Marie Louise de la Ramée

“ The Greek was always before him; now and again they well-nigh touched, and the foam from his horse's bit was flung on the steaming flanks of the mare he chased; now and again the dull thud of the hoofs thundered almost side by side as they scattered sand and surf, or trampled out the odorous dews from trodden roses. His enemy's life lay in the hollow of his hand; he saw the womanish beauty of Phaoleon's face, white and ghastly with a craven terror, turned backward one instant in the light of the moon, and a fierce delight, a just vengeance, heated his senses and throbbed in his veins. ”

“ But Erceldoune lay looking eastward at a lateen-boat cutting its swift track through the waters; so little had her beauty ever caught his eyes, that he never even knew that he had roused her interest. Vanity he had absolutely none; and as for pride in such uncared-for, unsought victories, he would have as soon thought of being proud that a bright Sicilian butterfly had flown beneath his foot, and been crushed by it.
"How beautifully she cuts her way!" he said to the man beside him. "Look how she dips, and lifts herself again—light as a bird! She will be past us like lightning." ”

“ I thought I should have fainted!—in the shadow of another aisle, living before me, the glorious beauty that you painted in our altar-piece! I never sinned so deeply in my life before, but, though I never raised my eyes again, I thought of nothing but her all through the mass. If she tempted me so, how must she have tempted the souls of men! She is more lovely even than your portrait——"
"But her name—her country?" broke in Erceldoune, impatiently. "Why have withheld from me that she——"
"My son, I will tell all I know if you do not hasten me," pleaded Mother Veronica. ”

“ For a love that already had cost him a year of pain to a few short hours of hope; for a woman of whom he knew nothing, not even whether she were the wife or the mistress of another; for the miserable fever of restless passion, for the haunting torment of unattainable joys, for the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for the shadows of surrounding doubt and mystery. Better far let the strange charm that had enthralled him be cut away at any cost, and go back to that old life while there was yet time. The thought crossed him for the moment as he drifted from the quay of the Golden Horn. ”

“ The story of his single-handed peril, his choice of death rather than disloyalty to his trust, in the silent ravine of the Moldavian pine-woods, had sent a thrill of its own chivalry through the languid, nil admirari, egotistic, listless pulses of high-bred society. Erceldoune was the hero of the hour if he chose; and the Border Eagle might have folded his strong pinions under the soft caress of a thousand white hands. Bat he did not choose: he had never cared for women—they had never gained any hold on him. Steeped in vice in his earliest years, sensuality had little power over his manhood ”

“ With the hoofs now thundering loud on barren rock, now scattering in clouds the loosened sand, now trampling out the fragrance from acres of wild myrtles and basilica, he rode on in close hot chase, the bridle held in the grip of his teeth, his rifle covering his assassin, while Conrad Phaulcon fled for his life. A single shot, from an aim which never missed, and the coward would be slain as he would have slain, would die the death that he would have dealt; a single ball sent screaming, with its shrill hiss, crash through his spine, and he would drop from the saddle dead as a dog. ”

“ Phaulcon knew why, with that lean tube flashing in the starlight, he was still spared; he knew, too, that once side by side in fair struggle, he would be hurled from his saddle, and crushed out under a just retribution, till all life was dead, as pitilessly as righteously as men crush out the snake whose fangs have bit them.
And the pursuit gained on him. Erceldoune rode him down, dashing through the wilderness of vegetation, with the surf of the sea thundering loudly below, and a loathing hate, a riotous joy seething through his veins. ”

“ But if you ever meet again one who loves you as I have loved, remember me—and spare him."
The generous answer died in his throat; never again, he knew, would he look upon the loveliness that had betrayed him; he knew that he was going to his death, as surely as though he sank into the sea-depths glistening below, and that when he should lie in the darkness and decay of a forgotten soldier's grave, there would be no pang of memory for him in her heart, no thought that gave him pity or lament in the life to which his own was sacrificed. ”

“ But for the light that shone from Greece in the breaking of the Renaissance, Europe would have perished in its Gothic darkness. They call her dead!—she can never die while her life, her soul, her genius breathe fire into the new nations, and give their youth all of greatness and of grace that they can claim. Greece dead! She reigns in every poem written, in every art pursued, in every beauty treasured, in every liberty won, in every god-like life and god-like death, in your fresh lands, which, but for her, would be barbarian now. ”

“ The echoes of the conflict rang in quick succession on the stillness, thundered back by the reverberations of the hills, it was hot, close, mortal work in that narrow choked defile, Erceldoune, with his back against the granite, and his dead bay at his feet between him and his foes, had the strength and the fury of a legion, now that his wrath was up in all its might, and the blood-thirst wakened in him. A ball broke his right arm above the wrist; it fell useless at his side. He laughed aloud:
"Blunderers! why don't you hit through the lungs?" ”

“ The Monarch, with his head drooped and the steam reeking from his hot flanks, took his own course over the unknown ground, and turning out of thickets, paced down a long winding aisle of cedars: the night was perfectly still, nothing was heard but the surging of the Bosphorus waters, nothing was stirring save the incessant motion of the fire-flies, that sparkled over all the boughs with starry points of light. Erceldoune had no knowledge where he was except the sea was still beside him, and he let his horse take his own way. ”

“ Even while close beside him, the richness of her beauty the glance of her eyes, the touch of her trailing dress, the gleam of the diamonds on her hair, heightened her loveliness and heightened his passion, till the night seemed full of wild tumult to him, of fierce delight, and of as fiery a pain, there was still on him that deadly nameless sense of some impending loss. She was nothing to him, worse than nothing, if she were not what he believed her. Alas, where was there ever man or woman who reached the spiritualised standard of an idealic love? ”

“ And with one stroke of the oars among the fragrant water-weeds, the little curled gilded sea-toy floated softly and slowly down the still grey waters that glistened like a lake of silver in the sun. Erceldoune was in as ecstatic a dream as any opium-eater. She had cast away whatever thoughts had weighed on her when she had bade him leave her; a step once taken, a decision once given, she was not a woman to vacillate in further doubt or in after regret, she was at once too proud and too nonchalant. ”

“ THE WISDOM OF MOTHER VERONICA.
The pines were tipped with their lightest green, the torrents were swollen with the winter rains, the rafts were rushing, lightning-like, down the rivers in the impetus that the spring lends to nature and to labour, to the earth and the human swarm it bears; primroses strewed every inch of ground under the boughs of the pine-woods; and the light of the young year was on the solitary' hills and ravines as Erceldoune rode once more into Moldavia, through the same defile where his assassins had waylaid him. ”

“ It was a strange unreal knowledge to the man in whose veins life swept with such eager vivid force, and in whose every breath and every limb strength was so vital, that life and strength both seemed eternal.
It was very still, here in the depths of the Danubian defile; and in the flood of sunset light he seemed to see the face of the woman he had lost. His heart went out to her with a futile, passionate longing; the pine-boughs that bent over him had shadowed her, the water that foamed at his feet had been touched by her hand ”

“ Like a deer stung by a shot he started to his feet, standing between her and the shafts of jasper that formed the portico into the building; the endurance that had laid him at her mercy, soffering all things for her sake, living only in the light of her smile, and knowing no law but her desire, broke its bondage now and turned against her in fierce bat just rebuke, incoherent in its misery.
"It is true, then, what they say! You have a heart of bronze, a soul of marble? You have that glory of your loveliness only to draw men in your net and hurl them to perdition? ”

“ There was a shadow of melancholy still on their hostess; but the dazzling glitter of her wit gained rather than lost by that certain disdainful languor—half scorn, half weariness—which was more marked in her that evening than when she had been with Erceldoune alone in the sunny, silence of the Bosphorus. A woman far less conscious of her power than she was conscious of it, would have known that all these men loved her, and were, even if unknown to them, each other's rivals. ”

“ A woman rose from her couch in the distance, startled, yet with the look of one who disdains to give its reins to fear—as a sovereign would rise were her solitude desecrated;—and he paused, his steps arrested and his passions silenced, as in ancient days he who came to slay in the deadliness of wrath, uncovered his head, and dropped his unsheathed sword, entering the holy shrine at whose altar his foe had taken sanctuary. ”

“ The blood coursed like fire through Erceldoune's veins, every muscle in him strained like those of a gallant hound in chase; he longed, as the hound longs, to be at the throat of his flying foe: he had a mortal debt to pay, and a deadly wrath to pay it with; the life of his murderer lay at his mercy, and he panted—with brute thirsty perhaps—to take it, and trample it ont on the sands in a just and pitiless vengeance. Yet—he did not fire.
All that was boldest and truest in him refused to let him do as he had been done by;—forbade him. to shoot down an unarmed man. ”

“ The voice fell on Erceldoune's ear, rich, harmonious; soft as a woman's contralto—the voice that had given the word to "kill the Border Eagle." He started to his feet, flinging back his burnous; in the silvery silent Eastern night they met once more—and knew each other at a glance: there is no instinct so rapid and so unerring as the instinct of a foe. ”