Domnei Part 2

"It is very sweet. I have known no happier moment in my life. For you stand within arm's reach, mine to touch, mine to possess and do with as I elect. And I dare not lift a finger. I am as a man that has lain for a long while in a dungeon vainly hungering for the glad light of day--who, being freed at last, must hide his eyes from the dear sunlight he dare not look upon as yet. Ho, I am past speech unworthy of your notice! and I pray you now speak harshly with me, madame, for when your pure eyes regard me kindly, and your bright and delicate lips have come thus near to mine, I am so greatly tempted and so happy that I fear lest heaven grow jealous!"

"Be not too much afraid--" she murmured.

"Nay, should I then be bold? and within the moment wake Count Emmerick to say to him, very boldly, 'Beau sire, the thief half Christendom is hunting has the honour to request your sister's hand in marriage'?"

"You sail to-morrow for the fighting oversea. Take me with you."

"Indeed the feat would be worthy of me. For you are a lady tenderly nurtured and used to every luxury the age affords. There comes to woo you presently an excellent and potent monarch, not all unworthy of your love, who will presently share with you many happy and honourable years. Yonder is a lawless naked wilderness where I and my fellow desperadoes hope to cheat offended justice and to preserve thrice-forfeited lives in savagery. You bid me aid you to go into this country, never to return! Madame, if I obeyed you, Satan would protest against pollution of his ageless fires by any soul so filthy."

"You talk of little things, whereas I think of great things. Love is not sustained by palatable food alone, and is not served only by those persons who go about the world in satin."

"Then take the shameful truth. It is undeniable I swore I loved you, and with appropriate gestures, too. But, dompnedex, madame! I am past master in these specious ecstasies, for somehow I have rarely seen the woman who had not some charm or other to catch my heart with. I confess now that you alone have never quickened it. My only purpose was through hyperbole to wheedle you out of a horse, and meanwhile to have my recreation, you handsome jade!--and that is all you ever meant to me. I swear to you that is all, all, all!" sobbed Perion, for it appeared that he must die. "I have amused myself with you, I have abominably tricked you--"

Melicent only waited with untroubled eyes which seemed to plumb his heart and to appraise all which Perion had ever thought or longed for since the day that Perion was born; and she was as beautiful, it seemed to him, as the untroubled, gracious angels are, and more compa.s.sionate.

"Yes," Perion said, "I am trying to lie to you. And even at lying I fail."

She said, with a wonderful smile:

"a.s.suredly there were never any other persons so mad as we. For I must do the wooing, as though you were the maid, and all the while you rebuff me and suffer so that I fear to look on you. Men say you are no better than a highwayman; you confess yourself to be a thief: and I believe none of your accusers. Perion de la Foret," said Melicent, and ballad-makers have never shaped a phrase wherewith to tell you of her voice, "I know that you have dabbled in dishonour no more often than an archangel has pilfered drying linen from a hedgerow. I do not guess, for my hour is upon me, and inevitably I know! and there is nothing dares to come between us now."

"Nay,--ho, and even were matters as you suppose them, without any warrant,--there is at least one silly stumbling knave that dares as much. Saith he: 'What is the most precious thing in the world?--Why, a.s.suredly, Dame Melicent's welfare. Let me get the keeping of it, then.

For I have been entrusted with a host of common priceless things--with youth and vigour and honour, with a clean conscience and a child's faith, and so on--and no person alive has squandered them more gallantly. So heartward ho! and trust me now, my timorous yoke-fellow, to win and squander also the chiefest jewel of the world.' Eh, thus he chuckles and nudges me, with wicked whisperings. Indeed, madame, this rascal that shares equally in my least faculty is a most pitiful, ign.o.ble rogue! and he has aforetime eked out our common livelihood by such practices as your unsullied imagination could scarcely depicture.

Until I knew you I had endured him. But you have made of him a horror.

A horror, a horror! a thing too pitiful for h.e.l.l!"

Perion turned away from her, groaning. He flung himself into a chair.

He screened his eyes as if before some physical abomination.

The girl kneeled close to him, touching him.

"My dear, my dear! then slay for me this other Perion of the Forest."

And Perion laughed, not very mirthfully.

"It is the common usage of women to ask of men this little labour, which is a harder task than ever Hercules, that mighty-muscled king of heathenry, achieved. Nay, I, for all my sinews, am an attested weakling. The craft of other men I do not fear, for I have encountered no formidable enemy save myself; but that same midnight stabber unhorsed me long ago. I had wallowed in the mire contentedly enough until you came.... Ah, child, child! why needed you to trouble me! for to-night I want to be clean as you are clean, and that I may not ever be. I am garrisoned with devils, I am the battered plaything of every vice, and I lack the strength, and it may be, even the will, to leave my mire. Always I have betrayed the stewards.h.i.+p of man and G.o.d alike that my body might escape a momentary discomfort! And loving you as I do, I cannot swear that in the outcome I would not betray you too, to this same end! I cannot swear--Oh, now let Satan laugh, yet not unpitifully, since he and I, alone, know all the reasons why I may not swear! Hah, Madame Melicent!" cried Perion, in his great agony, "you offer me that gift an emperor might not accept save in awed grat.i.tude; and I refuse it." Gently he raised her to her feet. "And now, in G.o.d's name, go, madame, and leave the prodigal among his husks."

"You are a very brave and foolish gentleman," she said, "who chooses to face his own achievements without any paltering. To every man, I think, that must be bitter work; to the woman who loves him it is impossible."

Perion could not see her face, because he lay p.r.o.ne at the feet of Melicent, sobbing, but without any tears, and tasting very deeply of such grief and vain regret as, he had thought, they know in h.e.l.l alone; and even after she had gone, in silence, he lay in this same posture for an exceedingly long while.

And after he knew not how long a while, Perion propped his chin between his hands and, still sprawling upon the rushes, stared hard into the little, crackling fire. He was thinking of a Perion de la Foret that once had been. In him might have been found a fit mate for Melicent had this boy not died very long ago.

It is no more cheerful than any other mortuary employment, this disinterment of the person you have been, and are not any longer; and so did Perion find his cataloguing of irrevocable old follies and evasions.

Then Perion arose and looked for pen and ink. It was the first letter he ever wrote to Melicent, and, as you will presently learn, she never saw it.

In such terms Perion wrote:

"Madame--It may please you to remember that when Dame Melusine and I were interrogated, I freely confessed to the murder of King Helmas and the theft of my dead master's jewels. In that I lied. For it was my manifest duty to save the woman whom, as I thought, I loved, and it was apparent that the guilty person was either she or I.

"She is now at Brunbelois, where, as I have heard, the splendour of her estate is tolerably notorious. I have not ever heard she gave a thought to me, her cat's-paw. Madame, when I think of you and then of that sleek, smiling woman, I am appalled by my own folly. I am aghast by my long blindness as I write the words which no one will believe. To what avail do I deny a crime which every circ.u.mstance imputed to me and my own confession has publicly acknowledged?

"But you, I think, will believe me. Look you, madame, I have nothing to gain of you. I shall not ever see you any more. I go into a perilous and an eternal banishment; and in the immediate neighbourhood of death a man finds little sustenance for romance. Take the worst of me: a gentleman I was born, and as a wastrel I have lived, and always very foolishly; but without dishonour. I have never to my knowledge--and G.o.d judge me as I speak the truth!--wronged any man or woman save myself.

My dear, believe me! believe me, in spite of reason! and understand that my adoration and misery and unworthiness when I think of you are such as I cannot measure, and afford me no judicious moment wherein to fas.h.i.+on lies. For I shall not see you any more.

"I thank you, madame, for your all-unmerited kindnesses, and, oh, I pray you to believe!"

4.

_How the Bishop Aided Perion_

Then at three o'clock, as Perion supposed, someone tapped upon the door. Perion went out into the corridor, which was now unlighted, so that he had to hold to the cloak of Ayrart de Montors as the young prelate guided Perion through the complexities of unfamiliar halls and stairways into an inhospitable night. There were ready two horses, and presently the men were mounted and away.

Once only Perion s.h.i.+fted in the saddle to glance back at Bellegarde, black and formless against an empty sky; and he dared not look again, for the thought of her that lay awake in the Marshal's Tower, so near at hand as yet, was like a dagger. With set teeth he followed in the wake of his taciturn companion. The bishop never spoke save to growl out some direction.

Thus they came to Manneville and, skirting the town, came to Fomor Beach, a narrow sandy coast. It was dark in this place and very still save for the encroachment of the tide. Yonder were four little lights, lazily heaving with the water's motion, to show them where the _Tranchemer_ lay at anchor. It did not seem to Perion that anything mattered.

"It will be nearing dawn by this," he said.

"Ay," Ayrart de Montors said, very briefly; and his tone evinced his willingness to dispense with further conversation. Perion of the Forest was an unclean thing which the bishop must touch in his necessity, but could touch with loathing only, as a thirsty man takes a fly out of his drink. Perion conceded it, because nothing would ever matter any more; and so, the horses tethered, they sat upon the sand in utter silence for the s.p.a.ce of a half hour.

A bird cried somewhere, just once, and with a start Perion knew the night was not quite so murky as it had been, for he could now see a broken line of white, where the tide crept up and shattered and ebbed.

Then in a while a light sank tipsily to the water's level and presently was bobbing in the darkness, apart from those other lights, and it was growing in size and brilliancy.

Said Perion, "They have sent out the boat."

"Ay," the bishop answered, as before.

A sort of madness came upon Perion, and it seemed that he must weep, because everything fell out so very ill in this world.

"Messire de Montors, you have aided me. I would be grateful if you permitted it."

De Montors spoke at last, saying crisply:

"Grat.i.tude, I take it, forms no part of the bargain. I am the kinsman of Dame Melicent. It makes for my interest and for the honour of our house that the man whose rooms she visits at night be got out of Poictesme--"

Said Perion, "You speak in this fas.h.i.+on of the most lovely lady G.o.d has made--of her whom the world adores!"

"Adores!" the bishop answered, with a laugh; "and what poor gull am I to adore an attested wanton?" Then, with a sneer, he spoke of Melicent, and in such terms as are not bettered by repet.i.tion.

Perion said:

"I am the most unhappy man alive, as surely as you are the most ungenerous. For, look you, in my presence you have spoken infamy of Dame Melicent, though knowing I am in your debt so deeply that I have not the right to resent anything you may elect to say. You have just given me my life; and armoured by the fire-new obligation, you blaspheme an angel, you condescend to buffet a fettered man--"