But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own choice forever; and the old habits of his early life were strong upon him still. He lifted his head and spoke gently, and very quietly, though she caught the tremor that shook through the words.
“Do not let us speak of myself. You see what my life is; there is no more to be said. Tell me rather of your own story—you are no longer the Lady Venetia? You have been wedded and widowed, they say?”
“The wife of an hour—yes! But it is of yourself that I would hear. Why have left the world, and, above all, why have left us, to think you dead? I was not so young when we last saw you, but that I remember well how all my people loved you.”
Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath which his flight had been made? He began to think so. It was possible. She had been so young a child when he had left for Africa; then the story was probably withheld from reaching her; and now, what memory had the world to give a man whose requiem it had said twelve long years before? In all likelihood she had never heard his name, save from her brother’s lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old comrade.
“Leave my life alone, for God’s sake!” he said passionately. “Tell me of your own—tell me, above all, of his. He loved me, you say?—O Heaven! he did! Better than any creature that ever breathed; save the man whose grave lies yonder.”
“He does so still,” she answered eagerly. “Philip’s is not a heart that forgets. It is a heart of gold, and the name of his earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever. He thinks you dead; to-night will be the happiest hour he had ever known when he shall meet you here.”
He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs lest it should strike a chill to her as she passed over it; the torture grew unsupportable to him. And yet, it had so much of sweetness that he was powerless to end it—sweetness in the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by birth; in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen now and forever.
She watched him with grave, musing eyes. She was moved, startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with a wondering of regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleasure, rose above these. She had never forgotten the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought the gifts of her golden store; she was glad that he lived, though he lived thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion than any that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except her brother. The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger’s fortunes, and which she had driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her harboring, was justified for one whom her people had known and valued while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had never heard from her brother’s lips aught except constant regret and imperishable attachment. For it was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his memory had passed to all in England had never been seen by her eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary.
“What is it you fear from Philip?” she asked him, at last, when she had waited vainly for him to break the silence. “You can remember him but ill if you think that there will be anything in his heart save joy when he shall know that you are living. You little dream how dear your memory is to him—”
He paused before her abruptly.
“Hush, hush! or you will kill me! Why!—three nights ago I fled the camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw his face in the light of the bivouac-fire and dreaded that he should so see mine!”
She gazed at him in troubled amaze; there was that in the passionate agitation of this man who had been serene through so much danger, and unmoved beneath so much disaster, that startled and bewildered her.
“You fled from Philip? Ah! how you must wrong him! What will it matter to him whether you be prince or trooper, wear a peer’s robes or a soldier’s uniform? His friendship never yet was given to externals. But—why?—that reminds me of your inheritance. Do you know that lord Royallieu is dead? That your younger brother bears the title, thinking you perished at Marseilles? He was here with me yesterday; he has come to Algeria for the autumn. Whatever your motive may have been to remain thus hidden from us all, you must claim your own rights now. You must go back to all that is so justly yours. Whatever your reason be to have borne with all the suffering and the indignity that have been your portion here, they will be ended now.”
Her beauty had never struck him as intensely as at this moment, when, in urging him to the demand of his rights, she so unconsciously tempted him to betray his brother and to forsake his word. The indifference and the careless coldness that had to so many seemed impenetrable and unalterable in her were broken and had changed to the warmth of sympathy, of interest, of excitation. There was a world of feeling in her face, of eloquence in her eyes, as she stooped slightly forward with the rich glow of the cashmeres about her, and the sun-gleam falling across her brow. Pure, and proud, and noble in every thought, and pressing on him now what was the due of his birth and his heritage, she yet unwittingly tempted him with as deadly a power as though she were the vilest of her sex, seducing him downward to some infamous dishonor.
To do what she said would be but his actual right, and would open to him a future so fair that his heart grew sick with longing for it; and yet to yield, and to claim justice for himself, was forbidden him as utterly as though it were some murderous guilt. He had promised never to sacrifice his brother; the promise held him like the fetters of a galley slave.
“Why do you not answer me?” she pursued, while she leaned nearer with wonder, and doubt, and a certain awakening dread shadowing the blue luster of her eyes that were bent so thoughtfully, so searchingly, upon him. “Is it possible that you have heard of your inheritance, of your title and estates, and that you voluntarily remain a soldier here? Lord Royallieu must yield them in the instant you prove your identity, and in that there could be no difficulty. I remember you well now, and Philip, I am certain, will only need to see you once to—”
“Hush, for pity’s sake! Have you never heard—have none ever told you–”
“What?”
Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could unman him thus.
“What is it I should have heard?” she asked him, as he kept his silence.
He turned from her so that she could not see his face.
“That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the taint of crime on me!”
“Of crime?”
An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word; but she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no shadowy terror appall.
“Of crime? What crime?”
Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hopeless, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or could have given.
“I was accused of having forged your brother’s name.”
A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes darkened and dilated.
“Accused. But wrongfully?”
His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms.
“I could not prove that.”
“Not prove it? Why?”
“I could not.”
“But he—Philip—never believed you guilty?”
“I cannot tell. He may; he must.”
“But you are not!”
It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out in the silver clearness of her voice. There was not a single intonation of doubt in it; there was rather a haughty authority that forbade even himself to say that one of his race and that one of his Order could have been capable of such ignoble and craven sin.
His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him; he turned his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the heart.
“Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will; I cannot answer you.”
His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of their utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the nobler, belief offered to her choice. She had lived much in the world, but it had not corroded her; she had acquired keen discernment from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked at him now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and gracious gesture of infinite eloquence.
“You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have arrayed against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely on you. Is it not so?”
He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. In that moment half the bitterness of his doom passed from him; he had at least her faith. But his face was bloodless as that of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were audible on the stillness. This faith must live on without one thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be?
He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own closed involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until her dying day.
“I was guiltless; but none could credit it then; none would do so now; nor can I seek to make them. Ask me no more; give me your belief, if you can—God knows what precious mercy it is to me; but leave me to fulfill my fate, and tell no living creature what I have told you now.”
The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she heard. Even in the amaze and the vagueness of this first knowledge of the cause of his exile she felt instinctively, as the Little One also had done, that some great sacrifice, some great fortitude and generosity, lay within this sealed secret of his sufferance of wrong. She knew, too, that it would be useless to seek to learn that which he had chosen to conceal; that for no slender cause could he have come out to lead this life of whose sufferings she could gauge the measure; that nothing save some absolute and imperative reason could have driven him to accept such living death as was his doom in Africa.
“Tell no one!” she echoed. “What! not Philip even? Not your oldest friend. Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might be against you, his heart never condemned you for one instant.”
“I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you to do for me, is to keep silence forever on my name. To-day, accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to keep sacred. When you recognized me, I could not deny myself, I could not lie to you; but, for God’s sake, tell none of what has passed between us!”
“But why?” she pursued—“why? You lie under this charge still—you cannot disprove it, you say; but why not come out before the world, and state to all what you swear now to me, and claim your right to bear your father’s honors? If you were falsely accused, there must have been some guilty in your stead; and if—”
“Cease, for pity’s sake! Forget I ever told you I was guiltless! Blot my memory out; think of me as dead, as I have been, till your eyes called me back to life. Think that I am branded with the theft of your brother’s name; think that I am vile, and shameless and fallen as the lowest wretch that pollutes this army; think of me as what you will, but not as innocent!”
The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears away all barriers that have long dammed their course. They were wild, passionate, incoherent; unlike any that had ever passed his lips, or been poured out in her presence. He felt mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon her face again, and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the man whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to betray.
She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most women would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the violence of his self-accusation; she did not. Her intuition was too fine, her sympathies too true. She felt that he feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but that she should justly think him guiltless. She knew that this, whatever its root might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal life.
“I hear you,” she answered him gently; “but I do not believe you, even against yourself. The man whom Philip loved and honored never sank to the base fraud of a thief.”
Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming to read his very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, all the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage within him refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien crime, and rose in revolt to fling off the bondage that forced him to stand as a criminal before the noble gaze of this woman. His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without wavering; his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.
“No. I was innocent. But in honor I must bear the yoke that I took on me long ago; in honor I can never give you or any living soul the proof that this crime was not mine. I thought that I should go to my grave without any ever hearing of the years that I have passed in Africa, without any ever learning the name I used to bear. As it is, all I can ask is now—to be forgotten.”
His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them. It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman whom he loved with all the strength of a sudden passion born in utter hopelessness; the woman whose smile, whose beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won as his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birthright. So bitter that, rather than have spoken those words of resignation, he would have been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the autumn sunlight beside Rake’s grave.
“You ask what will not be mine to give,” she answered him, while a great weariness stole through her own words, for she was bewildered, and pained, and oppressed with a new, strange sense of helplessness before this man’s nameless suffering. “Remember—I knew you so well in my earliest years, and you are so dear to the one dearest to me. It will not be possible to forget such a meeting as this. Silence, of course, you can command from me, if you insist on it; but—”
“I command nothing from you; but I implore it. It is the sole mercy you can show. Never, for God’s sake! speak of me to your brother or to mine.”
“Do you so mistrust Philip’s affection?”
“No. It is because I trust it too entirely.”
“Too entirely to do what?”
“To deal it fruitless pain. As you love him—as you pity me—pray that he and I never meet!”
“But why? If all this could be cleared–”
“It never can be.”
The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of some immovable calamity which she had felt before came on her. She had been always used to be obeyed, followed, and caressed; to see obstacles crumble, difficulties disappear, before her wish; she had not been tried by any sorrow, save when, a mere child still, she felt the pain of her father’s death; she had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with easiest victory. The sense that here there was a tragedy whose meaning she could not reach, that there was here a fate that she could not change or soften, brought a strange, unfamiliar feeling of weakness before a hopeless and cruel doom that was no more to be altered by her will than the huge, bare rocks of Africa, out yonder in the glare of noon, were to be lifted by her hand. For she knew that this man, who made so light of perils that would have chilled many to the soul in terror, and who bore so quiet and serene a habit beneath the sharpest stings and hardest blows of his adversities, would not speak thus without full warrant; would not consign himself to this renunciation of every hope, unless he were compelled to it by a destiny from which there was no escape.
She was silent some moments, her eyes resting on him with that grave and luminous regard which no man had ever changed to one more tender or less calmly contemplative. He had risen again, and paced to and fro the narrow chamber; his head bent down, his chest rising and falling with the labored, quickened breath. He had thought that the hour in which his brother’s ingratitude had pierced his heart had been the greatest suffering he had ever known, or ever could know; but a greater had waited on him here, in the fate to which the jeweled toy that he had lifted from the water had accidentally led him, not dreaming to what he came.
“Lord Royallieu,” she said softly, at length, while she rose and moved toward him, the scarlet of the trailing cashmeres gathering dark, ruby lights in them as they caught sun and shadow; and at the old name, uttered in her voice, he started, and turned, and looked at her as though he saw some ghost of his past life rise from its grave. “Why look at me so?” she pursued ere he could speak. “Act how you will, you cannot change the fact that you are the bearer of your father’s title. So long as you live, your brother Berkeley can never take it legally. You may be a Chasseur of the African Army, but none the less are you a Peer of England.”
“What means that?” he muttered. “Why tell me that? I have said I am dead. Leave me buried here, and let him enjoy what he may—what he can.”
“But this is folly—madness–”
“No; it is neither. I have told you I should stand as a felon in the eyes of the English law; I should have no civil rights; the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me remain forgotten here. It will not be long, most likely, before I am thrust into the African sand, to rot like that brave soul out yonder. Berkeley will be the lawful holder of the title then; leave him in peace and possession now.”
He spoke the words out to the end—calmly, and with unfaltering resolve. But she saw the great dews gather on his temples, where silver threads were just glistening among the bright richness of his hair and she heard the short, low, convulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he spoke. She stood close beside him, and gazed once more full in his eyes, while the sweet, imperious cadence of her voice answered him:
“There is more than I know of here. Either you are the greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived. You choose to guard your own secret; I will not seek to persuade it from you. But tell me one thing—why do you thus abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, and consign yourself forever to this cruel agony?”
His lips shook under his beard as he answered her.
“Because I can do no less in honor. For God’s sake, do not you tempt me!”
“Forgive me,” she said, after a long pause. “I will never ask you that again.”
She could honor honor too well, and too well divine all that he suffered for its sake, ever to become his temptress in bidding him forsake it; yet, with a certain weariness, a certain dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realized that what he had chosen was the choice not of his present or of his future. It could have no concern for her,—save that long years ago he had been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative,—whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the unknown name of a French Chasseur. And yet it smote her with a certain dull, unanalyzed pain; it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would remain all his years through, until an Arab’s shot should set him free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service. She stood silent long, leaning against the oval of the casement, with the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that swept round her. He stood apart in silence also. What could he say to her? His whole heart longed with an unutterable longing to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between him and his duty; but his promise hung on him like a leaden weight. He must remain speechless—and leave her, for doubt to assail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts of him, if so they would.
Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in which honor had forbade him to compromise a woman’s reputation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a brother’s sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act as that which he paid now.
Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren, dust-strewn plains, in the distance there approached three riders, accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their crimson burnous floating in the autumnal wind. She started, and turned to him.
“It is Philip! He is coming for me from your camp to-day.”
His eyes strained through the sun-glare.
“Ah, God! I cannot meet him—I have not strength. You do not know–”
“I know how well he loved you.”
“Not better than I him! But I cannot—I dare not. Unless I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth, we must be apart forever. For Heaven’s sake promise me never to speak my name!”
“I promise until you release me.”
“And you can believe me innocent still, in face of all?”
She stretched her hands to him once more. “I believe. For I know what you once were.”
Great, burning tears fell from his eyes upon her hands as he bent over them.
“God bless you! You were an angel of pity to me in your childhood; in your womanhood you give me the only mercy I have known since the last day you looked upon my face! We shall be far sundered forever. May I come to you once more?”
She paused in hesitation and in thought a while, while for the first time in all her years a tremulous tenderness passed over her face; she felt an unutterable pity for this man and for his doom. Then she drew her hands gently away from him.
“Yes, I will see you again.”
So much concession to such a prayer Venetia Corona had never before given. He could not command his voice to answer, but he bowed low before her as before an empress—another moment, and she was alone.
She stood looking out at the wide, level country beyond, with the glare of the white, strong light and the red burnous of the Franco-Arabs glowing against the blue, but cloudless sky; she thought that she must be dreaming some fantastic story born of these desert solitudes.
Yet her eyes were dim with tears, and her heart ached with another’s woe. Doubt of him never came to her; but there was a vague, terrible pathos in the mystery of his fate that oppressed her with a weight of future evil, unknown, and unmeasured.
“Is he a madman?” she mused. “If not, he is a martyr; one of the greatest that ever suffered unknown to other men.”
In the coolness of the late evening, in the court of the caravanserai, her brother and his friends lounged with her and the two ladies of their touring and sketching party, while they drank their sherbet, and talked of the Gerome colors of the place, and watched the flame of the afterglow burn out, and threw millet to the doves and pigeons straying at their feet.
“My dear Venetia!” cried the Seraph, carelessly tossing handfuls of grain to the eager birds, “I inquired for your Sculptor-Chasseur—that fellow Victor—but I failed to see him, for he had been sent on an expedition shortly after I reached the camp. They tell me he is a fine soldier; but by what the Marquis said, I fear he is but a handsome blackguard, and Africa, after all, may be his fittest place.”
She gave a bend of her head to show she heard him, stroking the soft throat of a little dove that had settled on the bench beside her.
“There is a charming little creature there, a little fire-eater—Cigarette, they call her—who is in love with him, I fancy. Such a picturesque child!—swears like a trooper, too,” continued he who was now Duke of Lyonnesse. “By the way, is Berkeley gone?”
“Left yesterday.”
“What for?—where to?”
“I was not interested to inquire.”
“Ah! you never liked him! Odd enough to leave without reason or apology?”
“He had his reasons, doubtless.”
“And made his apology to you?”
“Oh, yes!”
Her brother looked at her earnestly; there was a care upon her face new to him.
“Are you well, my darling?” he asked her. “Has the sun been too hot, or la bise too cold for you?”
She rose, and gathered her cashmeres about her, and smiled somewhat wearily her adieu to him.
“Both, perhaps. I am tired. Good-night.”