Chapter XII: Paolo and Francesca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I cannot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose so.”

“I was frightened of myself, monsieur.”

“Monsieur?”

“What can I call you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gazed at her, his eyes rapt and dreaming.

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

“Your past?”

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

“Not to part?” she whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I did not know.”

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

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

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

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

He took his lute, and sang softly to her:

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

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