The Mystery of a Turkish Bath Part 4

Then something--a sound sweet as song--yet without the vibratory pa.s.sion of a human voice--seemed to float out of the darkness and hold his ear enchained like a spell. It was the divinest beauty of music, divinely interpreted, and it seemed to him as he listened that all the discord and woe and misery that oppressed his earthly senses, disappeared and died away into the very perfection of peace.

He stood there quite silent--quite motionless--waiting, so it seemed to himself, for some fuller revelation to which these exquisite sounds were but a prelude.

It was a matter of no surprise when he quietly lifted his dreamy glance to the stone balcony above, and saw there, in the soft glow of light from the rooms beyond, the fair form of the woman he had expected to see.

A faint tremor of fear and apprehension thrilled his heart, but it died away as a low remembered voice stole through the s.p.a.ce that parted him from a visible form he had never thought to see again.

"I told you we should meet. But I scarcely thought it would be so soon.

Will you come up here, or shall I join you?"

The voice and greeting roused him. He bared his head and bent low to the speaker in a deeper homage than that of conventional courtesy.

"Is it really you, Princess? And may I be permitted to join you?"

The mute sign of a.s.sent showed him also a flight of steps leading up from the terrace to the balcony. A moment, and he was by her side.

No ordinary greeting pa.s.sed between them. Perhaps none could have conveyed what that long silent gaze did; seeming to go straight to the heart of each, full of memories that time had softened, but sad with the sadness that is in all deep human love.

"A strange meeting-place," she said. "Yet why more strange than the mountains of the East, or the lonely plains of the Desert, the steppes of Russia, or the house-tops of Damascus?"

"You read my thoughts, as ever," he said. "I must confess that it seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English conventionalism, after--after--"

"I know," she said. "But life is full of the unexpected. You do not ask how these five years have been spent. The years that have changed the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you."

"I do not ask," he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could not conceal, "because it can be no pleasure to me to learn. Do you forget what I told you? Do you think that the memory of these five years is a pleasant one for me? Against my prayers, against my warnings, you chose your own life. Are you free--now?"

"No," she said, in a strange stifled voice, "never _that_--never while I wear the shackles of humanity!" She sank suddenly down in a low seat, and buried her face in her hands. "Oh," she cried, faintly, "if I could tell you--if I only dared; but I cannot! My bondage is deeper--my chains are heavier. Sometimes I think those years were only a dream--a horrible, frightful dream--but then, again, I _know_ they were not."

"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.

"I cannot tell you," she said, "I dare not."

"Do you forget," he said, severely, "that if I _wish_ to know, I shall learn it?"

"Not now," she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly, yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely eyes. "I have pa.s.sed beyond your power," she went on. "Beyond most human influence, I might say--" then she shuddered and her eyes sank again. "But oh!" she cried, "at what a cost!--at what a cost!"

He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony. "I believe you are right," he said; "my power is gone--yours is the strongest now."

He was silent for a few moments. "One question only," he then said; "I don't wish to pry into your past. It is enough that we have met--for that would never have taken place if you had not needed me. So much I know. Your marriage--was it as I foretold?"

"It was worse," she said, bitterly--"a million times worse! Body and soul, how I have suffered! And yet, as I told you then, _it had to be_."

"I did not believe it then," he said stormily; "I refuse to believe it now. Your misery was self-created. You voluntarily degraded yourself.

What result could there be? Only suffering and shame."

"The good of others," she answered mournfully. "You cannot see it yet; but I know--it was foretold me. I did my work there. Sometimes I hope it is finished; but I do not know. One can never tell; at any time the summons may come again. G.o.d help me if it does."

"Is your life in danger, then?" he asked, and again that chill and horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.

"My life!" She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something intensely mournful in her gaze. "As if _that_ mattered! What is my life to me now, any more than it was then? Did I count the cost--did I call it a sacrifice? Life--the mere material actual life of the body-- has never weighed with me for one moment. And yet," she added, in a dull, strange voice, "I failed at the crucial test! Failed!--I, who had denied to myself all woman's weakness, all mortal love, all fleshly vanities--failed! I am no more now than the veriest beginner on the path. I, who deemed myself so wise!"

Then she rose and came close to him, and laid her white hand on his arm.

"That," she said, "is why I needed you again. You can help me--you can tell me where and how I failed."

That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery. He bent his head and pa.s.sionately kissed the white, soft hand. "You failed, oh, my Princess!

because you are still mortal woman. Thank Heaven for it! You failed because memory and love were still strong in your heart. You failed-- and I am by your side once more. Oh, let the past be forgotten! Brief is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once strayed. Fate stayed them on the threshold. But now--now--"

She raised her white face. "Do not deceive yourself," she said. "You have always loved me too well--but I--"

"Only _let_ me love you!" he whispered pa.s.sionately. "It is honour enough. All the wide earth holds no other woman such as you. Having once known you, there has never been a disloyal thought within my heart.

Read it--see for yourself."

"I read it," she said, "even while the music was sounding in your ears, as you stood on the terrace there below; even while you moved amidst that chattering, flippant throng, and heard what they said of me. No, dear friend. You have nothing in that great frank, loyal soul to hide.

But I--there is something that whispers I shall only bring you suffering. I am not for mortal love. True, I cannot see beyond, but Fear meets me on the threshold. The hour I gave myself to you would bring you an evil I dimly realise. I cannot foretell, and I cannot avert it; but it is there. It lurks like a hidden foe where our lives should join... No, no!--do not tempt me. Happiness is not for me, as we count it on the earth plane."

"And in the next I may lose you altogether. Oh listen--listen, and let the woman defy the priestess. Give me your love, and, even with Death as its bridal gift I shall receive it as the deepest joy of earth."

"There," she said sadly, "speaks the mortal. Pa.s.sion sways your senses.

You too will lose your powers--and for what?--a few brief years of joy--a longer darkness--then the old weary round--the old sad effort to climb the long stairway from the bottom rung that once you proudly spurned. It was not this that Channa taught us in the sweet peace of our youth--it was not this for which our souls thirsted, and to which our faces were set."

"Channa is dead, and to the dead all is peace. Even he said that Life's one good gift was Love."

"True, but not selfish love. 'The feet of the soul must be washed in the blood of the heart.' Love to all humanity--to the poor--the sad-- the suffering. Love, even to the Fate that gives us sorrow and misfortune. Love to the eternal and immutable. Love for all that is purest and best in each life with which we mingle. Such a love is not sensual--not earthly. It gives without necessity of return; it is the soul's devotion, not the heart's impulse. But you are not content with loving me, you claim mine in return, and so far as I have lost or you have gained a firmer foothold since last we met, so far you can compel my lower nature to answer yours. We have loved before, and unhappy was our fate. Once more we meet, and your cry is still for me. And I--"

She ceased; her arms fell to her side. Her face, lovely beyond all mere mortal loveliness, looked back to his yearning, pa.s.sionate gaze. Had she been temptress, devil, saint, there could have been but one answer from the throbbing heart and leaping pulse of manhood. He caught her to his heart, and his lips drank from hers the sweetness that only earthly pa.s.sion drains from earthly love.

She did not resist. She lay there like a white lily in the moonlight, but her lips were cold as marble and her eyes held the mute sorrow of despair, not the rapture of a granted joy.

CHAPTER SIX.

ENCHANTMENT.

When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.

The Princess Zairoff, to whom men's admiration was as familiar as the air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her strange nature, to any beseechment.

But now, for one brief hour she threw back the portals of emotion. She was a woman, pure and simple. The man beside her was the one man in the world to whom her memory had been faithful. Boy and girl they had known each other in years long past. As boy and girl they had shared in the same tastes, and been penetrated with the same desires for the Mystic and the Unknown.

Living in a remote part of India under very careless guardianship, and with no one to care for their pursuits, or remark them, they had made the acquaintance of a learned and somewhat mysterious native, and from his lips they first heard some hints of the wonders that nature reveals to the earnest student. As time went on they were separated--the boy was sent to England, the girl remained in the East. When they met again he was a young lieutenant in an infantry regiment stationed at one of the most popular stations of a popular Presidency, and she was the reigning queen of the same station. Again fate parted them. Two years went by. Their next meeting was in Egypt, where she was travelling with her guardian.

Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart's secret by then, but there was a coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of love-making.

Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and s.e.x, and, however much the young man's heart might throb with its hidden pa.s.sion, there yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished devotion.