Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul Part 22

"Tell me, have you won or lost?"

"Lost!" replied Denzil, fiercely, through his set teeth. "It is your turn now! But, if you win, as sure as there is a G.o.d above us, I will kill you!"

"SOIT! But not till I am ready for killing! AFTER TO-MORROW NIGHT I shall be at your service, not till then!"

And smiling coldly, his dark face looking singularly pale and stern in the moonlight, Gervase turned away, and, walking with his usual light, swift, yet leisurely tread, entered the Princess's apartment by the French window which was still open, and from which the sound of sweet music came floating deliciously on the air as he disappeared.

CHAPTER XIV.

In a half-reclining att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sion 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 embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 an-other moment her voice, full and rich, with a sobbing pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion wasted!

What hearts are broken!

Not a glimpse of the moon shall s.h.i.+ne, Not a star shall mark The pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sion wasted,-- A heart was broken!

Not a glimpse of the moon shall s.h.i.+ne, Not a star shall mark The pa.s.sing 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 along 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 pa.s.sionately. "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 a.s.sured that your own pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion!' Do you actually suppose I have a 'pa.s.sion' 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, l.u.s.t 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 wors.h.i.+pped.

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 'pa.s.sion,' 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 ba.n.a.lite! 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, pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x. 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."