Arethusa Part 4

'Yet, if you leave your mother now----' the old woman began.

'She has lived through much more than losing me,' answered Zoe. 'My father's long imprisonment, his awful death!' she shuddered now, from head to foot.

Nectaria laid a withered hand sympathetically on her trembling shoulder, but Zoe mastered herself after a moment's silence and turned her face to her companion.

'You must make her think that I shall come back,' she whispered.

'There is no other way--unless I give my soul, too. That would kill her indeed--she could not live through that!'

'And to think that my old bones are worth nothing!' sighed the poor old woman; she took the rags of Zoe's tattered sleeve and pressed them to her lips.

But Zoe bent down, for she was the taller by a head, and she tenderly kissed the wrinkled face.

'Hush!' she whispered softly. 'You will wake her if you cry. I must do it, Ria, to save you all from death, since I can. If I wait longer, I shall grow thinner, and though I am so strong I may fall ill. Then I shall be worth nothing to the Bokharian.'

'But it is slavery, child! Do you not understand that it is slavery?

That he will take you and sell you in the market, as he would sell an Arab mare, to the highest bidder?'

[Ill.u.s.tration: She tenderly kissed the wrinkled face.]

Zoe leaned sideways against the wall, and the faint light that shone upwards from the earthen lamp on the floor, fell upon her lovely upturned face, and on the outlines of her graceful body, ill-concealed by her thin rags.

'Is it true that I am still beautiful?' she asked after a pause.

'Yes,' answered the old woman, looking at her, 'it is true. You were not a pretty child, you were sallow, and your nose----'

Zoe interrupted her.

'Do you think that many girls as beautiful as I are offered in the slave market?'

'Not in my time,' answered the old woman. 'When I was in the market I never saw one that could compare with you.'

She had been sold herself, when she was thirteen.

'Of course,' she added, 'the handsome ones were kept apart from us and were better fed before they were sold, but we waited on them--we whom no one would buy except to make us work--and so we saw them every day.'

'He says he will give a hundred Venetian ducats for me, does he not?'

'Yes; and you are worth three hundred anywhere,' answered the old slave, and the tears came to her eyes, though she tried to squeeze them back with her crooked fingers.

The sick woman called to the two in a weak voice. Zoe was at her side instantly, and Nectaria shuffled as fast as she could to the pan of coals and crouched down to blow upon the embers in order to warm some milk.

'I am cold,' complained the sufferer, 'so cold!'

Zoe found one of her hands and began to chafe it gently between her own.

'It is like ice,' she said.

The girl was ill-clothed enough, as it was, and the early spring night was chilly; but she slipped off her ragged outer garment, the long-skirted coat of the Greeks, and spread it over the other wretched coverings of the bed, tucking it in round her mother's neck.

'But you, child?' protested the sick woman feebly.

'I am too hot, mother,' answered Zoe, whose teeth were chattering.

Nectaria brought the warm milk, and Zoe lifted the pillow as she had done before, and held the cup to the eager lips till the liquid was all gone.

'It is of no use,' sighed her mother. 'I shall die. I shall not live till morning.'

She had been a very great lady of Constantinople, the Kyria Agatha, wife of the Protosparthos Michael Rhangabe, whom the Emperor Andronicus had put to death with frightful tortures more than a year ago, because he had been faithful to the Emperor Johannes. Until her husband had been imprisoned, she had spent her life in a marble palace by the Golden Horn, or in a beautiful villa on the Bosphorus. She had lived delicately and had loved her existence, and even after all her husband's goods had been confiscated as well as all her own, she had lived in plenty for many months with her children, borrowing here and there of her friends and relatives. But they had forsaken her at last; not but that some of them were generous and would have supported her for years, if it had been only a matter of money, but it had become a question of life and death after Rhangabe had been executed, and none of them would risk being blinded, or maimed, or perhaps strangled for the sake of helping her. Then she had fallen into abject poverty; her slaves had all been taken from her with the rest of the property and sold again in the market, but old Nectaria had hidden herself and so had escaped; and she, who knew the city, had brought Kyria Agatha and her three children to the beggars' quarter as a last refuge, when no one would take them in. The old slave had toiled for them, and begged for them, and would have stolen for them if she had not been profoundly convinced that stealing was not only a crime punishable at the very least by the loss of the right hand, but that it was also a much greater sin because it proved that the thief did not believe in the goodness of Providence. For Providence, said Nectaria, was always right, and so long as men did right, men and Providence must necessarily agree; in other words, all would end well, either on earth or in heaven. But to steal, or kill by treachery, or otherwise to injure one's neighbour for one's own advantage, was to interfere with the ways of Providence, and people who did such things would in the end find themselves in a place diametrically opposite to that heaven in which Providence resided. Of its kind, Nectaria's reasoning was sound, and whether truly philosophical or not, it was undeniably moral.

Zoe was not Kyria Agatha's own daughter. No children had been born to the Protosparthos and his wife for several years after their marriage, and at last, in despair, they had adopted a little baby girl, the child of a young Venetian couple who had both died of the cholera that periodically visited Constantinople. Kyria Agatha and Rhangabe brought her up as their own daughter, and again years pa.s.sed by; then, at last, two boys were born to them within eighteen months. Michael Rhangabe's affection for the adopted girl never suffered the slightest change. Kyria Agatha loved her own children better, as any mother would, and as any children would have a right to expect when they were old enough to reason. She had not been unkind to Zoe, still less had she conceived a dislike for her; but she had grown indifferent to her and had looked forward with pleasure to the time when the girl should marry and leave the house. Then the great catastrophe had come, and loss of fortune, and at last beggary and actual starvation; and though Zoe's devotion had grown deeper and more unselfish with every trial, the elder woman's anxiety now, in her last dire extremity, was for her boys first, then for herself, and for Zoe last of all.

The girl knew the truth about her birth, for Rhangabe himself had not thought it right that she should be deceived, but she had not the least recollection of her own parents; the Protosparthos and his wife had been her real father and mother and had been kind, and it was her nature to be grateful and devoted. She saw that the Kyria loved the boys best, but she was already too womanly not to feel that human nature must have its way where the ties of flesh and blood are concerned; and besides, if her adoptive mother had been cruel and cold, instead of only indifferent where she had once been loving, the girl would still have given her life for her, for dead Rhangabe's sake. While he had lived, she had almost worshipped him; in his last agonies he had sent a message to his wife and children, and to her, which by some happy miracle had been delivered; and now that he was dead she was ready to die for those who had been his; more than that, she was willing to be sold into slavery for them.

She stood by the bedside only half covered, and she tried to think of something more that she might do, while she gazed on the pale face that was turned up to hers.

'Are you warmer, now?' she asked tenderly.

'Yes--a little. Thank you, child.'

Kyria Agatha closed her eyes again, but Zoe still watched her. The conviction grew in the girl that the real danger was over, and that the delicately nurtured woman only needed care and warmth and food.

That was all, but that was the unattainable, since there was nothing left that could be sold; nothing but Zoe's rare and lovely self. A hundred golden ducats were a fortune. In old Nectaria's hands such a sum would buy real comfort for more than a year, and in that time no one could tell what might happen. A turn of fortune might bring the Emperor John back to the throne. He had been a weak ruler, but neither cruel nor ungrateful, and surely he would provide for the widow of the Commander of his Guards who had perished in torment for being faithful to him. Then Zoe's freedom might be bought again, and she would go into a convent and live a good life to the end, in expiation of such evil as might be thrust upon her as a bought slave.

This she could do, and this she must do, for there was no other way to save Agatha's life, and the lives of the little boys.

'A little more milk,' said the sick woman, opening her eyes again.

Nectaria crouched over the embers, and warmed what was left of the milk. Zoe, watching her movements, saw that it was the last; but Kyria Agatha was surely better, and would ask for more during the night, and there would be none to give her; none, perhaps, until nearly noon to-morrow.

Nectaria took the pan of coals away to replenish it, going out to the back of the ruined house in order to light the charcoal in the open air. The sick woman closed her eyes again, being momentarily satisfied and warm.

Zoe sank upon her knees beside the bed, forgetting that she was cold and half-starved, as the tide of her thoughts rose in a wave of despair.

The fitful night breeze wafted the words of the mad woman's crooning along the lane, 'Eleeison! Eleeison!'

And Zoe unconsciously answered, as she would have answered in church, 'Kyrie eleeison!'

'Blessed Michael, Archangel, give us meat, we starve!' came the wild song, now high and distinct.

'Kyrie eleeison!' answered Zoe on her knees.

Then she sprang to her feet like a startled animal. Some one had knocked at the door. With one hand she gathered her thin rags across her bosom, the other unconsciously went to the sick woman's shoulder, as if at once to rea.s.sure her and to bid her be silent.

Again the knocking came, discreet still, but a little louder than before. Nectaria was still away and busy with the pan of coals, and the sick woman heard nothing, for she was sound asleep at last. Zoe saw this, and drew her bare feet out of her patched slippers before she ran lightly to the door.

'Who knocks?' she asked in a very low tone, clasping her tattered garment to her body.

The Bokharian's smooth voice answered her in oily accents.

'I am Rustan,' he said. 'I am suddenly obliged to go on a journey, and I start at dawn.'