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!”