/In/ a half-reclining attitude of indolently graceful ease, the
Princess Ziska watched from beneath the slumbrous shadow of her
long-fringed eyelids the approach of her now scarcely-to-be controlled
lover. He came towards her with a certain impetuosity of movement
which was so far removed from ordinary conventionality as to be wholly
admirable from the purely picturesque point of view, despite the fact
that it expressed more passion and impatience than were in keeping
with nineteenth-century customs and manners. He had almost reached her
side before he became aware that there were two other women in the
room besides the Princess,--silent, veiled figures that sat, or rather
crouched, on the floor, holding quaintly carved and inlaid musical
instruments of some antique date in their hands, the only sign of life
about them being their large, dark, glistening almond-shaped eyes,
which were every now and then raised and fixed on Gervase with an
intense and searching look of inquiry. Strangely embarrassed by their
glances, he addressed the Princess in a low tone:
“Will you not send away your women?”
She smiled.
“Yes, presently; if you wish it, I will. But you must hear some music
first. Sit down there,” and she pointed with her small jewelled hand
to a low chair near her own. “My lutist shall sing you something,--in
English, of course!--for all the world is being Anglicized by degrees,
and there will soon be no separate nations left. Something, too, of
romantic southern passion is being gradually grafted on to English
sentiment, so that English songs are not so stupid as they were once.
I translated some stanzas from one of the old Egyptian poets into
English the other day, perhaps you will like them. Myrmentis, sing us
the ‘Song of Darkness.’”
An odd sensation of familiarity with the name of “Myrmentis” startled
Gervase as he heard it pronounced, and he looked at the girl who was
so called in a kind of dread. But she did not meet his questioning
regard,--she was already bending over her lute and tuning its strings,
while her companion likewise prepared to accompany her on a similar
though larger instrument, and in another moment her voice, full and
rich, with a sobbing passion in it which thrilled him to the inmost
soul, rang out on the warm silence:
In the darkness what deeds are done!
What wild words spoken!
What joys are tasted, what passion wasted!
What hearts are broken!
Not a glimpse of the moon shall shine,
Not a star shall mark
The passing of night,--or shed its light
On my Dream of the Dark!
On the scented and slumbrous air,
Strange thoughts are thronging;
And a blind desire more fierce than fire
Fills the soul with longing;
Through the silence heavy and sweet
Comes the panting breath
Of a lover unseen from the Might-Have-Been,
Whose loving is Death!
In the darkness a deed was done,
A wild word spoken!
A joy was tasted,--a passion wasted,--
A heart was broken!
Not a glimpse of the moon shall shine,
Not a star shall mark
The passing of night,--or shed its light
On my Dream of the Dark!
The song died away in a shuddering echo, and before Gervase had time
to raise his eyes from their brooding study of the floor the singer
and her companion had noiselessly disappeared, and he was left alone
with the Princess Ziska. He drew a long breath, and turning fully
round in his chair, looked at her steadily. There was a faint smile on
her lips--a smile of mingled mockery and triumph,--her beautiful
witch-like eyes glittered. Leaning towards her, he grasped her hands
suddenly in his own.
“Now,” he whispered, “shall I speak or be silent?”
“Whichever you please,” she responded composedly, still smiling.
“Speech or silence rest equally with yourself. I compel neither.”
“That is false!” he said passionately. “You do compel! Your eyes drag
my very soul out of me--your touch drives me into frenzy! You
temptress! You force me to speak, though you know already what I have
to say! That I love you, love you! And that you love me! That your
whole life leaps to mine as mine to yours! You know all this; if I
were stricken dumb, you could read it in my face, but you will have it
spoken--you will extort from me the whole secret of my madness!--yes,
for you to take a cruel joy in knowing that I _am_ mad--mad for the
love of you! And you cannot be too often or too thoroughly assured
that your own passion finds its reflex in me!”
He paused, abruptly checked in his wild words by the sound of her low,
sweet, chill laughter. She withdrew her hands from his burning grasp.
“My dear friend,” she said lightly, “you really have a very excellent
opinion of yourself--excuse me for saying so! ‘My own passion!’ Do you
actually suppose I have a ‘passion’ for you?” And rising from her
chair, she drew up her slim supple figure to its full height and
looked at him with an amused and airy scorn. “You are totally
mistaken! No one man living can move me to love; I know all men too
well! Their natures are uniformly composed of the same mixture of
cruelty, lust and selfishness; and forever and forever, through all
the ages of the world, they use the greater part of their intellectual
abilities in devising new ways to condone and conceal their vices. You
call me ‘temptress’;--why? The temptation, if any there be, emanates
from yourself and your own unbridled desires; I do nothing. I am made
as I am made; if my face or my form seems fair in your eyes, this is
not my fault. Your glance lights on me, as the hawk’s lights on
coveted prey; but think you the prey loves the hawk in response? It is
the mistake all men make with all women,--to judge them always as
being of the same base material as themselves. Some women there are
who shame their womanhood; but the majority, as a rule, preserve their
self-respect till taught by men to lose it.”
Gervase sprang up and faced her, his eyes flashing dangerously.
“Do not make any pretence with me!” he said half angrily. “Never tell
me you cannot love! …”
“I _have_ loved!” she interrupted him. “As true women love,--once, and
only once. It suffices; not for one lifetime, but many. I loved; and
gave myself ungrudgingly and trustingly to the man my soul worshipped.
I was betrayed, of course!--it is the usual story--quite old, quite
commonplace! I can tell it to you without so much as a blush of pain!
Since then I have not loved,--I have _hated_; and I live but for one
thing--Revenge.”
Her face paled as she spoke, and a something vague, dark, spectral and
terrible seemed to enfold her like a cloud where she stood. Anon she
smiled sweetly, and with a bewitching provocativeness.
“Your ‘passion,’ you see, my friend, awakens rather a singular
‘reflex’ in me!--not quite of the nature you imagined!”
He remained for a moment inert; then, with an almost savage boldness,
threw his arm about her.
“Have everything your own way, Ziska!” he said in quick, fierce
accents. “I will accept all your fancies, and humor all your caprices.
I will grant that you do not love me--I will even suppose that I am
repellent to you,--but that shall make no difference to my desire! You
shall be mine!--willing or unwilling! If every kiss I take from your
lips be torn from you with reluctance, yet those kisses I will
have!--you shall not escape me! You--you, out of all women in the
world, I choose …”
“As your wife?” said Ziska slowly, her dark eyes gleaming with a
strange light as she dexterously withdrew herself from his embrace.
He uttered an impatient exclamation.
“My wife! _Dieu!_ What a _banalité_! You, with your exquisite,
glowing beauty and voluptuous charm, you would be a ‘wife’--that
tiresome figure-head of utterly dull respectability? You, with your
unmatched air of wild grace and freedom, would submit to be tied down
in the bonds of marriage,--marriage, which to my thinking and that of
many other men of my character, is one of the many curses of this
idiotic nineteenth century! No, I offer you love, Ziska!--ideal,
passionate love!--the glowing, rapturous dream of ecstasy in which
such a thing as marriage would be impossible, the merest vulgar
commonplace--almost a profanity.”
“I understand!” and the Princess Ziska regarded him intently, her
breath coming and going, and a strange smile quivering on her lips.
“You would play the part of an Araxes over again!”
He smiled; and with all the audacity of a bold and determined nature,
put his arms round her and drew her close up to his breast.
“Yes,” he said, “I would play the part of an Araxes over again!”
As he uttered the words, an indescribable sensation of horror seized
him--a mist darkened his sight, his blood grew cold, and a tremor
shook him from head to foot. The fair woman’s face that was lifted so
close to his own seemed spectral and far off; and for a fleeting
moment her very beauty grew into something like hideousness, as if the
strange effect of the picture he had painted of her was now becoming
actual and apparent--namely, the face of death looking through the
mask of life. Yet he did not loosen his arms from about her waist; on
the contrary he clasped her even more closely, and kept his eyes fixed
upon her with such pertinacity that it seemed as if he expected her to
vanish from his sight while he still held her.
“To play the part of an Araxes aright,” she murmured then in slow and
dulcet accents, “you would need to be cruel and remorseless, and
sacrifice my life--or any woman’s life--to your own clamorous and
selfish passion. But you,--Armand Gervase,--educated, civilized,
intellectual, and totally unlike the barbaric Araxes, could not do
that, could you? The progress of the world, the increasing
intelligence of humanity, the coming of the Christ, these things are
surely of some weight with you, are they not? Or are you made of the
same savage and impenitent stuff as composed the once famous yet
brutal warrior of old time? Do you admire the character and spirit of
Araxes?--he who, if history reports him truly, would snatch a woman’s
life as though it were a wayside flower, crush out all its sweetness
and delicacy, and then fling it into the dust withered and dead? Do
you think that because a man is strong and famous, he has a right to
the love of woman?--a charter to destroy her as he pleases? If you
remember the story I told you, Araxes murdered with his own hand
Ziska-Charmazel the woman who loved him.”
“He had perhaps grown weary of her,” said Gervase, speaking with an
effort, and still studying the exquisite loveliness of the bewitching
face that was so close to his own, like a man in a dream.
At this she laughed, and laid her two hands on his shoulders with a
close and clinging clasp which thrilled him strangely.
“Ah, there is the difficulty!” she said. “What cure shall ever be
found for love-weariness? Men are all like children--they tire of
their toys; hence the frequent trouble and discomfort of marriage.
They grow weary of the same face, the same caressing arms, the same
faithful heart! You, for instance, would grow weary of me!”
“I think not,” answered Gervase. And now the vague sense of
uncertainty and pain which had distressed him passed away, leaving him
fully self-possessed once more. “I think you are one of those
exceptional women whom a man never grows weary of: like a Cleopatra,
or any other old-world enchantress, you fascinate with a look, you
fasten with a touch, and you have a singular freshness and wild
attraction about you which makes you unlike any other of your sex. I
know well enough that I shall never get the memory of you out of my
brain; your face will haunt me till I die!”
“And after death?” she queried, half-closing her eyes, and regarding
him languorously through her silky black lashes.
“Ah, _ma belle_, after that there is nothing to be done even in the
way of love. _Tout est fini!_ Considering the brevity of life and the
absolute certainty of death, I think that the men and women who are so
foolish as to miss any opportunities of enjoyment while they are alive
deserve more punishment than those who take all they can get, even in
the line of what is called wickedness. Wickedness is a curious thing:
it takes different shapes in different lands, and what is called
‘wicked’ here, is virtue in, let us say, the Fiji Islands. There is
really no strict rule of conduct in the world, no fixed law of
morality.”
“There is honor!” said the Princess, slowly;--“A code which even
savages recognize.”
He was silent. For a moment he seemed to hesitate; but his indecision
soon passed. His face flushed, and anon grew pale, as closing his arms
more victoriously round the fair woman who just then appeared
voluntarily to yield to his embrace, he bent down and whispered a few
words in the tiny ear, white and delicate as a shell, which was
half-hidden by the rich loose clusters of her luxuriant hair. She
heard, and smiled; and her eyes flashed with a singular ferocity which
he did not see, otherwise it might have startled him.
“I will answer you to-morrow,” she said. “Be patient till then.”
And as she spoke, she released herself determinedly from the clasp of
his arms and withdrew to a little distance, looking at him with a
fixed and searching scrutiny.
“Do not preach patience to me!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I never
had that virtue, and I certainly cannot begin to cultivate it now.”
“Had you ever any virtues?” she asked in a playful tone of something
like satire.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I do not know what you consider virtues,” he answered lightly: “If
honesty is one, I have that. I make no pretence to be what I am not. I
would not pass off somebody else’s picture as my own, for instance.
But I cannot sham to be moral. I could not possibly love a woman
without wanting her all to myself, and I have not the slightest belief
in the sanctimonious humbug of a man who plays the Platonic lover
only. But I don’t cheat, and I don’t lie. I am what I am. …”
“A man!” said Ziska, a lurid and vindictive light dilating and firing
her wonderful eyes. “A man!--the essence of all that is evil, the
possibility of all that is good! But the essence is strong and works;
the possibility is a dream which dissolves in the dreaming!”
“Yes, you are right, _ma chère_!” he responded carelessly.
“Goodness--as the world understands goodness--never makes a career for
itself worth anything. Even Christ, who has figured as a symbol of
goodness for eighteen hundred years, was not devoid of the sin of
ambition: He wanted to reign over all Judæa.”
“You view Him in that light?” inquired Ziska with a keen look. “And as
man only?”
“Why, of course! The idea of an incarnate God has long ago been
discarded by all reasoning thinkers.”
“And what of an incarnate devil?” pursued Ziska, her breath coming and
going quickly.
“As impossible as the other fancy!” he responded almost gayly. “There
are no gods and no devils, _ma belle_! The world is ruled by ourselves
alone, and it behoves us to make the best of it. How will you give me
my answer to-morrow? When shall I see you? Speak low and quickly,--Dr.
Dean is coming in here from the garden: when--when?”
“I will send for you,” she answered.
“At what hour?”
“The moon rises at ten. And at ten my messenger shall come for you.”
“A trustworthy messenger, I hope? One who knows how to be silent?”
“As silent as the grave!” she said, looking at him fixedly. “As secret
as the Great Pyramid and the hidden tomb of Araxes!”
And smiling, she turned to greet Dr. Dean, who just then entered the
saloon.
“Denzil has gone to bed,” he announced. “He begged me to excuse him to
you, Princess. I think the boy is feverish. Egypt doesn’t agree with
him.”
“I am sorry he is ill,” said the Princess with a charming air of
sympathy.
“Oh, he isn’t exactly ill,” returned the Doctor, looking sharply at
her beautiful face as he spoke. “He is simply unnerved and restless. I
am a little anxious about him. I think he ought to go back to
England--or Scotland.”
“I think so, too,” agreed Gervase. “And Mademoiselle Helen with him.”
“Mademoiselle Helen you consider very beautiful?” murmured the
Princess, unfurling her fan and waving it indolently to and fro.
“No, not beautiful,” answered the Doctor quickly. “But very pretty,
sweet and lovable--and good.”
“Ah then, of course some one will break her heart!” said the Princess
calmly. “That is what always happens to good women.”
And she smiled as she saw Gervase flush, half with anger, half with
shame. The little Doctor rubbed his nose crossly.
“Not always, Princess,” he said. “Sometimes it does; in fact pretty
often. It is an unfortunate truth that virtue is seldom rewarded in
this world. Virtue in a woman nowadays----”
“Means no lovers and no fun!” said Gervase gayly. “And the possibility
of a highly decorous marriage with a curate or a bank-clerk, followed
by the pleasing result of a family of little curates or little
bank-clerks. It is not a dazzling prospect!”
The Doctor smiled grimly; then after a wavering moment of indecision,
broke out into a chuckling laugh.
“You have an odd way of putting things,” he said. “But I’m afraid you
may be right in your estimate of the position. Quite as many women are
as miserably sacrificed on the altar of virtue as of vice. It _is_ ‘a
mad world,’ as Shakespeare says. I hope the next life we pass into
after this one will at least be sane.”
“Well, if you believe in Heaven, you have Testament authority for the
fact that there will be ‘neither marriage nor giving in marriage’
there, at any rate,” laughed Gervase. “And if we wish to follow that
text out truly in our present state of existence and become ‘as the
angels of God’ we ought at once to abolish matrimony.”
“Have done! Have done!” exclaimed the Doctor, still smiling, however,
notwithstanding his protest. “You Southern Frenchmen are half
barbarians,--you have neither religion nor morality.”
“_Dieu merci!_” said Gervase, irreverently; then turning to the
Princess Ziska, he bowed low and with a courtly grace over the hand
she extended towards him in farewell. “Good-night, Princess!”--then in
a whisper he added: “To-morrow I shall await your summons.”
“It will come without fail, never fear!” she answered in equally soft
tones. “I hope it may find you ready.”
He raised his eyes and gave her one long, lingering, passionate look;
then with another “Good-night,” which included Dr. Dean, left the
room. The Doctor lingered a moment, studying the face and form of the
Princess with a curiously inquisitive air; while she in her turn
confronted him haughtily, and with a touch of defiance in her aspect.
“Well,” said the _savant_ presently, after a pause: “Now you have got
him, what are you going to do with him?”
She smiled coldly, but answered nothing.
“You need not flash your beautiful eyes at me in that eminently
unpleasant fashion,” pursued the Doctor, easily. “You see I _know
you_, and I am not afraid of you. I only make a stand against you in
one respect: you shall not kill the boy Denzil.”
“He is nothing to me!” she said, with a gesture of contempt.
“I know he is nothing to you; but you are something to him. He does
not recognize your nature as I do. I must get him out of the reach of
your spell----”
“You need not trouble yourself,” she interrupted him, a sombre
melancholy darkening her face; “I shall be gone to-morrow.”
“Gone altogether?” inquired the Doctor calmly and without
surprise,--“Not to come back?”
“Not in this present generation!” she answered.
Still Dr. Dean evinced no surprise.
“Then you will have satisfied yourself?” he asked.
She bent her head.
“For the time being--yes! I shall have satisfied myself.”
There followed a silence, during which the little Doctor looked at his
beautiful companion with all the meditative interest of a scientist
engaged in working out some intricate and deeply interesting problem.
“I suppose I may not inquire how you propose to obtain this
satisfaction?” he said.
“You may inquire, but you will not be answered!” she retorted, smiling
darkly.
“Your intentions are pitiless?”
Still smiling, she said not a word.
“You are impenitent?”
She remained silent.
“And, worst of all, you do not desire redemption! You are one of those
who forever and ever cry, ‘Evil, be thou my good!’ Thus for you,
Christ died in vain!”
A faint tremor ran through her, but she was still mute.
“So you and creatures like you, must have their way in the world until
the end,” concluded the Doctor, thoughtfully. “And if all the
philosophers that ever lived were to pronounce you what you are, they
would be disbelieved and condemned as madmen! Well, Princess, I am
glad I have never at any time crossed your path till now, or given you
cause of offence against me. We part friends, I trust? Good-night!
Farewell!”
She held out her hand. He hesitated before taking it.
“Are you afraid?” she queried coldly. “It will not harm you!”
“I am afraid of nothing,” he said, at once clasping the white taper
fingers in his own, “except a bad conscience.”
“That will never trouble you!” and the Princess looked at him full and
steadily. “There are no dark corners in your life--no mean side-alleys
and trap-holes of deceit; you have walked on the open and straight
road. You are a good man and a wise one. But though you, in your
knowledge of spiritual things, recognize me for what I am, take my
advice and be silent on the matter. The world would never believe the
truth, even if you told it, for the time is not yet ripe for men and
women to recognize the avengers of their wicked deeds. They are kept
purposely in the dark lest the light should kill!”
And with her sombre eyes darkening, yet glowing with the inward fire
that always smouldered in their dazzling depths, she saluted him
gravely and gracefully, watching him to the last as he slowly
withdrew.