Meanwhile the Princess Corona drove homeward--homeward to where atemporary home had been made by her in the most elegant of the manysnow-white villas that stud the sides of the Sahel and face the brightbow of the sunlit bay; a villa with balconies, and awnings, and cool,silent chambers, and rich, glowing gardens, and a broad, low roof, halfhidden in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid soundof waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of blossom.
Mme. la Princesse passed from her carriage to her own morning room andsank down on a couch, a little listless and weary with her search amongthe treasures of the Algerine bazaars. It was purposeless work, afterall. Had she not bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objetsd'art in profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great,grim palace in Estremadura.
"Not one of those things do I want--not one shall I look at twice. Themoney would have been better at the soldiers' hospital," she thought,while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near her--a table on which themimic hosts of Chasseurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons.
She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with a certaininterest.
"That man has been noble once," she thought. "What a fate--what a cruelfate!"
It touched her to great pity; although proud with too intense a pride,her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when once moved, deeplycompassionate. The unerring glance of a woman habituated to the firstsociety of Europe had told her that the accent, the bearing, the tone,the features of this soldier, who only asked of life "oblivion," werethose of one originally of gentle blood; and the dignity and patience ofhis acceptance of the indignities which his present rank entailed on himhad not escaped her any more than the delicate beauty of his face asshe had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with pain, in the unconsciousrevelation of sleep.
"How bitter his life must be!" she mused. "When Philip comes, perhapshe will show some way to aid him. And yet--who can serve a man who onlydesires to be forgotten?"
Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd discrepancy, of someunseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling on the wishes and the burdensof a sous-officier of Light Cavalry, she laughed a little, and put theWhite Chief back once more in his place. Yet even as she set the kingamong his mimic forces, the very carvings themselves served to retaintheir artist in her memory.
There was about them an indescribable elegance, an exceeding grace andbeauty, which spoke of a knowledge of art and of refinement of tastefar beyond those of a mere military amateur in the one who had producedthem.
"What could bring a man of that talent, with that address, into theranks?" she mused. "Persons of good family, of once fine position, comehere, they say, and live and die unrecognized under the Imperial flag.It is usually some dishonor that drives them out of their own worlds;it may be so with him. Yet he does not look like one whom shame hastouched; he is proud still--prouder than he knows. More likely it is theold, old story--a high name and a narrow fortune--the ruin of thousands!He is French, I suppose; a French aristocrat who has played au roidepouille, most probably, and buried himself and his history foreverbeneath those two names that tell one nothing--Louis Victor. Well, itis no matter of mine. Very possibly he is a mere adventurer with a goodmanner. This army here is a pot-pourri, they say, of all the variedscoundrelisms of Europe!"
She left the chess-table and went onward to the dressing and bath andbed chambers, which opened in one suite from her boudoir, and resignedherself to the hands of her attendants for her dinner toilet.
The Moslem had said aright of her beauty; and now, as her splendid hairwas unloosened and gathered up afresh with a crescent-shaped comb ofgold that was not brighter than the tresses themselves, the brilliant,haughty, thoughtful face was of a truth, as he had said, the fairestthat had ever come from the Frankish shores to the hot Africansea-board. Many beside the old Moslem had thought it "the fairest thate'er the sun shone on," and held one grave, lustrous glance of the blueimperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her--all withoutreturn. Yet, although only twenty years had passed over her proud head,the Princesse Corona d'Amague had been wedded and been widowed.
Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain pity and acertain honor for the man whose noble Spanish name she took. Widowed,by a death that was the seal of her marriage sacrament, and left her hiswife only in name and law.
The marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made her mistressof wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, of that light,spacious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her name, of that vastmajestic old castle throned on brown Estremaduran crags, and lookingdown on mighty woods of cork and chestnut, and flashing streams offalling water hurling through the gorges. The death had left noregret upon her; it only gave her for a while a graver shadow over thebrilliancy of her youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always--orfor so long, at least, as she chose to use it--a plea for thatindifference to men's worship of her which their sex calledheartlessness; which her own sex thought an ultra-refined coquetry; andwhich was, in real truth, neither the one nor the other, but simply thenegligence of a woman very difficult to touch, and, as it had seemed,impossible to charm.
None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some were wontto whisper "ambition"; and, when that whisper came round to her, hersplendid lips would curl with as splendid a scorn.
"Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us equally?" shewould ask; for she came of a great Line that thought few royal brancheson equality with it; and she cherished as things of strictest creed thelegends that gave her race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphireblue, the blood of Arthur in their veins.
Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his death-bed,with Beltran Corona d'Amague; but what it was the world could nevertell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard thetruth--the truth that it had been, in a different fashion, a gleam ofsomething of the same compassion that now made her merciful to acommon trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead SpanishPrince--compassion which, with many another rich and generous thing,lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen lies foldedwithin the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily.
She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to any one out ofthe many who had sought her high-born beauty; she was too proud to beeasily moved to such selection, and she was far too habituated to homageto be wrought upon by it, ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sun-lit,gracious nature, she had been always happy, always obeyed, alwayscaressed, always adored; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuousof flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain. She hadnever had aught to regret; it was not possible that she could realizewhat regret was.
Hence men called and found her very cold; yet those of her own kinwhom she loved knew that the heart of a summer rose was not warmer, norsweeter, nor richer than hers. And first among these was her brother--atonce her guardian and her slave--who thought her perfect, and wouldno more have crossed her will than he would have set his foot on herbeautiful, imperial head. Corona d'Amague had been his friend; the onlyone for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying indifference toher lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded vainly until one autumnseason, when they had stayed together at a great archducal castle inSouth Austria. In one of the forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of thehunt, she rejected, for the third time, the passionate supplication ofthe superb noble who ranked with the D'Ossuna and the Medina-Sidonia. Herode from her in great bitterness, in grief that no way moved her--shewas importuned with these entreaties to weariness. An hour after he wasbrought past her, wounded and senseless; he had saved her brother fromimminent death at his own cost, and the tusks of the mighty Styrian boarhad plunged through and through his frame, as they had met in the narrowwoodland glade.
"He will be a cripple--a paralyzed cripple--for life!" said the onewhose life had been saved by his devotion to her that night; and hislips shook a little under his golden beard
as he spoke.
She looked at him; she loved him well, and no homage to herself couldhave moved her as this sacrifice for him had done.
"You think he will live?" she asked.
"They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But how? My God! what adeath in life! And all for my sake, in my stead!"
She was silent several moments; then she raised her face, a little palerthan it had been, but with a passionless resolve set on it.
"Philip, we do not leave our debts unpaid. Go; tell him I will be hiswife."
"His wife--now! Venetia----"
"Go!" she said briefly. "Tell him what I say."
"But what a sacrifice! In your beauty, your youth--"
"He did not count cost. Are we less generous? Go--tell him."
He was told; and was repaid. Such a light of unutterable joy burnedthrough the misty agony of his eyes as never, it seemed to those whosaw, had beamed before in mortal eyes. He did not once hesitate at theacceptance of her self-surrender; he only pleaded that the marriageceremony should pass between them that night.
There were notaries and many priests in the great ducal household; allwas done as he desired. She consented without wavering; she had passedher word, she would not have withdrawn it if it had been a thousandtimes more bitter in its fulfillment. The honor of her house was dearerto her than any individual happiness. This man for them had lost peace,health, joy, strength, every hope of life; to dedicate her own life tohim, as he had vainly prayed her when in the full glow and vigor of hismanhood, was the only means by which their vast debt to him could bepaid. To so pay it was the instant choice of her high code of honor,and of her generosity that would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitiedhim unspeakably, though her heart had no tenderness for him; she haddismissed him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to save theonly life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, broken, helplesswreck, with endless years of pain and weariness before him!
At midnight, in the great, dim magnificence of the state chamber wherehe lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the chapel choir from afarechoing through the incensed air, she bent her haughty head down overhis couch, and the marriage benediction was spoken over them.
His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of a passionatetriumph in it. When the last words were uttered, he lay a while,exhausted, silent; only looking ever upward at her with his dark, dreamyeyes, in which the old love glanced so strangely through the blindnessof pain. Then he smiled as the last echo of the choral melodies diedsoftly on the silence.
"That is joy enough! Ah! have no fear. With the dawn you will be freeonce more. Did you think that I could have taken your sacrifice? Iknew well, let them say as they would, that I should not live the nightthrough. But, lest existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, Irent the linen bands off my wounds an hour ago. All their science willnot put back the life now! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up!Ah, love! Ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But have nogrief for me. I am happy. Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mineonce. You are my own!--death is sweeter than life!"
And before sunrise he died.
Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage rested on herstill. Though she was blameless, some vague remorse ever haunted her;though she had been so wholly guiltless of it, this death for her sakeever seemed in some sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder,only prouder; but they erred. She was one of those women who, beneaththe courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinitetenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach.
A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from a distance,shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, like the sun dazzledhim. "Exquisite--superb!" he muttered; and he was a man whose own idealswere so matchless that living women rarely could wring out his praise."She is nearly perfect, your Princesse Corona!"
"Nearly!" cried a Roman sculptor. "What, in Heaven's name, can shewant?"
"Only one thing!"
"And that is----"
"To have loved."
Wherewith he turned into the Greco.
He had found the one flaw--and it was still there. What he missed in herwas still wanting.