Chapter III: Part 3

She had the small head and the broad low brow of ancient races; eyes long, dark, and somber, accented by brows as “delicately arched as those of the pictured Cenci;” a mouth whose warm red undercurve contradicted the saddened eyes.

She was a frail and febrile copy of Da Vinci’s St. Marguerite, who, despite her saintship, is a Spanish dancing-girl in a moment of repose. There was something about her that stimulated the powers of life, that created a passionate and imperious music which flooded the soul with desire.

But it was the eyes that held my attention longest. They clung to mine with an unwavering glance. In them lay a mute appeal. They looked at me piteously, longingly. They implored help of me. They were like eyes that look from the other side of the grave with the hope that by not losing sight of mine they could draw themselves back and up again to the light. They begged for life. At that moment I would have lain down my own life to give momentary reality to hers.

Nor did she dance continuously like the puppet of my bow. She possessed independent life. She paused and waved and beckoned with her little hands. She tried to make me understand her dumb sign language, but always in her eyes there was that look of piteous questioning.

She was so frail and bright! She was like a butterfly made of gauze. A breath could crush her. Yet she danced bravely to please me, to win my applause. Poor little lonely dancer! Who could be more unsuited to the shadow world? Never had I so realized the cruelty of death. Never had I so rebelled against it. What had her crisp muslins, her satins, and her frivolous graces to do with death! I longed to clasp her in my arms, to breathe my own life breath into her, to shield her from that awful fear.

Her eyes looked into mine. Her soul spoke to mine and was understood, but her body I could not reach. It was, perhaps, ages away. It was not space that separated us; it was something crueler far. It was time!

Suddenly a tremor passed over her. What was it! Ah! yes, my weary arm had faltered in its playing. The little face quivered with fear. She held out her arms in mute appeal. I was helpless. The exhausted muscles refused to obey. My arm fell to my side. She floated away, away down the dim, gray, mirror vista, her little hands fluttering a sad farewell.

When I put out the lights and leaned from the window for a moment for a whiff of fresh air, I found that the night had gone and that the dawn was streaking faintly the fields and hills.

That day I slept only until noon. Nervous tension prevented rest. The remainder of the day I lounged in the library or idled on the verandas, living over again in thought the incidents of the night. For months this was my life. Not once did I leave the _castillo_, although invitations from the neighboring gentry and my uncle’s friends poured in upon me. Nor indeed, during this time, did I see any one but the servants. I denied myself to visitors. I thought only of my Moorish love. I dreamed only of her in the few day hours devoted to sleep. Several times I saw the servants touch their foreheads significantly when they passed me, and I heard them whisper, “The madness of the De Quederos!”

My life now took on an excessive value. Did not another depend upon it? Without me my Moorish love was dead. With me she enjoyed a semi-being. At times I suffered the most torturing fear lest accident to me condemn her forever to oblivion. The thought shook my soul.

Each night when my playing evoked her, she begged more piteously for life, and I, who so gladly would have granted it, was powerless. Each night her sign language was more comprehensible, more eloquent of longing and of love. Each night my love for her grew greater. When the hour for parting came, I felt grief such as they who bury those they love. How could I know where she went, what horrors encompassed her! How could I know what difficulties she had conquered to come to me! How could I know that she would ever come again!

By day the burden of my mind was to know where, only to know where, she was! Not even the feverish imaginings of my heart could frame an answer.

At night, when lights began to twinkle in the little houses of the village and the stars to show one by one, I looked out and cursed them, because I knew that in not one of them all was she. In all the broad firmament she was not. She alone, my Moorish love, had no share in the sweetness of the spring. I grew to hate the world that had cast her off. I became a solitary. How could I be expected to mingle with people, to leave the _castillo_! Would it not be murder to do so even for the space of a night? Not all crimes are amenable to law. Her life depended upon me. Absence meant death. Could I condemn her I loved to one unnecessary hour within the grave? Did I not always see, sleeping or waking, the piteous eyes that begged for life? Did I not always see the mouth that tried to smile, to coquette, despite the death-fear that drooped it?

But how could I explain this to the Conde’s friends? Had I done so, they would not have understood. I really believe they would have called me mad. I persisted in silent refusals.

What a fate was mine! I loved a woman who was separated from me by the centuries. I loved a phantom, a vision, a self-created mirage. I, alone, knew that this vision possessed life. Night after night we conversed by signs. Eyes looked into eyes, soul into soul, yet might we never join hands or lips. We saw each other plainly, yet might our voices never bridge the chasm of the ages. Within arm’s reach of me she stood, and smiled and beckoned, yet I had not the power to touch her. Her red lips voiced messages to me, but the wind of ages rushed between and swept them away to bury within soundless silence. What torture was this! What inexplainable suffering! In subtle punishment the curse of Tantalus was not its kin.

Only to the violin could I confide my sorrow. I threw away my music. My heart alone dictated. Thus I poured forth my longing, my unsatisfied passion, and my grief. Thus I voiced my anger, my hatred of men, of life, my rage against that silent and invisible God who mocked me with his might, and reduced my endeavor to puny impotence.

Sometimes, when cruel notes shivered the air, and sharp discords all but snapped the strings, I caught sight of the frightened faces of the servants coming one by one, a-tiptoe, to peer at me. Or below I saw teamsters turn sharply to avoid the _castillo_ and the Roman bridge beneath my window. Too, there were fewer travelers on the road of late. Less often sounded the friendly mule bell. The simple peasants were terrified by the sounds of hate and rage. The servants, too, feared me. They believed me to be “_possessed_.” The old steward, alone, had a different opinion. He attributed my peculiarities to drink or infatuation for a woman. The more so since of late no one had been admitted to my rooms. One day the kind old fellow touched my arm in a fatherly manner and whispered, “_Mi hijo, niños y vinos son mal a guardar!_”

It was too late for the kindly offices of friends. I was hopelessly given over to an infatuation. I had lost regard for appearances. I did not care.

Swiftly the days slipped by. I paid as little heed as do they who live under emotional strain. Spring deepened into summer; autumn came. In time its color faded beneath the mists of November. Before I knew it, _la nôche de los difuntos_ (the night when the dead come back) was at hand.

It pleased me to think that then I could celebrate my wedding with the dead. For the occasion I had the great drawing-room filled with flowers. At the last moment the caprice seized me to don the state costume of a courtier of Philip the Second. Then I drew a gilt couch of old brocade in front of the mirror and with closed eyes began to improvise upon the dance.

Suddenly a little hand touched my shoulder and a voice whispered: “Will you not look at me, now that I have come?”

There she was beside me, and more lovely by half when freed from the mirror’s grayness.

“But you--will you not tell me who you are?” I whispered back in an ecstasy of love.

“Zarabanda.”

“_Zarabanda!_”

“Yes, why not?”

“The Moorish love of Philip the Second?”

Passion and its artistic embodiment, music, had made my love outlast the empire that gave her birth. She had survived Spain and its splendor.

I was perched upon a dizzy height indeed. Below me the gray centuries unfolded.

At the word “Philip” grief contracted her face.

“Oh, Philip! Philip! Will you not call him? Will you not let me see him? I will never ask it of you again. You need not be afraid because he is a great king. Give him this,” taking a bracelet of peculiar workmanship from her arm and handing it toward me. “He will understand. He will come anywhere for me.”

Grief filled my heart. It was not I she loved--I, who had recreated her, who had brought her back from the grave. It was not I she thought of, but that cruel and long-dead king.

“Believe me, my little love, I would do anything for you but this--which is impossible.”

“Just once, please, just once! He was so handsome, Philip, and he loved me so. Before he married Mary of England he took me to Granada, to the town of the wall of a thousand towers. There he would have married me, had it not been for Perez, the Great Minister!”

At mention of that name a shiver passed over her, the memory of an ancient fear, setting crisply a-jingle the gems upon her cap and the gold bells on her trousers.

“There I invented the Saraband. It was the dance he loved, and he named it for me. All Spain danced it then.

“One day he was called away by a court messenger from Madrid. When he left, he swore to marry me. On a certain day I was to meet him, having sent word three days before. Then he was to marry me and make me queen!

“But as soon as he went, I was seized and imprisoned. I could not send him word. I never saw him again. Oh, please let me tell him why. He thinks I failed him. Let me tell him why!”

“I would do it if I could. I would do anything for you, but how can I?”

“Why? Philip is not--” Her dark face blanched, fear leaped into her eyes. “Philip--is not--dead?”

I nodded. Not a word did she say, but tears came to her eyes and fell slowly, one by one, upon her little hands. Never before had I realized the word’s leaden weight. It was a plummet line that found the heart of grief.

“Then there is nothing more to live for!”

The words pierced me like a dagger. I knew how complete was her indifference to me.

“How long ago did he die?” she asked, with a sigh that shook her body as a ground swell shakes the sea.

Could I tell her? That would mean another grief.

“Tell me when he died; how long ago.”

“In 1598.”

“And now what year is it?”

“1898. Three hundred years.”

“Three hundred years he has slept and dreamed me false! And now I can never tell him!”

My heart forgot its suffering in sympathy for her.

“Now I can never tell him!”

Silence fell between us. She forgot my presence, so complete was her absorption in the past.

The breath of the late autumn came through the ancient windows, slanting for an instant the flames of chandeliers and sconces until they looked like an army’s bloody spears upraised in flight. Opposite the mute mirror oppressed me with its suggestion of nothingness and of space. The flowers, too, became restless and shivered, as if some foreign element had disturbed them.

As I thought thus gloomily, the little brown hand fell on mine, and the voice whose sound was like the veiled tone-sweetness of a harp was saying:

“Then, if it was so long ago, you did not know Tiziano, who painted me, did you?”

How pitiful was this effort to be gay!

“Tiziano-was-a-noble-man-from-Venezia.”

The words were hyphenated with sighs.

“Oh, he was a very great painter! He said I was the loveliest woman in Europe. The court ladies were wild with envy. But he would have none of them. It was I he wanted--I--I! He painted me lying beside an open window, a Cupid holding a crown above my head. At my feet sat Philip--Philip, the king, at my feet! There is a little cap upon his head, and he is playing the Saraband upon his lute. In the background I made him paint the highland country of Madrid, which I should look out upon when I was queen--”

“Yes!” I interrupted excitedly, unable to stand more. “Philip might have given you a crown; I have given you life. Which is greater? Whom do you owe the most? Have you no thought of me? My love has brought you back from the grave, and now you think only of him!”

The little hand on mine fluttered sensitively. I grasped it. Its delicate touch made me recall what I had read of the fine skin texture of women of the dark races. I pressed my lips to it with delight. From it came a peculiar odor, as from some unknown exotic, which took the senses captive.

Until now I had never loved a woman. I had loved pictures, I had loved marbles, but a living woman never. Acquaintance with the most exquisite and exacting of arts had perhaps made my senses superfine. The slightest physical imperfection was sufficient to spoil my pleasure. Old age--that physical memory of many wearinesses--filled me with disgust. Of love I did not ask a return, but the near presence of something faultless, something which might never pall upon my senses, something which I might love unrestrainedly.

During the years of concert giving I had been attracted by beautiful faces, but acquaintance seldom failed to dispel the glamour. Their possessors were self-seeking, vain, frivolous. Disgust took the place of admiration. It was a disagreeable sensation which I did not like to endure for the second time, to find a woman of delicate and sensitive beauty possessed of the grasping nature of a miser, or caring only for detail of practical things. Nothing in womankind had made me so dislike the race as this union of external beauty and prosaic practicability.

Here, for the first time, was a woman whom I could love. She had none of the traits of the modern woman. She could not prate of things that disgusted and bored me. In her eyes there was no consciousness of the life I detested. She was mine in a very real sense because I had created her. I measured the greatness of my love by the knowledge that I could love on while knowing that her heart was another’s. If one loves, it is not necessary to be loved in return. Love is its own reward. Already I felt its ennobling influence.

Ah! how she enchanted my soul leaning there against the high gilt sofa’s end! Her black braids swept the floor. Her brown feet from which the slippers had fallen were folded childishly, showing little pink nails a-shine.

Every gem of color on her costume was like the dropping of a note of liquid melody into my soul. She was an exquisite toy of flesh fashioned for love. She was a fine-wrought gem of palest bronze, from which the swinging lights struck cream and amber gleams.

“Zarabanda, my Moorish love! You shall learn to care for me and forget him. I swear it! What a life we will lead together, you and I! He could have brought Spain to your feet. I will bring the world. You shall see! You shall see! I will bring the world. I will show this modern age which loves ugliness--I will show it the noble type of antique beauty!” Thus I raved in my infatuated dream.

My fervor moved her. She sat up erect. The jewels on her cap danced brightly. She leaned toward me. I saw that my suit was not to be in vain. The look of piteous fear within her eyes which had so haunted me for months was gone. In its place there was a look which, had she possessed no other charm, would have bound me to her forever. How shall I describe it?

It was the essence of that which I missed in modern pictures which represent antique life. It was just that which I missed in the women of Tadema. It was just that which their eyes had not. It was a look made up of the accumulated days of living a life totally dissimilar to our own, a life made up of dissimilar thoughts, pleasures, needs. In short, I saw within the eyes of Zarabanda the soul of a vanished age. My mind was filled with a thousand fancies.

Looking at her, I sensed vividly the imperial love-hours of Moorish beauties who had wantoned by the wall of a thousand towers. Their purple and palpitant past engulfed me. The penetrating color-joy of pagan pageants swept my senses, leaving a myriad burnished points of thought. The voluptuous phantoms of past pleasures intoxicated me. The life that pagan Spain had lived in ancient days, before Christianity had come to make bitter upon its lips the wine of joy, was distilled within my soul. Love, thought, creative fire, lifted life to divinest height, intensifying all its powers.

Before my feverish and exalted fancy there rose a vision of the East, the personified East, the seductive East, the glorious and sensuous East, swathed in a robe of mist which palpitated like the voluptuous veins of women when the tide of love is high. This vision inundated my senses in a shimmering wave, which rolled its long, foaming coils of pleasure over me.

Bending down, I folded her in my arms. I felt her little brown arm slip round my neck, its softness rivaling the down beneath a sea-gull’s wing. The penetrating Eastern perfumes struck my face, the blended sweetness of aloes and ambergris. Her brown breasts became two moons of gold beneath the shadowy twilight of her throat. The thick hair with its trailing braids was an Eden of dim and amorous ways, where a promise dwelled. As I drew her nearer, her eyes became black lakes. Exquisitely pale her face was, like warm ivory. Nearer and nearer to me the red mouth came; I knew that upon it dwelled all the sweetness and all the savors of the South. My lips just brushed it, when, with a reverberant crash, the great mirror fell and shivered in a thousand pieces. My arms encircled the empty air. She was gone--gone, and forever.

Thick dust of powdered chemicals, with which the glass was coated, filled the air. I hastened to gain the window. Something fell at my feet. It was her bracelet.

I reached the window just as the sun, its red rays throbbing like a crown of blood, dipped above the horizon line. By its angry glare I read upon the golden band, which was all that remained to me now of my one night of joy, “Philip, To His Moorish Love.”

FOOTNOTES:

[8] From “Diego Velázquez y su Siglo,” by Carlos Justi.

LISZT’S CONCERTO PATHÉTIQUE

It was in the winter of 1906 that the following remarkable incidents were communicated to me, and truly in a most remarkable manner. But who may say what shall be the intermediary link, the invisible tie to connect us with the facts of a vanished past? Who may say what vague but mentally potent beings dwell on the border line separating the real from the unreal, floating up perhaps from unthinkable depths of time and space, there to await the propitious moment for tapping some nerve of consciousness in us and establishing telegraphic communication with the soul? Over these spirit wires of thought and feeling they flash faint messages. They set the nerves a-tingle with the consciousness of an infinity of unknown lives surrounding our own, of invisible electric bodies that shock us into the recovery of forgotten memories, of the realization of a limitless land that spreads beside us and upon the verge of which we live precariously poised.

On an afternoon in the winter of 1906 I attended a concert given by two well-known pianists. The _pièce de résistance_ of the concert--it was for this that I had come--was a two-piano number, the _Concerto Pathétique_ of Liszt, that sonorous tone tragedy with its wildly dramatic incidents, interrupted from time to time by a melody of more than mortal sweetness. As I listened, annoyed by the movements of seat companions, the bobbing black heads in front, or the dry winter light that filtered through a window to the right, striking sharply a corsage ornament or a jewel, and projecting into my eyes daggered light as from a crystal ball, suddenly my surroundings vanished, and I found myself alone looking out across a land that I had never seen.

Before me lay a twilight desert, somber and lonely. Gray sand, uninterrupted by tree or dwelling, as undulating and as barren as the sea, stretched on and on. After a time I discovered that it was not twilight that caused the dimness. Upon the horizon there was nothing to indicate the vanishing of a sun or the future rising of a moon. Within the sky there were no stars. A Cimmerian twilight lay over all. I realized then that it was some place of purgatorial punishment, where sweet light did not come nor green earth growths, nor rain, nor the sound of leaves. It was a place of puzzling incompleteness and fragmentary physical form. There were arms twisted and bony and unattached to bodies, whose bent-fingered hands thirsted for cruelty or itched for gold. There were legs wrinkled and withered with pain and curved fantastically. There were backs bowed by the bearing of burdens, and a multitude of winged and awful faces forming a discordant chromatic scale of miseries, now flashing out leering and wanton smiles, and anon fading away into monotonous grayness.

It was a land of disembodied pain, where the shadow forms of sorrow dwelled. Regret, remorse, shame, misery, and anguish here got themselves clothed in unearthly substances, and strained futilely earthward where repentance lay. Here evil thoughts and desires were at once translated into form, swiftly to fade back again by uncountable disgusting gradations to the insubstantiality of dreams.

Across this desert a woman fled, breathless with haste and terror. She was young, scarcely more than a child, as years count, and she would have been beautiful had not her features been disfigured by grief. Out behind, a long black robe floated like an emblem of evil, giving to her appearance a certain cloistral touch. Closer inspection proved it to be a nun’s cloak. It was unfastened and thrown hastily about her where it was held together by one small nervous hand. Her hair, which was pale gold, was short-cropped and curly, and bore the imprint of a close covering. There was something pitiful in these little clustering curls of faded gold, which were down-soft like the hair on a baby’s neck. They told of helplessness and youth. Now in places they were darkened by the perspiration of fear. Cloistral life and the nun’s hood had bleached her face and given to it a marble pallor, until it seemed to radiate light in the general dimness. Her eyes were a dark ethereal blue. In their depths lay a light made of blended pain, passion, and regret. As the hideous sand monsters drifted toward her, threatening to block her way, then vanished to reshape themselves into still more hideous forms, childishly she opened her mouth to call for help. But no sound issued from her lips, although the little chin quivered piteously. I knew that she was dumb and could not speak.

As she sped on, upborne by an unnatural energy, there rang out upon the desert air a melody of more than mortal sweetness, the brief and broken fragment of a phrase. As the music died away upon the moonless space, there fell across the sand the pallid cold radiance of a cross, but so far away, so etherealized by space and distance, that it was scarcely more than a shadow’s shadow.

At first, I thought that the music was in some inexplicable way related to the beauty of her face--that perhaps they were one. There was a similarity between them. Both set to vibrating the same responsive fibers of the heart. Both were penetratingly sweet, yet touched with sorrow.

Further consideration proved this conjecture to be vain, and that the music came from some alien yet nearby place. I could see by the woman’s face that it caused her joy and sorrow, and I felt that it always sang on in her heart, and that her trembling lips tried to frame its sounds. Yet--in some way I could not understand--it kept her forever outside the radiance of the cross.

Again and again it rang out--a melody of more than mortal sweetness. And each time the woman hastened her pace. The face of the desert began to change, and in the distance there was something that lay like the shimmer of light. I watched it as it grew brighter. Colors were distinguishable. It was a garden! Oh, the yearning in her face! Oh, the effort with which she summoned strength to reach it! Her eyes grew black with determination. Her little curls were spotted with moisture. Sweeter and more penetrating became the breath of melody. It winged her feet with courage. It put strength into her heart. Yes, yes, there it lay! A fresh, bright, green garden, where a happy multitude of tiny blue and white flowers grew. Over it iris-winged insects fluttered. The sun shone resplendently. Here was the home of the melody. Its sweetness was that of love and the fullness of life. Now the radiance of the cross no longer touched the sandy waste. It remained high in the air, aloof and far, a wan gold shadow of exquisite remoteness, like the ghost of a vanished joy.

As she drew nearer, more intense became the light that fell upon the garden. It became a blue and dazzling glory, beneath which the tiny flowers expanded and expanded until they were lilies of mammoth size and proportion. Oh, so lustrous, so satin soft, so voluptuously lovely was their texture! A rare fragrance filtered from them through the sand-thick air, a languorous, seductive, benumbing fragrance, like the intangible soul of pleasure. When again the music came, the giant lily buds burst open, disclosing in place of pistil and stamen the white glorious bodies of women, whose hair outfloated in bright crinkles like blown flame, and whose feet trod an amorous measure.

Now I knew whence the music came. It was made by the twining beauty of seductive arms, the swaying of bright torsos, the interlacing of lithe limbs, the argent light struck from bared breasts and brows. It was their white passion, their wanton loveliness, their amorous longing, their electric, vital, and indomitable youth translated into tone.

Far above the desert now, the wan cross hung in dim remoteness, a faint frown of light, withdrawing coldly into the depths of space. The garden glory touched the woman’s face. The sand monsters fell back, no longer encumbering her. Happiness and courage shone from her eyes. The journey was nearly over. A step--a dozen steps and she would have gained the garden. She was all but there. She flung away the convent cloak. The sweet wind lifted the little curls upon her brow. A blue lily leaned amorously to meet her, its petals ready to enfold her. The strange light swathed her about like a robe. The melody touched her heart to joy. She was ready to grasp a waiting flower; one white hand reached for it, when a thunder of many wings was heard.

From across the desert, from the sky above, a multitude of blackish green-winged monsters, darkening the air to a dun midnight, dashed down. Their black and sullen bodies, outspread wing on wing, shut out the garden and formed a hideous wall of crawling heads. The great wings surrounded and engulfed her, beating her back--back--back--with lightning-like rapidity. Away, away, away they swept her, so swiftly that the desert was left behind. And still they swept her on and on, across another land--a land of granite, bleak and sterile and black, whose darkness was shivered from time to time by the angry glare of whirling swords that formed the mighty gate of a realm of night. Here the whirring wings uplifted her. She had no more hold upon the earth. Below, above, beside, were depth on depth of overlapping wings. Once, for an instant, the swaying, fluttering band fell back. Sharp sword light streaked her face. I saw its white horror and the little curls a-dance with fear. Then more monsters came rushing. The earth and the air were a-quiver with wings. There was a rush and a roar. There was a noise as of many waters. Then the monsters swept away into the land of darkness beyond, where nothing was distinguishable, where there was no measurement of time or space. Again the granite land was lone and silent, its gray immovableness disturbed only by the swinging gate of swords, which streaked the rocks with floating ribbons of light.

SISTER SERAPHINE

We were sitting upon the terrace of Château Châteauroux in the early evening--the old Comtesse M----, Mischna Stepanoff, and myself. It was the time of the first soft warmth of spring. Two blossoming fruit trees beside us were sweet ghosts in the early night. About them white butterflies fluttered.

In the west there were great piled clouds edged with a pink as rare and as wonderful as that which Watteau created for his frail creatures of joy. And this pink was reflected in soft broken ribbons in the gently moving surface of the Loire.

“What a night for love!” sighed Mischna Stepanoff, in whose life the passion had played no unimportant part.

“Yes,” I replied, “love and youth and spring; they are earth’s immortal trinity.”

“That reminds me of a story--a true story--of spring and youth and love,” sighed reminiscently the old Comtesse, who had been a famous beauty in her day.

“Tell it to us,” urged Mischna Stepanoff. “Next to being in love oneself is the pleasure of listening to the stories of other people who have been in love.”

“But I feel that I cannot do justice to it,” objected the old Comtesse. “It is a story for the pen of Maupassant, who wrote of the tress of hair. It might have been included among the pagan and Oriental dreams of Gautier, or such fragile and dainty reminiscences of youth as De Nerval occasionally indulged in. What could I do with a fancy like that?”

“Tell it, anyway,” we insisted.

“Well, what I lack, your own greater imaginative skill must supply,”--smiling and waving deprecatingly toward us a tiny jeweled hand.

“It is the strangest, the most interesting story in the world. And it is true.

“Over there where the hills step aside to make room for the passing of the Loire, is the ruin of a convent which you have probably noticed. In my youth it was inhabited by Les Sœurs Blanches, a well-conducted and aristocratic order of nuns, who educated the daughters of the old noblesse.

“One day I paid a visit there and for the first time saw Sister Seraphine. She was about eighteen then, I should judge, although she had already taken the final vows. I was at once attracted by her face and her strange beauty. The upper part of the face--the brow, the eyes, the nose--were those of an ascetic, a dreamer, an intellectual. The brow was nobly formed and broad; the nose chastely chiseled and modeled to an artist’s taste; and the eyes were the spiritual gray-blue of the mystic. The eyes were very beautiful, too--mistily humid, like the valley of our Loire here on a morning of spring.

“But the mouth! How can I tell you what it was like! There will never be another in the world like it. In its color alone there were hidden all the sins of earth. Such a color might have been born from the conflagration of a world, or in the feverish brain of some sightless dreamer. In its curves there was all the resistless languor of a mediæval mondaine, or a voluptuous Roman woman who had idled in the villas of Baiæ. Imagine, if you will, such a mouth beneath that ascetic brow! It was the cause of her undoing, too--and her ruin.

“It contradicted the rest of her face so sharply that it was as if she were two persons in one. It threw the beholder into a sort of stupefaction. It made him feel as if he had stumbled awkwardly upon some unguarded secret. It was that rarest of all features--a perfect mouth! And yet, perchance, I think its perfection was a trifle over-accented. It was, I think, a shade too red, too alluring, too sensuous. It was a veritable Cupid’s bow set about with mocking dimples that changed like light on the mobile surface of the Loire.

“No one could have known less of the world than Sister Seraphine. She had been placed with Les Sœurs Blanches when she was four years old. And she had never once left their sheltering care. She was of noble blood, too, although the bar sinister blackened her birth record. On her father’s side, it was whispered, she came of that royal blood of old France that had never known the meaning of fear. And her mother was the gay Comtesse of Marny.

“Now in all her young life Sister Seraphine had never seen a man except the village priests and those who sat on Sundays beyond the grating in the church. Think of it! Can you even imagine such a condition! Every holiday and fête day before her final vows were taken, plans had been made to give her an outing in the great world, to introduce her to that society to which by birth she belonged. But, some way or other, each time the plans miscarried. Some other person’s welfare and happiness intervened, had to be considered first. The result was that she had never left the convent walls.

“Shortly after this first visit of mine, the Duchesse de St. Loisy presented to the convent two long mirrors for the reception room. About this same time Sister Seraphine was put in charge of the room to receive guests and the relatives of the _jeunes demoiselles_ on visiting days. Callers at the convent were not very frequent in those days. Traveling facilities were not what they have come to be since, so Sister Seraphine was left alone for hours in the great room.

“Here she acquired the habit of looking at herself in one of the mirrors. At first eyes stared blankly back at eyes. She could not see _herself_. It is difficult, always, to get acquainted with oneself. That to me, Mischna Stepanoff, has been one of the pleasures of living--to find within me things that I did not dream were there. Sister Seraphine after a while discovered her mouth. She was surprised, as you may imagine. It was as if it were the mouth of some strange unknown person who dwelled within her. It was--_the other_--made visible!

“Soon she sensed, rather than reasoned, that it was in harmony with the fragrant creative spring outside; that she was part of an universal nature that lived and laughed. It seemed to her that even in repose her mouth laughed. It was like the pagan sunshine, which always laughed. She became interested in her mouth. She became fascinated with the many things that it expressed, with its color, its flexibility, and its capacity for joyous sensation, if by chance she touched it to a flower.

“One night, just before she closed and left the great room for the night, she leaned long by the mirror’s edge looking up at the stars through a near-by window. They were merry that night, the stars. It was spring, which is youth in the world, and they laughed. They laughed so gayly, so alluringly, that she turned impulsively and kissed her own mouth in the mirror.

“For days after this Sister Seraphine was meditative and beyond her habit thoughtful. She could not look at the mirrors. Her cheeks flushed with shame. She felt disgraced and dishonored. Every time she was obliged to pass by the great mirrors, she carefully turned her eyes away.

“During these days it seemed as if Spring, like a bandit, broke through the ponderous convent walls. Its murmur and its mystery and its fragrance and its buoyant life were everywhere. They poured invisibly through the somber, painted windows. They swept enticingly down the long bare halls. All night they sang beneath the casements of the penitential chambers. They awoke with the first penetrating sweetness of the dawn.

“Each morning, in the opening flower cups, Sister Seraphine found other mouths that looked like hers. She saw there the same desirous, satiny lips. The same brilliant color burned upon them, the same dewy ripeness. One night, unable to sleep, so many and so mighty were the voices that called her, she got up softly and tiptoed down the long bare corridors to the reception room. It was not ever really night anywhere that spring, it seems to me as I recall it. The frail gray shadows of summer made instead a sort of semi-day.

“She knelt down on the floor in front of one of the mirrors. There she saw a white face under an aureole of short gold hair, two eyes that shone like stars, and a mouth that was red as a wound. Again she kissed it. When she crept back to her room, she found it lonelier than before. Something, she knew not what, was missing. The world was empty. Some joy had gone out of life.

“The next day she asked for permission to see Father Richards, the aged priest of the parish.

“‘Father,’ she began, ‘you know that I have never left the convent walls, do you not?’

“‘Yes, my daughter.’

“‘You know that I have known no other home.’

“‘Yes, my daughter.’

“‘That I have read only my breviary and the books of the saints. And yet, Father, I have sinned, sinned grievously--’

“‘How, my daughter?’

“‘I have kissed--’

“‘Kissed?’

“‘Yes, Father. I have kissed a mouth, because I wanted to; because it was red and sweet, like the flowers outside in the spring.’

“‘What! You say--Explain, my daughter!’ said the aged priest, greatly puzzled.

“‘I kissed my own mouth, Father. I kissed it in the mirror, not once, Father, but twice. And I am not sorry. It gave me pleasure, Father. Were not mouths made to kiss? And the pleasure was not that which I have felt when I kissed the white feet of the Virgin. And I am not sorry, Father.’

“‘It is your youth, my daughter; spring, too, in the blood. You must pray and fast--especially fast. That will subdue evil.’

“‘No, Father. I think differently. I will not. I am going away. The great mirrors in the drawing-room there have shown me my mouth, Father. And it has told me of another life--a life to which I belong! Do you know what made it so red, so wonderful, so faultless, Father, this mouth of mine? It was the splendid, free, pleasure-loving, tempestuous lives that they lived who made me. There is not in this mouth of mine one servile curve, one penitential or humiliating line, one touch of pleading or regret. Although I have not seen them, I know that it must have been a great race that bore me. They did not even leave me a name to which I have a just claim. But right here, on my mouth, Father, they set the red seal of their pleasures, their aristocratic arrogance, their fearlessness, and their power.

“‘I can see the life they lived! I can see it all--through the days and the nights and the years. A regal life it was, in great moat-encircled castles, amid clash of steel, cries of joy and triumph and music and the madness of power.

“‘I can see the white glorious faces of the women they loved, framed in fluttering and triumphant banners.

“‘Think of the kisses given by brave men to the lips of beautiful women! Think of the banquets and the feasting in great halls, where a thousand candles flickered over satins and silks and gems and laces and smooth shoulders and lustrous hair! Think of the wine they drank in those long, long nights of revelry--wine that had treasured up and kept the sweetness of a thousand springs; think of the songs, the laughter, the dance, the jests! Think of the resounding hunt across fields vivid with spring; the inspiriting call of the horns, the tossing of plumes, the eyes afire with joy!

“‘Think of their daring and their high-hearted days when they cheerfully placed life in the balance, to weigh against a kiss! Think of the strength that took whatsoever it wanted, regardless of results; that flung defiance in the face of Fate!

“‘This mouth, Father, told all this to me. This mouth is their message to me.

“‘Do you know what has happened, Father? The strangest, the most unbelievable, the most preposterous thing in the world! I have been seduced by my own mouth! A miracle! A miracle of earth, not of heaven, Father--by my own mouth!

“‘I am going away, too, Father, now.’

“And right there, before the feeble and astonished old man, she tore off her hood and the bindings of her brow, and went out into the spring that was waiting for her--across the fields, and away. Think of the audacity, the power of decision, the strong, quick-working will that nothing could enfeeble!

“You have both heard of Madame X----, have you not, who had such a genius for life and luxury, whose sables the Tzaritza envied, who had at her feet half the desirable men of France? She was Sister Seraphine.”

“Every one has a right to happiness, do you not think so?” exclaimed Mischna Stepanoff, the joy of her own lost youth leaping to her eyes.

THE SACRED RELICS OF SAINT EUTHYMIUS

About the middle of the sixteenth century there was built, on the westward-fronting coast of Istria, a pleasure palace. The builder, Paul, Count of Radknothy, was a Hungarian nobleman of wealth and power, who had traveled widely and formed his taste upon the best models of the day.

On his frequent journeys he tarried oftenest in Venice. The rich and luxurious city held for him the charm it has never failed to hold for the people of the North.

Here he met La Fiorita, a dancer renowned for her beauty. She was his senior by a number of years and a woman of unsavory reputation. The story of her amours, which had been many, sounded like a page from Masuccio, and had been the talk of Italy. She had been _persona grata_ with the nobles of that licentious age. She had ruled as temporary mistress of many a summer palace hidden away among the Italian hills. For Count Radknothy she had the fascination which women of mature years have had for younger men. He married her and took her away to his Istrian home.

She was glad of this lucky stroke of fortune. She realized that, considering the life she had led, her beauty could not last in its perfection.

In the second year after her marriage, shortly before the time of her first confinement, she was miraculously saved from death at the hands of an assassin by a Carthusian nun, whom the blow struck. The assassin, who paid for the attempt with his life, was a follower of her old days, in whose heart her beauty had been more than a fancy.

This escape from death back into the luxurious life she had never ceased to look upon as the kindness of Providence, aroused the religious fanaticism that slumbers in the Italian soul. In return, she made a vow that the unborn child should be sacred to the church. Later, a daughter was born to Count and Countess Radknothy, who was christened Elsbeth.

Overjoyed at her safe delivery, chastened in mind by the favors of Heaven, the Countess decided that the child should take the veil in a convent of the Silent Sisters. Then she felt that she had atoned for the sins of her youth. Accordingly, when little Elsbeth was twelve years old, she was sent to the Hungarian Convent of St. Euthymius.

This convent, which had once been the war-castle of a feudal lord, and which bore witness to its past in its stern and forbidding exterior, was situated in northwestern Hungary, just south of the Little Carpathians, and surrounded by their gloomy forests. It stood on an elevation. On the north a lake lay, whose outlet was the shallow Ipoly, which to southward joins the Danube. It was a hilly, thinly populated country of ancient mansions separated from each other by miles of woodland.

From the convent but one building was visible, the family chapel of the Ràkoczi, a family of royal lineage whose male members had led the wars for Hungarian independence. The castle was on the other side of the chapel and its rear was toward the lake. On the north side of the convent there was but one window. From this the warlike baron used to watch his enemies approach. Beneath the window, clinging to the wall, was a staircase. This was the room which was assigned to Elsbeth.

Notwithstanding her childish immaturity, it was evident that she had inherited her mother’s blond beauty, which, in her case, was made more brilliant by the father’s Hungarian blood. During the two years that had preceded her daughter’s birth, La Fiorita had luxuriated in her Istrian palace. Here, freed from the efforts of a dancer’s life, and cherished by a love in the flower of its youth, her beauty had reached its perfection. In addition, little Elsbeth had inherited her mother’s abundant vitality and her taste for music and dancing.

Because of the child’s love of music and the noble family to which she belonged, the rules of St. Euthymius were lifted, and she was permitted to take her lute with her. La Fiorita consoled herself with the thought that the lute would take the place of conversation, which was forbidden. With this solicitude she dismissed the subject. She felt that she had purchased the forgiveness of Heaven and gave herself over unrestrainedly to the life of pleasure she loved.

It was autumn when Elsbeth reached St. Euthymius. The repellent exterior of the convent-fortress was softened by the richness of the season. Autumn once seen among the mountains of Hungary is something always to remember. A languid radiance enfolds the landscape. The stern Carpathians float in a mist of blue, through which white, fragile birches and fiery maples gleam. The forests and the mountains are reflected in the water. Along the roads ferns expand into fans of gold. The woodlands exhale an aromatic perfume.

The witchery of the season dulled the first pain of separation. But when the rains of November scattered the leaves, and the wind sang about the lonely towers and echoed down the bare corridors, she cried like a little child to go home. The sisters’ efforts to comfort her were vain. Equally vain were their attempts to divert her mind with lessons and prayer. She still cried to go home.

There was no devotional chord in her nature to respond to the good sisters’ teachings. They were like a voice calling in a land where no one lives. When winter came, the entire world was black and white. Without, the snow and the bare trees--or the blacker pines and firs; within, white, echoing rooms, where silent, black-clad figures moved. The sight filled her with grief, and by contrast called to mind her bright-gowned, beautiful mother.

When spring came, she was so pale and thin that the kind sisters would have sent word of her condition to her parents, had it not been expressly stated that no word was to be sent to disturb the peace of the Istrian home.

When she was seventeen, the sisters decided that she was sufficiently instructed in the duties of the order to be made a member. Obediently she took the veil and the vow of silence. This occasioned no fresh grief, since it could not interfere with her source of happiness--her dreams.

In the spring of the following year, shortly after vespers, when she was in her room alone, she heard some one playing upon a lute a melody of enchanting rhythm. Hastily she unfastened the window square. In the melody floated, with the breath of the soft spring night. It came from the lake. She vibrated pleasurably to it. In it were poured out the longing heart of youth and the soft allurements of love. Instinctively she threw off the cloak and hood. She unclasped the black mantle at her throat. In her eyes, upon her face, glowed that look of inspired joy with which La Fiorita had held her admirers. Snatching the lute from the wall, she repeated the melody and improvised an answer. The unknown musician understood and followed her lead. Thus they conversed for an hour through the medium of music.

The next morning Elsbeth was summoned to the Superior. Some of the sisters said that they had heard music in the night coming from her room, and of a kind not suitable for convent walls. Had not years of silence lamed their tongues and made them incapable of utterance, they would have been eloquent in their description of the melodies they had heard. As it was, they insisted vehemently upon their wickedness.

“My daughter,” said the Superior, “since this is the first complaint against you, you shall go unpunished. We have shown forbearance because of your youth. Now that you are older, and have become one of us permanently, it is right that you should obey the rules and uphold them. In the future play sacred music, or such as befits the vows you have taken.” With this the Superior dismissed her.

It was later that night when the lute called beneath her window. Her answer was a sharp note of warning. The unseen musician understood. When again he touched the strings, it was midnight, and the shy summer stars had been hours a-twinkle. He played the same alluring cantilena, but softly, tenderly, as if meant for a loved one’s ears alone. He swept the strings so delicately it was but a breath of musical fragrance upon the night.

Elsbeth trembled. The blood coursed pleasurably through her veins. Her soul expanded with joy. Fear was forgotten. She thought only of the unseen one upon the lake who called to her.

He had understood what she said the night before. He had come again. She took her lute and replied clearly and daringly. Then again the soft melodic whisper floated up from the water. Her answer was firm and triumphant, shrilling on one sustained crystal note of longing. This passionate appeal for life, for freedom, touched the hearer’s heart, as the murmurous caress which followed proved.

Six years had passed since any one had spoken to her like that, six silent years of convent life. She was like one buried alive, calling out to the warm, sweet world on the other side of the grave. Her lute told this in a song of unrest.