Under Two Flags Part 71

"I hear you," she answered him gently; "but I do not believe you, even against yourself. The man whom Philip loved and honored never sank to the base fraud of a thief."

Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming to read his very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, all the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage within him refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien crime, and rose in revolt to fling off the bondage that forced him to stand as a criminal before the n.o.ble gaze of this woman. His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without wavering; his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.

"No. I was innocent. But in honor I must bear the yoke that I took on me long ago; in honor I can never give you or any living soul the proof that this crime was not mine. I thought that I should go to my grave without any ever hearing of the years that I have pa.s.sed in Africa, without any ever learning the name I used to bear. As it is, all I can ask is now--to be forgotten."

His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them. It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman whom he loved with all the strength of a sudden pa.s.sion born in utter hopelessness; the woman whose smile, whose beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won as his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birthright. So bitter that, rather than have spoken those words of resignation, he would have been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the autumn sunlight beside Rake's grave.

"You ask what will not be mine to give," she answered him, while a great weariness stole through her own words, for she was bewildered, and pained, and oppressed with a new, strange sense of helplessness before this man's nameless suffering. "Remember--I knew you so well in my earliest years, and you are so dear to the one dearest to me. It will not be possible to forget such a meeting as this. Silence, of course, you can command from me, if you insist on it; but--"

"I command nothing from you; but I implore it. It is the sole mercy you can show. Never, for G.o.d's sake! speak of me to your brother or to mine."

"Do you so mistrust Philip's affection?"

"No. It is because I trust it too entirely."

"Too entirely to do what?"

"To deal it fruitless pain. As you love him--as you pity me--pray that he and I never meet!"

"But why? If all this could be cleared----"

"It never can be."

The baffled sense of impotence against the granite wall of some immovable calamity which she had felt before came on her. She had been always used to be obeyed, followed, and caressed; to see obstacles crumble, difficulties disappear, before her wish; she had not been tried by any sorrow, save when, a mere child still, she felt the pain of her father's death; she had been lapped in softest luxury, crowned with easiest victory. The sense that here there was a tragedy whose meaning she could not reach, that there was here a fate that she could not change or soften, brought a strange, unfamiliar feeling of weakness before a hopeless and cruel doom that was no more to be altered by her will than the huge, bare rocks of Africa, out yonder in the glare of noon, were to be lifted by her hand. For she knew that this man, who made so light of perils that would have chilled many to the soul in terror, and who bore so quiet and serene a habit beneath the sharpest stings and hardest blows of his adversities, would not speak thus without full warrant; would not consign himself to this renunciation of every hope, unless he were compelled to it by a destiny from which there was no escape.

She was silent some moments, her eyes resting on him with that grave and luminous regard which no man had ever changed to one more tender or less calmly contemplative. He had risen again, and paced to and fro the narrow chamber; his head bent down, his chest rising and falling with the labored, quickened breath. He had thought that the hour in which his brother's ingrat.i.tude had pierced his heart had been the greatest suffering he had ever known, or ever could know; but a greater had waited on him here, in the fate to which the jeweled toy that he had lifted from the water had accidentally led him, not dreaming to what he came.

"Lord Royallieu," she said softly, at length, while she rose and moved toward him, the scarlet of the trailing cashmeres gathering dark, ruby lights in them as they caught sun and shadow; and at the old name, uttered in her voice, he started, and turned, and looked at her as though he saw some ghost of his past life rise from its grave. "Why look at me so?" she pursued ere he could speak. "Act how you will, you cannot change the fact that you are the bearer of your father's t.i.tle. So long as you live, your brother Berkeley can never take it legally. You may be a Cha.s.seur of the African Army, but none the less are you a Peer of England."

"What means that?" he muttered. "Why tell me that? I have said I am dead. Leave me buried here, and let him enjoy what he may--what he can."

"But this is folly--madness----"

"No; it is neither. I have told you I should stand as a felon in the eyes of the English law; I should have no civil rights; the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me remain forgotten here. It will not be long, most likely, before I am thrust into the African sand, to rot like that brave soul out yonder. Berkeley will be the lawful holder of the t.i.tle then; leave him in peace and possession now."

He spoke the words out to the end--calmly, and with unfaltering resolve.

But she saw the great dews gather on his temples, where silver threads were just glistening among the bright richness of his hair and she heard the short, low, convulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he spoke. She stood close beside him, and gazed once more full in his eyes, while the sweet, imperious cadence of her voice answered him:

"There is more than I know of here. Either you are the greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived. You choose to guard your own secret; I will not seek to persuade it from you. But tell me one thing--why do you thus abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, and consign yourself forever to this cruel agony?"

His lips shook under his beard as he answered her.

"Because I can do no less in honor. For G.o.d's sake, do not you tempt me!"

"Forgive me," she said, after a long pause. "I will never ask you that again."

She could honor honor too well, and too well divine all that he suffered for its sake, ever to become his temptress in bidding him forsake it; yet, with a certain weariness, a certain dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realized that what he had chosen was the choice not of his present or of his future. It could have no concern for her,--save that long years ago he had been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative,--whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the unknown name of a French Cha.s.seur. And yet it smote her with a certain dull, una.n.a.lyzed pain; it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would remain all his years through, until an Arab's shot should set him free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service. She stood silent long, leaning against the oval of the cas.e.m.e.nt, with the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that swept round her. He stood apart in silence also.

What could he say to her? His whole heart longed with an unutterable longing to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between him and his duty; but his promise hung on him like a leaden weight. He must remain speechless--and leave her, for doubt to a.s.sail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts of him, if so they would.

Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in which honor had forbade him to compromise a woman's reputation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a brother's sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act as that which he paid now.

Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren, dust-strewn plains, in the distance there approached three riders, accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their crimson burnous floating in the autumnal wind. She started, and turned to him.

"It is Philip! He is coming for me from your camp to-day."

His eyes strained through the sun-glare.

"Ah, G.o.d! I cannot meet him--I have not strength. You do not know----"

"I know how well he loved you."

"Not better than I him! But I cannot--I dare not. Unless I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth, we must be apart forever. For Heaven's sake promise me never to speak my name!"

"I promise until you release me."

"And you can believe me innocent still, in face of all?"

She stretched her hands to him once more. "I believe. For I know what you once were."

Great, burning tears fell from his eyes upon her hands as he bent over them.

"G.o.d bless you! You were an angel of pity to me in your childhood; in your womanhood you give me the only mercy I have known since the last day you looked upon my face! We shall be far sundered forever. May I come to you once more?"

She paused in hesitation and in thought a while, while for the first time in all her years a tremulous tenderness pa.s.sed over her face; she felt an unutterable pity for this man and for his doom. Then she drew her hands gently away from him.

"Yes, I will see you again."

So much concession to such a prayer Venetia Corona had never before given. He could not command his voice to answer, but he bowed low before her as before an empress--another moment, and she was alone.

She stood looking out at the wide, level country beyond, with the glare of the white, strong light and the red burnous of the Franco-Arabs glowing against the blue, but cloudless sky; she thought that she must be dreaming some fantastic story born of these desert solitudes.

Yet her eyes were dim with tears, and her heart ached with another's woe. Doubt of him never came to her; but there was a vague, terrible pathos in the mystery of his fate that oppressed her with a weight of future evil, unknown, and unmeasured.

"Is he a madman?" she mused. "If not, he is a martyr; one of the greatest that ever suffered unknown to other men."

In the coolness of the late evening, in the court of the caravanserai, her brother and his friends lounged with her and the two ladies of their touring and sketching party, while they drank their sherbet, and talked of the Gerome colors of the place, and watched the flame of the afterglow burn out, and threw millet to the doves and pigeons straying at their feet.

"My dear Venetia!" cried the Seraph, carelessly tossing handfuls of grain to the eager birds, "I inquired for your Sculptor-Cha.s.seur--that fellow Victor--but I failed to see him, for he had been sent on an expedition shortly after I reached the camp. They tell me he is a fine soldier; but by what the Marquis said, I fear he is but a handsome blackguard, and Africa, after all, may be his fittest place."

She gave a bend of her head to show she heard him, stroking the soft throat of a little dove that had settled on the bench beside her.

"There is a charming little creature there, a little fire-eater--Cigarette, they call her--who is in love with him, I fancy.

Such a picturesque child!--swears like a trooper, too," continued he who was now Duke of Lyonnesse. "By the way, is Berkeley gone?"

"Left yesterday."

"What for?--where to?"