethren, seek any one of our people. They know how to avenge the unpardonable sin. Bid them bring him here; I will give him his sentence."

The boy smiled; the smile of a St. Just.

"He has lived his life," he said, in the old Roman idiom. "His name, Eccellenza?"

She stooped and breathed it on his ear : the name of Victor Vane.

Without word or pause he bowed low, took his rifle, and went on her errand; a child by years, yet already weighted with the weariness and the wisdom of maturity, by reason of the penalty he paid for having let his childish soul brood over the burdens of the peoples, and dream of liberties under the leprous shadow of a dominant priesthood, whilst other children laughed, and played, and only asked of life that the vine should give fruit, and the sleek herds milk, that their gay feet should ply in the tarantala's measure, and the sweet sun dance in their own bright eyes.

She, left there in solitude, and bound by her word to keep the limits of her den, paced to and fro in the fire-lit darkness in that fierce, futile rebellion with which she had paced the dungeon of the church. Her eyes were burning, her throat was swollen with long thirst, her teeth were locked like a vice. All sense, thought, volition, seemed scorched up and withered in one intolerable misery, one unalterable shame, One thing alone seemed left to her—her vengeance.

She was of the nature which happiness makes sweet, rich, generous, as southern sunlight; which calamity renders fearless, strong, and nobly calm beneath all adverse fate; but which, beneath wrong and treachery, in an instant turns hard, dark, dangerous as the force of iron.

She laughed aloud, in the loneliness.

"He played the traitor!—so! Well, he will learn how we deal with traitors. Fool, fool, fool!"

Then, as that laugh died, the weakness of her bodily frame, the agony of her soul, beat down the false alien strength of bitter passions.

"Oh, my love!" she moaned. "It was for your life, not for mine."

And she sank amidst the grey ashes by the fire that was slowly dying out, with the stupor of exhaustion stealing on her, and her eyes fastened on the gloom beyond, strained, and senseless, and savage with pain, like those of an animal that is chained to a stake for the torture.

To her, there could have been no martyrdom like this martyrdom of undenied dishonour.

Without, the boy Berto passed into the glare of day. His errand was perilous; and he knew what Tedeschi rods were like, how Papal steel could thrust; but he had the firm, silent heart that Nature early gives to those whom she will hereafter make leaders amongst men, and, having a purpose to accomplish, he did it unflinchingly, through to the end. He went swiftly and straightly now over the lonely shore, with the eye of a hawk, with the speed of a greyhound, glancing on every side for those he sought, and going warily, lest he should be seen by the soldiers, whom he knew were out, more or less near, seeking for the proscribed who had escaped them. He ran swiftly, mile on mile; reaching a crest of land, he paused at last for breath. On one side lay the sea, now blue and laughing in the fiíll noon-day; on the other, mountain-bounded, the low-lying lands, with their broad sun-lit desolate tracks dotted with the herds of swine and grazing buffaloes, with thickets of wild myrtle and green pools of water. There he saw what made him drop suddenly, and hide like a young hare.

What he saw were the barrels of carbines among some acanthus-covered stones that screened a score or so of soldiers, and further onward the solitary figure of a man in the clothing of the Capri fishers. The soldiers lay close, their heads alone above the fallen blocks of shattered marble; the tall form of the Capriote, dark and toweríng against the intense light, came onward, fast, blindly, taking heed of nothing, seeing nothing, in his path, passing straight through the horned cattle as though they were an insect cloud, with his head bare to the heat, and his eyes without sense in them; headlong, as if he were deep in drink, yet with a nameless misery on him that had as terrible a majesty.

Fascinated by it, the Roman boy watched him as he reeled through the sunlight, while the browsing herds were scattered by the tornado of his course. The soldiers watched him also, as he came nearer and nearer straight across the plain, pausing for no obstacle, breaking through all vegetation, rushing like the wind over the width of the country. Then, rapidly as a lasso is thrown, they sprang upon him as he passed; his arms, his limbs, his body, were bound and knotted with cords ere he could cast off one of the score of hands that seized him; fettered in an instant, with the naked blades flashing round him, he stood like a wild horse netted by guachos, his muscles panting under the close-drawn bonds, his eyes wide-opened on his captors, red and glaring and senseless. There was no escape possible.

He stood a moment, looking vacantly down on his bound limbs and the savage wolf-eyes of the soldiery. All consciousness seemed dead in him; he was passive from the sheer intoxication of suffering, and he was weak in his body also, for from a wound on his shoulder blood was oozing through his shirt. Yet, as he felt the withes on his limbs, he fought against his captors on the sheer instinct of combat, with his head dropped like a bull of Aragon when it charges to give to the torreador the fatal blow of the cogida, and with his firm white teeth, the only weapon left him, clenched hard and fast at the throat of the soldier nearest him.

For some minutes there was a struggle that made even the bold veins of the Roman boy run chill— weakened, hampered, jammed, powerless as the captive was, he had terror for his assailants, as the bull when its black hide is steeped scarlet with gore, and its flanks are transfixed with the lance-heads, carries death for picador and banderillo still. But brute force conquered; the hirelings of Francis were scarce better than brigands, and courage awakened no homage in them. When they fell away a little from each other, and the dust of the parched plain that had risen in clouds above the scene of the conflict sank, they had pulled him down as with a lasso—he was stretched there on the short burnt turf, his eyes distended, his mouth filled with sand, his limbs lashed fast with cords.

To them he was but a Capri boatman, a thing of the people, a scum of the sea, a rebel on whose life a good price was set, an animal to be thrust to the shambles, how roughly mattered little so that out of his heart they should cut that which they sought to know.

They heaved him up, with a kick, by the ropes they had passed round bis waist and under his shoulders; they loosened a little the cords binding his ankles, and bade him stand, holding a carbine at his head; then they fastened him by his belt to two of the strongest-built of their band, and, with bayonets fixed in his rear, drove him on in their centre, as the Aragon bull is driven on at the point of the lance from pasture to circus.

So they took their way through the white breath of the sunlight over the brown lonely plains, with their prisoner set in their midst. He had never spoken once.

The child Berto rose slowly from his hiding-place in the low myrtle-bushes; many a time his hand had been on his rifle to send a message of death through these wolves of the mountains who wore the King's livery, and dishonoured the title of soldier; as many times he had paused, knowing that one shot could avail nothing, and that, were it fired, he would only share the captivity of the man whom he sought to release. As his slight, girlish frame rose up out of the leafy screen and against the sunny blue of the sky, his teeth were set tight, his pale features had grown like marble.

"They go to take him to their captain;—they will make him tell where her refuge is. If he will not tell, they have rods, they have the water-torture—drop, drop, drop, ah! till one is mad!" he muttered aloud, in his breathless rage. He knew nothing of this stranger, save that he guessed him by his dress to be the sailor whom he had heard had rescued her from Taverno—in the cavern his sleep had been too profound to awake to any distant sound—but the sight of the conflict and the capture alone sufficed to rouse all the revolutionary and patriotic soul that was in him. He wrung his hands as he watched the soldiers move over the plain, growing dark and distant as some far-off troop of buffalo.

"Ah, the brigands: the assassins! And I could not fire a ballet for him!" he cried in his solitude. "Miladi must know of it. She can say whether he will bear the scourge and be silent. If I had thought he would speak, I would have shot him dead before they could have got him. Almost I wish I had. It had been surer."

For the Roman lad knew the means—passing the strength of humanity to endure—by which man who were mute against royal or priestly will were made to find voice in that fair dominión of Naples.

"She must know," he mused;—waited an instant, then with the speed of a lapwing, once having the swell of the hillocks between him and the soldiery, he retraced his way over the lowlands to whence he came, until out of the laughing brilliancy of the noon-sun he came into the darkness of the cave, which now was only lightened by the low flicker of the expiring pine-flames.

Her attitude had never changed. There was that in it, as she sat beside the great heap of silvered ashes and of burnt-out wood, that struck the boy's heart with a sudden awe and fear. The abasement, the subjection, of a fearless life has ever in it a certain terror—the mournful terror of every fallen greatness—for those who look upon it.

He went softly to her, and spoke low in her ear before she saw him by her.

"Eccellenza, the soldiery are out."

She gave no sign that she heard him.

"The soldiers have him! Can you trust him, Illustrissima?"

She still seemed to hear nothing where her gaze was fixed upon the dying fire. The boy touched her timidly.

"The King's people have him, Miladi. Will he be true?"

She started, as though some corpse had been galvanised to life, and turned her face to him.

"True? Will who be true? He whom all are false to? Yes, true to death—true to death!"

He saw that her mind wandered, that she had not aright understood him.

"Eccellenza, hear me." he said, softly. "The soldiers have made that friend of yours their prisoner."

She sprang to her feet, convulsed to passíonate energy, to fresh existence.

"Prisoner? The King's prisoner?—he!"

The boy's voice sank to a whisper; he had not thought it would move her thus; he knew she was well used to send men out to die.

"They took him on the shore there, by the ruins. They caught a brave man like a snared wolf, the cowards! He fought—gods! how he fought; but they threw him like a bull in the lasso. Will he keep silence, think you?"

"He will keep silence till they lay him mute in death. Ah! God reward you that you came to tell me!"

She put the wondering child aside, and swept across the vault to the far-off shadow where the Greek had crouched; she stood before him ere he had seen her move.

"I break my word to you. I go from here."

"Go!"—he echoed dizzily; the violence of his fall had stupified him. "Go! Not where I do not follow."

"Follow, if you will."

"Where, then?"

"To the soldiers of Francis."

She laughed aloud as she spoke; she knew that the cowardice of his nature would no more let him pass out where she went than if gates of adamant opposed him. He was startled and bewildered; he felt tenfold fear of her as she stood there in the shadows before him, with that despair on her face and that laugh on her lips; he had thought her dead or dying; a superstitious hesitation held him afraid and irresolute.

"Wait—wait," he said, stretching his hands out to hold her. "What is it you dream of? What mad thing would you do?"

"Save the life you and I have sent out to destruction."

Before he could arrest her she had passed him, and was far out beyond the watch-fire, and lost in the gloom of the entrance-passage; her hand was on the boy Berto's shoulder, and thrust him down the tortuous passage, swiftly and silently up to the open air. When once more the darkness lay behind her, and on her face was the breath of the morning, she bent to him.

"Which way?"

He pointed to the northward, looking with wistful anxiety in her face.

"Miladi, what is it you will do?"

"My duty—late in the day."

The hound had followed at her side; she stooped and kissed his forehead, then sent him from her back into the shelter of the cavern, reluctant yet obedient.

"Will you not need him?" the boy asked.

"No. Even a dog^s life is too noble to perish for mine. See you to him, and cherish him for my sake."

"I! I go with you, Eccellenza." "No—go rather on the errand I gave you."

"But——"

"Hush! I have said—none go with me. And—for that you came and told me this thing—may the beauty of life rest with you ever, my child."

She passed her hand softly over his fair curls. Then as rapidly and silently as a shadow passes she went from him on her fatal way.

Over the heavy, rugged ground the soldiers forced their prisoner, with his arms lashed behind him, and the Carbines held at his temples. They were a dozen men under a corporal, scouts sent out by the commandant of the gendarmerie scouring the shore; low scoundrels who had been thieves ere they donned the King's uniform, and would be brigands when they doffed it. So that they dragged him to their captain, and compelled him to tell what they sought from him, they heeded nothing beyond. His bound feet stumbled over the rough declivities, his chest was stifled under the crossed cords till he could barely breathe; with every jerked step that his guards took over the roughness of the ground their shot might be lodged in his brain; the red ants, disturbed in their hills, swarmed up his limbs and clung there; the open wound of his shoulder was cut by the tight-drawn ropes; still he said not one word, but went on in their midst, with his bloodshot eyes staring out at earth and sky yet seeing nothing, and with a heavy, sullen, murderous darkness on his face and on his soul.

Of physical suffering he was insensible; the deadness of despair had numbed in him all corporeal consciousness. There had only survived in him the mere mechanical brute instincts of defence and of resistance. Beaten in these, he resigned himself, passively, dumbly; too vast a ruin had fallen on his life for him to heed what befel his body. So far as thought still was distinct to him, so far as any ray of it pierced the blackness of desolation in which every memory save one was lost, he wished that they would strike him dead upon the plain they traversed.

They wondered that, cramped and bruised as he was, and strong to ferocity as they had found him, he went with them thus mutely and unresistingly; they did not note the keen, hard, ravenous, longing look, as of one starving at sight of food, that his eyes ever and again cast upon the steel tubes of the slanted carbines which carried death and oblivion so near, and yet denied them, to him.

Beyond this he knew nothing; he was dragged over the low-lying country at a pace as swift as the heat of the day and the unevenness of the uncertain paths would allow; whether he had force to bear it, in the sultry noontide of summer, they never heeded. If he had fallen, they would have pulled him on still, as best they might, with his head striking the stones. He knew nothing; the sunlight was like a blaze of fire ever about him; the hard, hot skies seemed to glitter as brass; water, mountain, the darkness of myrtle, the rush of wild birds, the blue gleam of the sea, the brown baked earth beneath his feet, these were all blurred, shapeless shadows to him, while his eyes looked out, straight onward, with the red, dusky, mastiff flame in them that made his guards mutter among themselves that this man was mad, and should be shot like a mad dog.

And they judged right: he was mad, with the Othello madness that believes what it adores dishonoured.

At last their march paused; the silence was broken by the noise of loosened tongues; there were stir, and tumult, and the clash of arms around them; they had joined their comrades,—they had brought their prisoner to their captain to be judged. Under some mighty pillars of yellow travestine, the lonely relics of some forgotten temple, four or five score of black-browed, loose-harnessed soldiers, the worst of a worthless army, were scattered, lying full-length in the shade, taking their noonday meal, or slaking their thirst at a sluggish noxious streamlet stealing by the columns' base amongst the violet-roots. They had been checked a moment in their search by the sea for the fugitives; and lay like hot, panting, ferocious dogs, ready to rise and use their teeth at a moment's tempting.

They swarmed round him like a pack of wolves, but no change came on his face; with a hundred soldiers beside him, lean, savage, ruffianly, for the most part, as any Abruzzian banditti, with the glitter of their steel, the muzzles of their carbines, the yelling of their oaths, the clamour of their triumph about him where he stood powerless in their midst, they could not tell that he even saw them there. His eyes never glanced to them; they looked still, straightly, sightlessly, to the low line where sea touched sky; there was no consciousness in them, but there was that whích stilled their riot of exultation with a vague sense of danger in this chained man standing so calmly in their hostile crowd.

They fell back, as their commander, told of the capture, came from the nook of shadow, where, with his subaltern, he had been at rest apart. He was little more than a guerillero—a course, rough, careless, Calabrian-born filibuster.

"A fine animal," he muttered, as he glanced over a paper of instructions, comparing the details there with the personal appearance of his prisoner. "So! you are the sacrilegious scoundrel who broke into the monastery of Taverno, and used foul violence against the august person of his sacred grace of ViUaflor?'

"I am." Erceldoune answered mechanically; his tongue clove to his mouth; his voice was hoarse and savage.

"Basta! you are in haste to be hanged!" swore the Calabrian, half disappointed at an avowal which left him no excuse for the ingenuity of threat and torture. "Since you confess yourself guilty, go further, and tell us—what have you done with the bona-roba you stole from her prison?"

The word struck like the stroke of lightning.

Life, sense, shame, grief, rage, rushed over his hearer with a torrentes force; the foam gathered on his lips; he strained for a moment like a fettered lion at his bonds;—then he was still as with the stillness of death.

"Speak—where is she?"

He made no answer.

"Have you no tongue? We will make you find it, and use it. Tell me—quick!—where is this woman hidden?"

His vengeance was in his hands; one word, one gesture only, to where the sea-cave lay, and his wrongs would be avenged, without the lifting of his hand.

"Speak out," hissed the soldier, whose rage was rising. "Where is this empress-democrat? Where does she hide? She knew how to use that buffalo strength of yours; but she will fool you, once she be free. We know what Miladi is! Give her to us; and you may save yourself a necklace of hemp, mayhap?"

There was still no answer.

"Has the sorceress put a spell on you?" swore the Calabrian. "Look you—you are safe to go to the gallows. Corpo di Christo!—it will be odds if his Grace do not think a quick twitch of the noose too gentle a punishment for you: Monsignore has a long arm and a heavy hand! You are a fine animal—it were a pity all that sinew should rot in quick lime; we will get your life saved somehow, if you put us this minute on the track of your mistress?"

He might never have spoken for aught by which he could tell that he was heard. The threat that his body would be given to slaughter had little import to the man in whom all life, save the mere breath of existence, had already been slain by worse than a thousand deaths.

"Have you no voice?" yelled the commandant, infuriated that his unwonted offer of mercy met no response. "We will find a way to make you speak, with your will or against it! Once for all—will you show US where this woman is sheltered?"

"No."

The Calabrian gnashed his glittering teeth.

"Altro! You defy us, you hound? We will see how long that obstinacy lasts. I have licence to deal with you as I see fit; to string you up by the throat to that column if I judge it right in the need of my service. We will soon make you find voice, you dog of a rebel! Here; take him, and lash him to tkat pillar; there, in the full sun."

He was already bound, in cords that crossed and recrossed, and left him scarce liberty to draw the air through his lungs; it was an easy matter to fasten him to the shaft of the shattered column that stood in the glare of the noon, unshaded even by a branch or a coil of ivy.

"Strip his shoulders, and let the gnats find him out," laughed the Calabrian, moving away to finish his meal and take a mid-day slumber. "We will see if we do not make him give tongue."

He was obeyed.

They stripped the linen from his chest and shoulders, and left him in the fullest force of the vertical rays; his wound uncovered, and his head bare. At his feet ran the half-dry brook. They went themselves into the shadow, and lay laughing, swearing, mocking, taunting, chanting obscene songs, and holding up to him in the distance the wine-cans they had drained.

The insults passed by him unnoted, the jeers unheard; in the desolation of his life they were known no more than the sting of an insect is felt by one whom the smoke and flame of a burning pile is consuming.

Yet they had chained him to a martyrdom.

The intense heat poured upon bis brain; the scorching light quivered about him; his veins swelled till it seemed, with every fresh pulse of the blood, they must burst; the innumerable winged insects, humming through the summer hours, attracted one by another, settled on his naked; breast, and thrust their antennæ into the bruised skin, and pierced their stings into the opening of the wound. He could not free his hands to brush one of them away. His throat was dry as leather; his tongue was swollen and black; his thirst was unbearable; and at his feet the shallow water stole, to madden him with the murmur of the cool ripples he could not touch. The moments were as hours; the minutes as years. The earth, the air, the sky, were as one vast furnace that enclosed him; where the jagged and beating nerves had been laid open by the hatchet-stroke, the buzzing gnats alit, and clove, and stung, and feasted. Weaklier men would have had the mercy of insensibility;—with him the vital strength, the indestructible force of life within him, kept every nerve and every sense strung to their keenest under the torture.

Yet when they came to him ever and again and asked hím if he would speak at last, his silence remained unbroken. He was faithful to those who had betrayed him.

He could receive release, as he could take vengeance, by the utterance of one word. He could deliver over his assassin to justice, and unloose his traitress to the doom that waited her, by the same sign that should free him from this slow excruciating death. He could cease to suffer, and become the just accuser of those by whom he was destroyed. He could sever his bonds, and divide those whose guilty union was a worse agony to him than it lay in the power of his torturers to deal. His own fate and theirs rested in his choice.

And he bore his martyrdom and kept silence. The supreme hour of his passion had come to him and tempted him, and found him strong. The purity of his honour would not let him take a traitorous shame even against those who dealt him treachery; the great love in him could not forsake her utterly, although itself forsaken and betrayed.

The bond of his word was as religion to him still; and in his sight, though fallen, lost, dishonoured, she still was sacred.

So far as thought could come to him, his thought was still to save her.

And he hung there, bound by the waist, with the blaze of the sun in his blind eyes and on his throbbing brain, and the clouds of the booming circling gossamer wings growing darker and larger as his tormentors swarmed down to fasten upon him.

One of the soldiers, whom he had heavily bruised in the struggle for his capture, came out of the shade and dipped a wooden cup in the brook, and held it just beyond the reach of his lips.

"Speak, and you shall have drink!"

His throat was baked like burnt clay, his mouth was full of dust, his tongue was cloven to his teeth; he longed for water with the death-thirst of the desert.

The Italian reached and touched his beard with the rim of the cup, so that the coolness of the draught mocked him cióse.

"Will you speak?"

He faintly moved his head in denial.

The soldier laughed with taunting mirth, and shook the water from the bowl out on to the herbage at his feet: he knew that every wasted drop would be an added pang.

Still he never spoke.

They left him again to the Tantalus torture. He had his freedom in his own choice; in the utterance of one word; and he let them do their worst upon him rather than turn traitor to the woman whom he held his traitress.

They carne and grouped about the pillar, and looked up in his face again with riotous laughter and foul-mouthed outrage at him in his defencelessness. The brazen sky burned above in pitiless fire; the smiling cruelty of the salt sea mocked him with its tossing sunlit freshness; the red ants were slowly climbing the base of the column, scenting blood, and swarming upward to fasten on him; through the air the first mosquito winged its way, herald of troops to come.

"Will you answer now?" asked the chief.

"No!"

The Calabrian flung himself round on his men in the rear.

"Take him down^ and scourge him till you cut the truth out of his heart!"

They were like a herd of Pyrenean dogs; the sight of prey roused all their ravenous instincts. Men tasting once the power and the pleasure of torture rarely pause till they lose their sport to the king-player, Death.

They unbound him from the column, and fastened him afresh to a low block of stone, strípped to the waist, so that his chest and back should be left undefended for the curling thongs of the lash; his face was set still seawards, so that the fair breadth of the free waters mocked him with its liberty. His head hung heavily downward; throes of pain, like the scorching of fire, throbbed through his wounded flesh; the rushing of pent-up blood filled his lungs, his brain, his ears, his throat to suffocation. There was a pause of some moments; they were weaving together some cords and some leather belts into the thing they needed. The chief sauntered near him once more, and looked at him doubtingly: he knew the Capri mariners could be dogged in brainless obstinacy as any Capri mule, but he saw that this man's endurance was far more than the mere mute, contumacious persistence of a sullen ignorance. He struck away, half compassionately, a gnat that was alighting on his prisoner's bare breast.

"You are too fine a brute to be cut in pieces with the lash. Look you, they have tough arms, have my men; they will make their belts lay your lungs open if you keep silent. Do you know how the leather can eat a man's flesh?"

He bent his head in assent; in Russia he had seen a serf die under the scourge.

"You do? Well, that grand frame of yours will not spare you; they will mash it to pulp. Will you not speak—now?"

"I have answered."

"You are a fool and a madman!" swore the Calabrian. "You lose your life for a worthless woman."

A spasm that the bodily torture had never brought there passed over his captive's face. He kept silence still.

The Italian shrugged his shoulders, and strolled away.

There was a momentos longer pause, then two soldiers came to their work; they bore the whips that they had made, with the heavy buckles at the end of the belts serving as the leaden points with which the lash is commonly weighted. The blows would fall from either side, as the strokes of the woodman's hatchet fall on a tree. The rest of the band closed round in a semicircle, their commandant slightly in advance.

Then—then only—as he saw the scourges in their hands, and knew the indignity that approached him, the mute calm of his endurance, the apathy of that desolation of the heart in which all bodily suffering passes as nought, changed and broke. All the fíre of his nature, all the pride of his race, all the dignity of his manhood, flashed to sudden life. He never spoke—he was bound, motionless—but he raised his head and looked them full in the eyes with all the haughty wrath of his fearless blood once more aflame. It was but one look; his aim could not avenge him, nor his strength resist the outrage; yet before it they paused and quailed. For the instant they stood irresolute, cowed by the challenge of that unshrinking leonine regard; then, savage at their own sense of shame, they threw themselves forward, the metal-weighted thongs swirled round their heads, gathering full force to curl around him like a serpent's folds; the watching soldiery drew deep noiseless breaths in silence, the hot hushed air of noon had not a sound upon it; he stood erect to his full height, the courage of the soul victorious over the torture of the body. Before the uplifted hands could fall, a single word echoed down through the stillness—"Wait!"

The scourgers paused; the chief swung round to see who dared bid his men's obedience halt. Into their startled crowd came the woman they sought. Against the glitter of the sea and the brown desolation of the plains, they saw Idalia.

From the captive they had bound a long bitter cry rang—a cry that the lash would not have forced from him, though it should have cut his heart in twain.

Breathless and toil-worn, she pressed her way to him and fell at his feet, and strove with both hands to wrench apart the knots that held him. The Calabrian seized her; he knew her but by ñame, and her face was strange to him.

"Woman!—how dare you? Who are you?"

"I am Idalia Vassalis. Take me—bind me—scourge me. But let the guiltless go."

The rough mountaineer looked at her amazed, awed, dazzled, doubting his own senses.

"You are the Countess Vassalis?"

There in her masque-robes, with the gold all soiled and blackened, the scarlet aflame against the sun, exhausted by that mid-day travel through the blaze of noon, yet with so much command in her eyes, with so much majesty in her glance, she moved him to fear as the sight of Cleopatra, captive, would have moved a Latin boor of the cohorts.

"Yes, yes, yes! Are there no men here who can swear to me? I am the rebel you seek. Take me; do what you will with me; deliver me up to your masters—but free that man, who is innocent!"

The Calabrian shaded bis eyes with his hand; he felt giddy before her.

"Is it she?" he whispered a comrade.

"It is she," said a Lombard, from the ranks. "I saw her before Verona; my shot killed a horse under her."

She turned her head to the soldier.

"I thank you for your witness. Now—do your duty. Bind me, and free your prisoner."

"Free him! So!—he has as much guilt as you."

"He has no guilt. Unloose him, I say; fasten me there in his stead; use those thongs upon me; it will not be the first time you scourged a woman. Take him down, and bind me there in his place, by every justice in earth and heaven!" Erceldoune's voice crossed her own, husky and forced with difficulty from his swollen throat.

"Do not heed her. She speaks only to save me——"

The Calabrian laughed coarsely.

"Ah! This fine Capriote dog, is he your love-toy, then, 'llustrissima?"

"He is my victim. May not that better release him?" The coarse outrage had no power to wound her; she had no consciousness except of the man who, for her sake, was bound in the cruel scorching noonday well-nigh to the pangs of a crucifixion. "Is he to suffer for those who have wronged him? He does so when he suffers for me! If I be your enemy, I am tenfold his; will not that quell your rage against him? I have ruined him; that should give him grace in your sight? From first to last he has been wronged by me. Plundered, wounded, left for dead by those who were of my people; used by me, forsaken by me, driven to peril and bondage by me—has he not more to hate me for than you? In the nobility of his heart he shields me still, because he once has pledged me shelter, because his honour still is greater even than his immeasurable wrongs; but he does so only because he is above even his own just vengeance, only because he will not purchase freedom even at cost of lives that are his curse." She sank down at his feet once more; she strove to rend his bonds asunder;—he seemed to her great as never man was great in that silent martyrdom, endured for those who had betrayed him. He looked down on her, doubting his own senses, doubting that the burning of the sun made him, in delirium, dream the words he heard, the face he saw.

"Free him!" she cried aloud, with that ferocity of unbearable misery which makes the gentlest savage. "What plea have you to hold him? I am here; I surrender to you. Take me to king or príest, as you choose; give me only his liberty for mine!

Instínctively his heart went out to save her; his consciousness awakened through the feverish mists of pain enough to know that remorse flung her here to perish for him, enough by unconsidered impulse to seek to save her still.

"Do not heed her, I say," his lips breathed hoarsely. "She only speaks to spare me——"

"Ho!" laughed the Calabrian, "how you quarrel for the kiss of the lash! Now we have you we will keep you—both."

She turned on him with her old imperious command:

"O God! you will not dare to take his life! He is of England—not of Italy. Such things as he has done against your king and your laws he has done never for himself, only at my instance——"

"A likely tale, to screen your fellow-rebels, Miladi! Tell it to more credulous hearers——"

"You think that I speak falsely?"

For the moment the old glorious challenge of her disdainful pride beamed from her face;—they who saw it thought, despite themselves, that if this woman were not above a lie, then never truth was uttered in this world.

"It is no matter how you speak," the Italian made her answer. "You are my prisoners; I shall but give you over to those who will judge you."

"Give me, then. Am I not here that you may do your worst with me? But by all justice, all mercy, all pity, leave him free!"

"It is impossible!"

She threw herself before him; she let her fallen hair bathe his feet, she poured out the vivid utterances of an eloquence that none ever heard unmoved, she sued to him as never for herself would she have sued an emperor; for the only time in her life she abased herself to supplication—she to whom the praying of such a prayer was worse than the endurance of any chastisement.

The Calabrian heard her, startled, dazzled, shaken, but he would not yield.

"It is too late," he said, abmptly. "Miladi, why did you not think before what serving you might cost to a brave man? You treated him like a dog: well, he must die a dog's death. The blame of it is not mine,"

There was a certain pathos in the words; he was brave enough himself to honour the courage he had so mercilessly tried; her head sank as though the rebuke of Deity spoke by the rough soldier's mouth; she crouched with a low moan, like a stricken animal's, at the foot of the column where Erceldoune was bound.

He turned on her his strained and aching eyes.

"Why have you so much mercy on my body?"

There was an infinite reproach in the infinite patience of the wondering words. Why had she who had slain his soul, his spirít, his hope, all in him that made the living of his life of any peace, of any worth, thus have mercy on the mere torture of limb and nerve and sinew? Why did she who had been so pitiless, so wanton in her cruelty, feel compassion and contrition before the coarse, indifferent doom of merely physical pain?

The Calabrian looked at them in silence, then motioned to his men.

"Take them from the sun-glare, and bind them together."

In a sense he felt pity, because he felt the homage of courage to courage, for this man whom he had seen so loyal at such awful cost; but for her he had no emotion, save dread of her as a sorceress, save wrath against her for one whose fell temptations had been so fatal and so ruthless.

She made no resistance; she never felt the grating of the leathern thongs upon her wrists; she had lost all consciousness of personal suffering; she had come to deliver up her life for his, and the sacrifice was given too late. She had no knowledge left her save this, no heed for whatsoever they might do to her, though she had given herself back to a worse captivity than the prison of the grave. As the leash with which the soldiers coupled them like hounds was pulled tighter, her hand touched his. He shuddered as he had never done when the mosquito had thrust its sting into his unshielded breast.

She felt rather than saw it; it passed through her in tenfold bitterness. This man, who had held himself unworthy to touch but the hem of her garment, who had deemed himself blessed as with the gift of gods if her eyes but dwelt with a smile on his, now shrank from the contact of her hand as from pollution, from iniquity!

"Take me away," she moaned, wearily. "Would you chain him to his murderess?"

They hesitated, and looked towards their chief.

"Leave me, and take him down!" she said, with that vibration in her voice that scared them like startled sheep. "He dies there, and you have not mercy enough even to lift him up one drop of water. If you are men, and not fiends, unloose him!"

They had been as fiends in their sport; the southern cruelty that will rend a bird's wings from its body, or a butterfly's dainty beauty asunder, laughing softly all the while, had been awakened in them; they were loath to quit its indulgence.

He looked as though she said aright, and that he was dying lashed there to the column; his eyes were blood-red, his mouth open and swollen, his forehead pui"ple with suffused blood; his heart beat visibly, great slow laboured throbs, under the cords.

She wrenched herself from their hold, and caught the wooden cup the soldier had cast down, and filled it with the water of the stagnant stream, and held it upward to his lips. He quivered from head to foot, and shrank from the draught that through the parching heat he had been athirst for with so deadly a longing.

"Do not torture me—more?"

The whisper was almost inarticulate from his dry stiffened lips: the cup fell from her hold. She knew his meaning; she remembered the memory which made the thirst that he endured more bearable than that action from her hand. She turned passionately on the nearest soldiers.

"Show some human mercy! Bind me there in his stead, tear me limb from limb as children tear the fire-flies; it will be rarer pastime for you to put a woman to torment! You know what manner of thing is justice? Then if you do, by every law of justice make me suffer, and spare him."

Under their drooping lids, his eyes lightened a moment with a gleam of consciousness: his instinct was still for her defence.

"Let me be. So best," he said, faintly. "It will soon end."

She was worthless—she had so declared herself; she was his traitress and another's paramour; yet the loyalty in him survived still—still, to lay his life down for her had its sweetness for him.

A shrill wailing cry broke from her, like that of some creature perishing in the trough of waves or under billowy flames.

"O Christ! have you no pity? Take him down while there is breath in him, and bind me there in his stead. I will never bid you spare me one pang!"

They looked doubtfully at their chief: he signed them to obey her.

"She says justly; it is she who ought to suffer. Loose him, and bring him out of the sun." They unloosened the knotted cords that swathed his limbs to the column. When they were wholly unfastened, he swayed forward, his head fell on his breast, his body bent like a reed, there was foam upon his beard, and his eyes were closed.

A great stillness came then upon the soldiery about the place; through them, under their breath, they whispered that their work was done—that he was dead.

She alone thought not as they thought, that his sacrifice for her was crowned by the last sacrifico of all.

"He is not dead," she said, simply.

There was a strange calmness and certainty in the words that thrilled through those who heard them. They looked at her, neither touching nor opposing her; she had terror for them—terror for them as of some great, fallen, half-shameful, and half-glorious thing. Every intense passion carries its reaction of fear upon those who witness it: hers had such on them now. They dimly felt that if they, in their wanton cruelty, had been the actual murderers of this man, she knew herself far more utterly his destroyer than they could be, who had but harmed his mortal form.

"He is not dead," she said, with that vibration of an exquisite joy crossing the icy desolation of despair, which smote the most callous there to some vague sense of answering pain;—as though her voice reached him, he raised himself slightly, where two soldiers held up his sinking frame, his lips gasped for breath, his eyes unclosed to the dazzling gleam of the day, he stood erect, while a loud cry broke from him:

"O God:—I cannot die!"

The English words missed the listening southern ears; she alone knew the agony in them of the great imperishable strength that would not let life leave him, that would survive all which strove to slay it—survive to keep sensation, memory, knowledge in him, and to refuse the only mercy he could ever know, the mercy of oblivion and annihilation.

The Calabrian went and laid his hand upon his prisoner's shoulder.

"You are a fine brute. I am sorry you provoked us. See here—this woman is the guiltier: she says so: she is come to suffer in your stead."

He heard, though all his senses still were dim—though earth, and sea, and sky, and the ring of the armed men, and her face in the white furnace-heat of the sunlight were all one misty blaze of colour to him. He heard, and his lips moved faintly. "She shall not suffer—for me."

So far as thought could be clear to him, he thought that, having sinned so deeply against him, remorse at the last had struck ber, and drawn her here to bear witness for bim. He thought that there yet dwelt in her too much still of native courage, of inborn nobility, to let her rest in safety and security, whilst through her sin, and to give her freedom, be endurhd the doom to which she had cast him out; he thought that, so far, sbe was true to herself, though false with worse than a Delilah's treachery to him. To take vengeance upon her was a poor, vain, wretched quittance that never glanced by him; a grossness, a baseness that could have no place with him; his great tortured passion could no more have slaked itself in such a payment than it could have wreaked its wrong by the bruising and the marring of that mere loveliness of form which had been the lure and instrument of his destruction.

The Italian swore a heavy oath.

"Are you mad? Why, of her own testimony she has been your ruin!"

"Of a woman's compassion she says it—out of her own mouth you would not condemn her?"

 

It was the sole denial, the sole evasión of the

truth that ever his voice had spoken. To save himself, he would not have borrowed the faintest likeness of a lie; but in the dizzy mists of his reeling senses this one instinct remained with him—to save her even from herself, to screen her even from the justice that would avenge him.

As she heard, where she stood bound, held back by the guards who had seized her, her eyes met his;—guilty or guiltless, faithful or faithless, by that look he knew that she loved him as no woman will love twice.

His head sank, his eyelids closed, he shivered in the scorching day. She loved him, or she had not come thither; she loved him, or never that language had burned for him in her glance. But this love—love of the traitress, of the voluptuous betrayer, of the temptress of sin, of the "queen of evil, lady of lust,"—what was this to him?

Some touch of veneration for the courage they had witnessed, for the self-sacrifice they vaguely understood, had come upon the brígands round him—brigands in their coarseness, their training, and their brutality, though they wore the livery of a monarchy. They had seen that this man could hold his own in contest with the strength, and the rage, and the prolonged resistance of lions; they saw now that he could suffer and submit with the mute-enduring patient self-surrender and self-command of those saints of whom the priests had told them, in their boyhood, dim, pathetic, ancient legends, half forgot and half remembered. They yielded him a certain reluctant, wondering respect, and they brought him, with more gentle usage, where the thickly-woven olive and acanthus made a shadow from the sun, and gave him water to slake his burning throat, and drew the linen folds of his dress over his wounded chest with what was, for them, almost tenderness. To her they had no such pity; they knew her a revolutionist, a rebel, an infidel, as they were told, a woman of evil, murderous, and fearful sorcery, who could revengo with the "evil eye" all those who incensed her by resisting her seductions; they hated her with a great sullen hate, the stronger, because it was the barbarous hatred that is born of fear. But for their commander they would have shot her down with a volley from their carbines, that the fatal regard might gaze on them no more with the glance that they believed could wither them like a sorceress' incantations. They bound her arms behind her with ruthless severity, till her fair skin was lacerated and bruised; then they forced her down on to the yellow grasses that grew lank and long among the fallen temple-stones, and passed the ropes that bound her round a block of travestine. From the moment that she had asked for his deliverance, she had never spoken.

He was so near her that, stretching her hand out had she been free, she could have touched him where they had laid him down. His pain-racked limbs were stiff and motionless; he could not have stirred one step to save his life; his frame was racked with cramp, and the virus from the insects' teeth seemed to eat like vitriol into his flesh; his face was buried in the grasses as his forehead rested on his arm; he could not bear to look upon her; he could not bear to feel her gaze was on him. To the watching eyes of the soldiers about them, to the certainty of captivity, or worse, that waited them, tkey were both unconscious; all that either knew was that presence of the other, which surpassed any martyrdom to which military and priestly power could ever bring them.

There was silence for some time around; the chief of the scanty troop had sent northward for orders. He was uncertain what to do, and whither to take them. In a thing of so much moment he feared to move rashly or wrongly; the people were inflamed, moreover; the times were rife with unrest and sedition, the mouths of the populace were whispering tales that made the national blood burn hot against the Bourbon; he feared a riot—even it might be a rescue—if he bore this woman, to whom his superstition gave such spells, and to whom the revolutionists gave such homage, in the full noonday captive towards Naples.

Where they had fastened her she sat with her head bowed down, and her eyes, that burned like fire under their swollen aching lids, fastened on him where he lay. He had lost all actual knowledge that she was near, in the exhaustion that had succeeded to the long strain on every nerve and fibre. Delirious teeming fancies swam before his brain even in that lethargy of worn-out powers; in them he had no sense of the reality of her presence beside him; but in visions he believed he beheld her, the priestess of passion and pain, the goddess of darkness and of the spells of the senses, whom no man shall worship and live.

The messenger returned. The answeríng command was whispered by him to his officer. There was noise and movement and haste and delay around them under the shadow of the aged silvered olive trees. Neither knew ñor heeded it. Fate had wrought its worst on them.

The soldiers brought a long low waggon, taken from a homestead some way in the interior, oxen-drawn, and commonly used to bear the load of millet-sheaves at harvest, or the piles of purple fruit at vintage time. They half-dragged, half-lifted hím upon the straw within it, and motioned her to a place beside him. She stooped over him where he lay, half-senseless.

"O Heaven! how you suffer!"

The darkness of his eyes, humid and lustreless, gleamed on her a moment under his half-closed lids; he turned with restless fever on the straw.

"You think this pains!"