Guy had sprung to his feet, excitement bringing back for the moment all his lost strength. If Ralph Mohun had seen him, he would not have feared that the wrathful devil was cast out. It was raging within him then, untamed and dangerous as ever.
"Do you dare to insult her now that she is dead--and to me, not a month after I have lost her? It is not safe: take care, take care!"
The tempest of his pa.s.sion made him forget, for the first time in his life, the weakness of her who had roused it.
Flora was only a woman after all, though haughty and bold of spirit as any that had breathed. Her own outbreak of anger vanished before that terrible burst of wrath, just as the camp-fire, when the prairie is blazing, is swallowed up in the great roaring torrent of flame. She bowed her head on her hands, trembling all over in pure physical fear.
Guy felt ashamed when he saw the effect of his violence, and spoke more gently than he had done yet.
"Forgive me. I was very wrong; but I have not learned to control myself--I never shall, I fear; but you ought not to say such words, even if I could bear them better. Now it is time that we should part; you have staid here too long already. You must not risk your reputation for me, who can not even be grateful for the venture. We shall never meet again, if we can avoid it; it would be strange to do so as mere acquaintance, and in any other way--no, don"t stop me--it is impossible.
It will be long before I go much into society again, so I shall not cross your path."
Flora knew it was hopeless then. She was quite broken down, and did not raise her head from her hand, through the fingers of which, half shading her face, the tears trickled fast. Guy heard her murmur, very low and plaintively, "I have loved you so long--so dearly!"
Mistress as she was of every art that can deceive, I believe she only spoke the simple truth then. With all the energy of her strong and sensual nature, I believe she did worship Livingstone. To most men she would have been far more dangerous thus, in the abandonment of her sorrow, than ever she had been in the insolence of her splendid beauty.
There are some women, very few (Johnson"s fair friend, Sophy Streatfield, was one), whom weeping does not disfigure. Their eyelids do not get red or swollen; only the iris softens for a moment; and the drops do not streak or blot the polished cheeks, but glitter there, singly, like dew on marble; their sobs are well regulated, and follow in a certain rhythm; and the heaving bosom sinks and swells, not too stormily. It is a rare accomplishment. Miss Bellasys had not practiced it often, being essentially Democritian--not to say Rabelaisian--in her philosophy; but she did it very well. Like every other emotion, it became her.
Guy hardly glanced at her, and never answered a word.
She rose to go; then turned all at once to try one effort more. "Yes, we must part," she said. "I know it now. But give me a kind word to take with me. I shall be so lonely, now that you are my enemy. Will you not say you wish me well? Ah! Guy, remember all the hours that I have tried to make pleasant for you. Say "Good-by, Flora," only those two little words, gently." Her voice was broken and uncertain, but full of music still, like the wind wandering through an organ.
Just at that moment I opened the door. (I had not an idea Livingstone was not alone.) I closed it before either had remarked my entrance, but not before I had caught sight of a very striking picture.
Guy was leaning one arm against the mantel-piece; the other was crossed over his chest: on that arm Flora was clinging, with both her hands clenched in the pa.s.sion of her appeal. Her slight bonnet had fallen rather back, showing the ma.s.ses of her glorious hair, and all her flushed cheeks, and her eyes that shone with a strange l.u.s.tre, though there were tears still on their long, trailing lashes. I saw the impersonation of material life, exuberant and vigorous, yet delicately lovely--the l.u.s.t of the Eye incarnate.
He stood perfectly still, making no effort to cast her off. Had he done so with violence, it would scarcely have evinced more repulsion than did the expression of his face. There was no more of yielding or softening in the set features and severe eyes than you would find in those of a corpse three hours old, whose spirit has pa.s.sed in some great anger or pain. Can you guess what made him more than ever hard and unrelenting?
He was thinking _who_ tried to win a kind farewell from him six months ago, and utterly failed. Should her rival have this triumph, too, over the dead?
As he answered deliberately, each slow word shut out another hope, like bolts shot, one by one, in the lock of a prison door.
"I remember nothing of the past except your last act, for which I will never, never forgive you. I form no wish for your welfare or for the reverse. There shall not stand the faintest shadow of a connecting link that I can break asunder. Between you and me there is the gulf of a fresh-made grave, and no thought of mine shall ever cross it--so help me G.o.d in Heaven!"
Flora"s last arrow was shivered: if she had had another in her quiver, she would have had no courage to try it after hearing those terrible words. She caught his hand, however, before he could guess her intention, and pressed her lips upon it till they left their print behind, and then she was gone. Her light foot hardly sounded as it sprang down the stairs, but its faint echo was the last living sound connected with Flora Bellasys that ever reached the ear of Guy Livingstone.
When I heard more of the interview, I thought, and think still, that he erred on the side of harshness. He was so fixed and steady in his purpose that he could have afforded to have compromised a little in expressing it. But he did things in his own way, and fought with his own weapons--effective, but hardly to be wielded by most men, like the axe of the King-maker or the bow of Odysseus. In carrying out his will, he was apt to consider the softer feelings of others as little as he did his own. It was just so with him when riding to hounds: he went as straight as a line, and if he did not spare his horses, he certainly did not himself.
To each man alive, one particular precept of the Christian code is harder to realize and practice than all the rest put together. It was this, perhaps, which drove the anchorites on from one degree of penance to another, and made them so savage in self-tormenting. When the macerated flesh had almost lost sensation, the thorn that had galled it sometimes in their hot youth rankled incessantly, more venomous than ever. That one injunction--"Forgive, as you would hope to be forgiven"--was ever a stumbling-block to Guy.
Besides all this, he knew, better than any one, what sort of an adversary he was contending against; one with whom each step in negotiation or temporizing was a step toward discomfiture. It was like the Spaniard with his _navaja_ against the sabre: your only chance is keeping him steadily at the sword"s-point, without breaking ground; if he once gets under your guard, not all the saints in the calendar can save you.
Perhaps, then, he was right, after all. Certainly Ralph Mohun thought so, as he listened to a sketch of the proceedings with a grim satisfaction edifying to witness.
As for me, before I went to bed that night, I read through those chapters in the "Mort d"Arthur" that tell how the long, guilty loves of Launcelot and Guenever ended. In the present case, there was certainly wonderfully little penitence on the lady"s side, but yet there were points of resemblance which struck me. [I always think the queen must have been the image of Flora.] It is worth while wading through many chapters of exaggeration and obscurity to come out into the n.o.ble light of the epilogue at last.
Good King Arthur is gone. It bit deep, that blow which Mordred, the strong traitor, struck when the spear stood out a fathom behind his back; and Morgan la Fay came too late to heal the grievous wound that had taken cold. The frank, kind, generous heart, that would not mistrust till certainty left no s.p.a.ce for suspicion, can never be wrung or betrayed again. The bitter parting between the lovers is over too; and Launcelot is gone to his own place, without the farewell caress he prayed for when he besought the queen "to kiss him once and never more."
After a very few short months, the beautiful wild bird has beaten herself to death against her cage, and the vision comes by night, bidding Launcelot arise and fetch the corpse of Guenever home. She wandered often and far in life, but where should her home be _now_ but by the side of her husband? Hardly and painfully in two days, he and the faithful seven accomplish the thirty miles that lay between; so utterly is that unearthly strength, before which lance-shafts were as reeds, and iron bars as silken threads (remember the May night in Meliagraunce"s castle), enfeebled and broken down. He stands in the nunnery-church at Almesbury; he hears from the queen"s maidens of the prayer that was ever on her lips through those two days when she lay a dying, how "she besought G.o.d that she might never have power to see Sir Launcelot with her worldly eyes." Then, says the chronicler, "he saw her visage; yet he wept not greatly, but sighed. And so he did all the observance of the service himself, both the dirge at night and the ma.s.s on the morrow." Not till every rite was performed, not till the earth had closed over the marble coffin, did Launcelot swoon.
I know nothing in fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow. "Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away; for the bishop nor none of his fellows might make him to eat, and little he drank; so that he waxed shorter by a cubit than he was, and the people could not know him; for evermore day and night he prayed; but needfully as nature required, sometimes he slumbered a broken sleep; and always he was lying groveling on King Arthur"s and Queen Guenever"s tomb. And there was no comfort that his fellows could make him; it availed nothing."
We know it can not last long; we know that the morning is fast approaching, when they will find him "stark dead, and lying as he had smiled;" when they will bear him forth, according to his vow, to his resting-place in Joyous Guard; when there will be p.r.o.nounced over him that famous funeral oration--the truest, the simplest, the n.o.blest, I think, that ever was spoken over the body of a sinful man.
CHAPTER x.x.xI.
"I pray G.o.d pardon me, That I no more, without a pang, His choicest works can see."
It was long before Livingstone"s health recovered the check to its improvement given by that interview. However, as the spring advanced he began to regain strength rapidly, and toward the end of May he and I started in the _Petrel_, which he had just bought, for a cruise in the Mediterranean.
It would seem hard that any one, coasting for the first time along the sh.o.r.es of Italy, and penetrating ever and anon far into the interior, should not feel and display some interest in the succession of pictures, of living Nature and dead Art, that meet you at every step. I can not say that I ever detected the faintest symptom of such in my companion.
He strayed with me through the old Forum, and through Adrian"s Villa, and lingered by the Alban Lake; but it was more to keep me in countenance than any thing else. I liked them better this second time of seeing them than I did the first; I doubt if they left an impression on his mind equal to the dimmest photograph that ever was the pride of an amateur and the puzzle of his friends. The brilliant landscapes made up of bold headlands, hanging woods, and sunny bays fared no better. Guy did not come on deck for two hours after we cast anchor off Mola di Gaeta.
Our _ciceroni_ were much pained and scandalized at an indifference which exceeded all they had yet encountered in the matter-of-fact _Signori Inglesi_. I saw one of them look quite relieved when, after quitting us, he had to listen to an excitable young Jewess endeavoring to express her raptures in the most execrable Italian. The physical effort it cost her was awful to witness, especially as she was wintering in Italy for her lungs. O, long-suffering stones of the Coliseum! which returned the most barbarous echo--the growls from the cells when their tenants scented the Christian; the jargon of the Goth and the Hun; or the _lingua Anglo-Romana in bocca Bloomsburiana_? The two first-named cla.s.ses, at all events, confined themselves to their own dialect, and spoke it, doubtless, with perfect propriety. However, in the present instance, the _custode_ took the sentimental ebullition of the Maid of Judah for an _amende honorable_, and rubbed his key complacently.
I do not believe that our travels brought to Guy a single distraction to the great sorrow that all the while held him fast.
A German philosopher under similar circ.u.mstances would have written reams and spoken volumes (eating and drinking all the while Pantagruelically), theorizing and abstracting his emotions till they vanished into cloud and vapor. A true disciple of Rousseau or Lamartine would have a.n.a.lyzed his grief, dividing it into as many channels as Alexander did the Oxus, till the main stream was lost, and each individual rivulet might be crossed dry-shod. Both would have shed tears perpetual and profuse. I read the other day of a Frenchman who, in the midst of a mixed a.s.sembly, remembering that on that day ten years he had lost a dear friend, instantly went out and wept bitterly. He was so charmed with the happiness of the thought that, as he says, "I took the resolution henceforth to weep for all whom I have loved, each on the anniversary of their death."
Can you conceive any thing more touching than the picture of the Bereaved One consulting his almanac and then "going at it with a will?"
It _was_ an athletic performance certainly; but remember what condition he must have been in from the constant training.
From the episode of Niobe down to the best song in the "Princess," how many beautiful lines have been devoted to those outward and visible signs of sorrow?
Sadder elegiacs, more pathetic threnodies might have been written on the tears that were stifled at their source, either from pride or from physical inability to let them flow. Great regrets, like great schemes, are generally matured in the shade. If I had to choose the tombs where most hopes and affections are buried, I should turn, I think, not to those with the long inscriptions of questionable poetry or blameless Latinity, but to where just the initials and a cross are cut on the single stone.
The philosophical and poetical mourners hardly suffered much more than Guy did during those months, and for long after too, though he was always quite silent on the subject, and would speak cheerfully on others now and then, and though, from the day that he parted with Constance to that of his own death, his eyes were as dry as the skies over the Delta.
He used to lie for hours in that state of utter listlessness which gives a reality to the sad old Eastern proverb, "Man is better sitting than standing, lying down than sitting, dead than lying down."
With all this, however, his health improved every day. After the wild life he had led lately, the perfect rest and the clear pure air refreshed him marvelously. It had the effect of coming out of a room heated and laden with smoke into the cool summer morning. His strength, too, had returned almost completely. I found this out at Baiae.
The guardian of the _Cento Camerelle_, a big _lazzarone_, became inordinately abusive. My impression is that he had received about fifteen times his due; but, seeing our yacht in the offing, he conceived the idea that we were princes in our own country, and ought to be robbed in his proportionally. Guy"s eyes began to gleam at last, and he made a step toward the offender. I thought he was going to be heavily visited; but Livingstone only lifted him by the throat and held him suspended against the wall, as you may see the children in those parts pin the lizards in a forked stick. Then he let him drop, unhurt, but green with terror. A year ago, a straightforward blow from the shoulder would have settled the business in a shorter time, and worked a strange alteration in good Giuseppe"s handsome sunburnt face. But the old hardness of heart was wearing away. I had another proof of this some days later.
We were dropping down out of the Bay of Naples. Though we weighed anchor in early morning, it was past noon before we cleared the Bocca di Capri, for there was hardly wind enough to give the _Petrel_ steerage-way. The smoke from our long Turkish pipes mounted almost straight upward, and lingered over our heads in thin blue curls; yet the sullen, discontented heave and roll in the water were growing heavier every hour. The black tufa cliffs crested with shattered masonry--the foundations of the sty where the Boar of Capreae wallowed--were just on our starboard quarter, when Riddell, the master, came up to Livingstone. "I think we"d better make all snug, sir," he said. "There"s dirty weather to windward, and we haven"t too much sea-room." He was an old man-of-war"s boatswain, and had had a tussle, in his time, on every sea and ocean in the known world, with every wind that blows. He had rather a contempt for the Mediterranean, esteeming it just one degree above the Cowes Roads, and attaching about as much importance to its vagaries as one might do to the fractiousness of a spoiled child. If he had been caught in the most terrible tempest that ever desolated the sh.o.r.es of the Great Lake, I don"t believe he would have called it any thing but "dirty weather." He was too good a sailor, though, not to take all precautions, even if he had been sailing on a piece of ornamental water; and he went quickly forward to give the necessary orders, after getting a nod of a.s.sent from Guy.
The latter raised himself lazily on his arm, so as to see all round over the low bulwarks. There was a blue-black bank of cloud rolling up from the southwest. Puffs of wind, with no coolness in them, but dry and uncertain as if stirred by some capricious artificial means, struck the sails without filling them, and drove the _Petrel_ through the water by fits and starts.
"I really believe we are going to have a white squall," Guy remarked, indifferently. "Well, we shall see how the boat behaves. Riddell only spoke just in time."
Suddenly his tone changed, and he said, quickly and decidedly, "Hold on every thing!"
The master turned his weatherwise eye toward the quarter where the danger lay, and frowned. "We"re none too soon with it, Mr. Livingstone.
If there"s a yard too much canvas spread when _that_ reaches us, I won"t answer for the spars."
Deeper and deeper the blackness came rushing down upon us, an angry ridge of foam before it--the white squall showing its teeth.
Guy took the old man by the arm, and pointed to an object to leeward that none on board had remarked yet. It was a small _barca_ with four men in it. They were Capriotes, as we found afterward, the boldest boatmen in the Bay. Had they been pure-bred Neapolitans, they would have been down on their faces long ago, screaming out prayers to a long muster-roll of saints. As it was, they stood manfully to their oars, straining every muscle to reach us; there was no other safety for them then. "They will never get alongside in time, unless we bear down to meet them," Livingstone said, "and what chance will they have in ten minutes hence?"