Part 6

The words pierced me like a dagger. I knew how complete was her indifference to me.

“How long ago did he die?” she asked, with a sigh that shook her body as a ground swell shakes the sea.

Could I tell her? That would mean another grief.

“Tell me when he died; how long ago.”

“In 1598.”

“And now what year is it?”

“1898. Three hundred years.”

“Three hundred years he has slept and dreamed me false! And now I can never tell him!”

My heart forgot its suffering in sympathy for her.

“Now I can never tell him!”

Silence fell between us. She forgot my presence, so complete was her absorption in the past.

The breath of the late autumn came through the ancient windows, slanting for an instant the flames of chandeliers and sconces until they looked like an army’s bloody spears upraised in flight. Opposite the mute mirror oppressed me with its suggestion of nothingness and of space. The flowers, too, became restless and shivered, as if some foreign element had disturbed them.

As I thought thus gloomily, the little brown hand fell on mine, and the voice whose sound was like the veiled tone-sweetness of a harp was saying:

“Then, if it was so long ago, you did not know Tiziano, who painted me, did you?”

How pitiful was this effort to be gay!

“Tiziano-was-a-noble-man-from-Venezia.”

The words were hyphenated with sighs.

“Oh, he was a very great painter! He said I was the loveliest woman in Europe. The court ladies were wild with envy. But he would have none of them. It was I he wanted--I--I! He painted me lying beside an open window, a Cupid holding a crown above my head. At my feet sat Philip--Philip, the king, at my feet! There is a little cap upon his head, and he is playing the Saraband upon his lute. In the background I made him paint the highland country of Madrid, which I should look out upon when I was queen--”

“Yes!” I interrupted excitedly, unable to stand more. “Philip might have given you a crown; I have given you life. Which is greater? Whom do you owe the most? Have you no thought of me? My love has brought you back from the grave, and now you think only of him!”

The little hand on mine fluttered sensitively. I grasped it. Its delicate touch made me recall what I had read of the fine skin texture of women of the dark races. I pressed my lips to it with delight. From it came a peculiar odor, as from some unknown exotic, which took the senses captive.

Until now I had never loved a woman. I had loved pictures, I had loved marbles, but a living woman never. Acquaintance with the most exquisite and exacting of arts had perhaps made my senses superfine. The slightest physical imperfection was sufficient to spoil my pleasure. Old age--that physical memory of many wearinesses--filled me with disgust. Of love I did not ask a return, but the near presence of something faultless, something which might never pall upon my senses, something which I might love unrestrainedly.

During the years of concert giving I had been attracted by beautiful faces, but acquaintance seldom failed to dispel the glamour. Their possessors were self-seeking, vain, frivolous. Disgust took the place of admiration. It was a disagreeable sensation which I did not like to endure for the second time, to find a woman of delicate and sensitive beauty possessed of the grasping nature of a miser, or caring only for detail of practical things. Nothing in womankind had made me so dislike the race as this union of external beauty and prosaic practicability.

Here, for the first time, was a woman whom I could love. She had none of the traits of the modern woman. She could not prate of things that disgusted and bored me. In her eyes there was no consciousness of the life I detested. She was mine in a very real sense because I had created her. I measured the greatness of my love by the knowledge that I could love on while knowing that her heart was another’s. If one loves, it is not necessary to be loved in return. Love is its own reward. Already I felt its ennobling influence.

Ah! how she enchanted my soul leaning there against the high gilt sofa’s end! Her black braids swept the floor. Her brown feet from which the slippers had fallen were folded childishly, showing little pink nails a-shine.

Every gem of color on her costume was like the dropping of a note of liquid melody into my soul. She was an exquisite toy of flesh fashioned for love. She was a fine-wrought gem of palest bronze, from which the swinging lights struck cream and amber gleams.

“Zarabanda, my Moorish love! You shall learn to care for me and forget him. I swear it! What a life we will lead together, you and I! He could have brought Spain to your feet. I will bring the world. You shall see! You shall see! I will bring the world. I will show this modern age which loves ugliness--I will show it the noble type of antique beauty!” Thus I raved in my infatuated dream.

My fervor moved her. She sat up erect. The jewels on her cap danced brightly. She leaned toward me. I saw that my suit was not to be in vain. The look of piteous fear within her eyes which had so haunted me for months was gone. In its place there was a look which, had she possessed no other charm, would have bound me to her forever. How shall I describe it?

It was the essence of that which I missed in modern pictures which represent antique life. It was just that which I missed in the women of Tadema. It was just that which their eyes had not. It was a look made up of the accumulated days of living a life totally dissimilar to our own, a life made up of dissimilar thoughts, pleasures, needs. In short, I saw within the eyes of Zarabanda the soul of a vanished age. My mind was filled with a thousand fancies.

Looking at her, I sensed vividly the imperial love-hours of Moorish beauties who had wantoned by the wall of a thousand towers. Their purple and palpitant past engulfed me. The penetrating color-joy of pagan pageants swept my senses, leaving a myriad burnished points of thought. The voluptuous phantoms of past pleasures intoxicated me. The life that pagan Spain had lived in ancient days, before Christianity had come to make bitter upon its lips the wine of joy, was distilled within my soul. Love, thought, creative fire, lifted life to divinest height, intensifying all its powers.

Before my feverish and exalted fancy there rose a vision of the East, the personified East, the seductive East, the glorious and sensuous East, swathed in a robe of mist which palpitated like the voluptuous veins of women when the tide of love is high. This vision inundated my senses in a shimmering wave, which rolled its long, foaming coils of pleasure over me.

Bending down, I folded her in my arms. I felt her little brown arm slip round my neck, its softness rivaling the down beneath a sea-gull’s wing. The penetrating Eastern perfumes struck my face, the blended sweetness of aloes and ambergris. Her brown breasts became two moons of gold beneath the shadowy twilight of her throat. The thick hair with its trailing braids was an Eden of dim and amorous ways, where a promise dwelled. As I drew her nearer, her eyes became black lakes. Exquisitely pale her face was, like warm ivory. Nearer and nearer to me the red mouth came; I knew that upon it dwelled all the sweetness and all the savors of the South. My lips just brushed it, when, with a reverberant crash, the great mirror fell and shivered in a thousand pieces. My arms encircled the empty air. She was gone--gone, and forever.

Thick dust of powdered chemicals, with which the glass was coated, filled the air. I hastened to gain the window. Something fell at my feet. It was her bracelet.

I reached the window just as the sun, its red rays throbbing like a crown of blood, dipped above the horizon line. By its angry glare I read upon the golden band, which was all that remained to me now of my one night of joy, “Philip, To His Moorish Love.”

FOOTNOTES:

[8] From “Diego Velázquez y su Siglo,” by Carlos Justi.

LISZT’S CONCERTO PATHÉTIQUE

It was in the winter of 1906 that the following remarkable incidents were communicated to me, and truly in a most remarkable manner. But who may say what shall be the intermediary link, the invisible tie to connect us with the facts of a vanished past? Who may say what vague but mentally potent beings dwell on the border line separating the real from the unreal, floating up perhaps from unthinkable depths of time and space, there to await the propitious moment for tapping some nerve of consciousness in us and establishing telegraphic communication with the soul? Over these spirit wires of thought and feeling they flash faint messages. They set the nerves a-tingle with the consciousness of an infinity of unknown lives surrounding our own, of invisible electric bodies that shock us into the recovery of forgotten memories, of the realization of a limitless land that spreads beside us and upon the verge of which we live precariously poised.

On an afternoon in the winter of 1906 I attended a concert given by two well-known pianists. The _pièce de résistance_ of the concert--it was for this that I had come--was a two-piano number, the _Concerto Pathétique_ of Liszt, that sonorous tone tragedy with its wildly dramatic incidents, interrupted from time to time by a melody of more than mortal sweetness. As I listened, annoyed by the movements of seat companions, the bobbing black heads in front, or the dry winter light that filtered through a window to the right, striking sharply a corsage ornament or a jewel, and projecting into my eyes daggered light as from a crystal ball, suddenly my surroundings vanished, and I found myself alone looking out across a land that I had never seen.

Before me lay a twilight desert, somber and lonely. Gray sand, uninterrupted by tree or dwelling, as undulating and as barren as the sea, stretched on and on. After a time I discovered that it was not twilight that caused the dimness. Upon the horizon there was nothing to indicate the vanishing of a sun or the future rising of a moon. Within the sky there were no stars. A Cimmerian twilight lay over all. I realized then that it was some place of purgatorial punishment, where sweet light did not come nor green earth growths, nor rain, nor the sound of leaves. It was a place of puzzling incompleteness and fragmentary physical form. There were arms twisted and bony and unattached to bodies, whose bent-fingered hands thirsted for cruelty or itched for gold. There were legs wrinkled and withered with pain and curved fantastically. There were backs bowed by the bearing of burdens, and a multitude of winged and awful faces forming a discordant chromatic scale of miseries, now flashing out leering and wanton smiles, and anon fading away into monotonous grayness.

It was a land of disembodied pain, where the shadow forms of sorrow dwelled. Regret, remorse, shame, misery, and anguish here got themselves clothed in unearthly substances, and strained futilely earthward where repentance lay. Here evil thoughts and desires were at once translated into form, swiftly to fade back again by uncountable disgusting gradations to the insubstantiality of dreams.

Across this desert a woman fled, breathless with haste and terror. She was young, scarcely more than a child, as years count, and she would have been beautiful had not her features been disfigured by grief. Out behind, a long black robe floated like an emblem of evil, giving to her appearance a certain cloistral touch. Closer inspection proved it to be a nun’s cloak. It was unfastened and thrown hastily about her where it was held together by one small nervous hand. Her hair, which was pale gold, was short-cropped and curly, and bore the imprint of a close covering. There was something pitiful in these little clustering curls of faded gold, which were down-soft like the hair on a baby’s neck. They told of helplessness and youth. Now in places they were darkened by the perspiration of fear. Cloistral life and the nun’s hood had bleached her face and given to it a marble pallor, until it seemed to radiate light in the general dimness. Her eyes were a dark ethereal blue. In their depths lay a light made of blended pain, passion, and regret. As the hideous sand monsters drifted toward her, threatening to block her way, then vanished to reshape themselves into still more hideous forms, childishly she opened her mouth to call for help. But no sound issued from her lips, although the little chin quivered piteously. I knew that she was dumb and could not speak.

As she sped on, upborne by an unnatural energy, there rang out upon the desert air a melody of more than mortal sweetness, the brief and broken fragment of a phrase. As the music died away upon the moonless space, there fell across the sand the pallid cold radiance of a cross, but so far away, so etherealized by space and distance, that it was scarcely more than a shadow’s shadow.

At first, I thought that the music was in some inexplicable way related to the beauty of her face--that perhaps they were one. There was a similarity between them. Both set to vibrating the same responsive fibers of the heart. Both were penetratingly sweet, yet touched with sorrow.

Further consideration proved this conjecture to be vain, and that the music came from some alien yet nearby place. I could see by the woman’s face that it caused her joy and sorrow, and I felt that it always sang on in her heart, and that her trembling lips tried to frame its sounds. Yet--in some way I could not understand--it kept her forever outside the radiance of the cross.

Again and again it rang out--a melody of more than mortal sweetness. And each time the woman hastened her pace. The face of the desert began to change, and in the distance there was something that lay like the shimmer of light. I watched it as it grew brighter. Colors were distinguishable. It was a garden! Oh, the yearning in her face! Oh, the effort with which she summoned strength to reach it! Her eyes grew black with determination. Her little curls were spotted with moisture. Sweeter and more penetrating became the breath of melody. It winged her feet with courage. It put strength into her heart. Yes, yes, there it lay! A fresh, bright, green garden, where a happy multitude of tiny blue and white flowers grew. Over it iris-winged insects fluttered. The sun shone resplendently. Here was the home of the melody. Its sweetness was that of love and the fullness of life. Now the radiance of the cross no longer touched the sandy waste. It remained high in the air, aloof and far, a wan gold shadow of exquisite remoteness, like the ghost of a vanished joy.

As she drew nearer, more intense became the light that fell upon the garden. It became a blue and dazzling glory, beneath which the tiny flowers expanded and expanded until they were lilies of mammoth size and proportion. Oh, so lustrous, so satin soft, so voluptuously lovely was their texture! A rare fragrance filtered from them through the sand-thick air, a languorous, seductive, benumbing fragrance, like the intangible soul of pleasure. When again the music came, the giant lily buds burst open, disclosing in place of pistil and stamen the white glorious bodies of women, whose hair outfloated in bright crinkles like blown flame, and whose feet trod an amorous measure.

Now I knew whence the music came. It was made by the twining beauty of seductive arms, the swaying of bright torsos, the interlacing of lithe limbs, the argent light struck from bared breasts and brows. It was their white passion, their wanton loveliness, their amorous longing, their electric, vital, and indomitable youth translated into tone.

Far above the desert now, the wan cross hung in dim remoteness, a faint frown of light, withdrawing coldly into the depths of space. The garden glory touched the woman’s face. The sand monsters fell back, no longer encumbering her. Happiness and courage shone from her eyes. The journey was nearly over. A step--a dozen steps and she would have gained the garden. She was all but there. She flung away the convent cloak. The sweet wind lifted the little curls upon her brow. A blue lily leaned amorously to meet her, its petals ready to enfold her. The strange light swathed her about like a robe. The melody touched her heart to joy. She was ready to grasp a waiting flower; one white hand reached for it, when a thunder of many wings was heard.

From across the desert, from the sky above, a multitude of blackish green-winged monsters, darkening the air to a dun midnight, dashed down. Their black and sullen bodies, outspread wing on wing, shut out the garden and formed a hideous wall of crawling heads. The great wings surrounded and engulfed her, beating her back--back--back--with lightning-like rapidity. Away, away, away they swept her, so swiftly that the desert was left behind. And still they swept her on and on, across another land--a land of granite, bleak and sterile and black, whose darkness was shivered from time to time by the angry glare of whirling swords that formed the mighty gate of a realm of night. Here the whirring wings uplifted her. She had no more hold upon the earth. Below, above, beside, were depth on depth of overlapping wings. Once, for an instant, the swaying, fluttering band fell back. Sharp sword light streaked her face. I saw its white horror and the little curls a-dance with fear. Then more monsters came rushing. The earth and the air were a-quiver with wings. There was a rush and a roar. There was a noise as of many waters. Then the monsters swept away into the land of darkness beyond, where nothing was distinguishable, where there was no measurement of time or space. Again the granite land was lone and silent, its gray immovableness disturbed only by the swinging gate of swords, which streaked the rocks with floating ribbons of light.

SISTER SERAPHINE

We were sitting upon the terrace of Château Châteauroux in the early evening--the old Comtesse M----, Mischna Stepanoff, and myself. It was the time of the first soft warmth of spring. Two blossoming fruit trees beside us were sweet ghosts in the early night. About them white butterflies fluttered.

In the west there were great piled clouds edged with a pink as rare and as wonderful as that which Watteau created for his frail creatures of joy. And this pink was reflected in soft broken ribbons in the gently moving surface of the Loire.

“What a night for love!” sighed Mischna Stepanoff, in whose life the passion had played no unimportant part.

“Yes,” I replied, “love and youth and spring; they are earth’s immortal trinity.”

“That reminds me of a story--a true story--of spring and youth and love,” sighed reminiscently the old Comtesse, who had been a famous beauty in her day.

“Tell it to us,” urged Mischna Stepanoff. “Next to being in love oneself is the pleasure of listening to the stories of other people who have been in love.”

“But I feel that I cannot do justice to it,” objected the old Comtesse. “It is a story for the pen of Maupassant, who wrote of the tress of hair. It might have been included among the pagan and Oriental dreams of Gautier, or such fragile and dainty reminiscences of youth as De Nerval occasionally indulged in. What could I do with a fancy like that?”

“Tell it, anyway,” we insisted.

“Well, what I lack, your own greater imaginative skill must supply,”--smiling and waving deprecatingly toward us a tiny jeweled hand.

“It is the strangest, the most interesting story in the world. And it is true.

“Over there where the hills step aside to make room for the passing of the Loire, is the ruin of a convent which you have probably noticed. In my youth it was inhabited by Les Sœurs Blanches, a well-conducted and aristocratic order of nuns, who educated the daughters of the old noblesse.

“One day I paid a visit there and for the first time saw Sister Seraphine. She was about eighteen then, I should judge, although she had already taken the final vows. I was at once attracted by her face and her strange beauty. The upper part of the face--the brow, the eyes, the nose--were those of an ascetic, a dreamer, an intellectual. The brow was nobly formed and broad; the nose chastely chiseled and modeled to an artist’s taste; and the eyes were the spiritual gray-blue of the mystic. The eyes were very beautiful, too--mistily humid, like the valley of our Loire here on a morning of spring.

“But the mouth! How can I tell you what it was like! There will never be another in the world like it. In its color alone there were hidden all the sins of earth. Such a color might have been born from the conflagration of a world, or in the feverish brain of some sightless dreamer. In its curves there was all the resistless languor of a mediæval mondaine, or a voluptuous Roman woman who had idled in the villas of Baiæ. Imagine, if you will, such a mouth beneath that ascetic brow! It was the cause of her undoing, too--and her ruin.

“It contradicted the rest of her face so sharply that it was as if she were two persons in one. It threw the beholder into a sort of stupefaction. It made him feel as if he had stumbled awkwardly upon some unguarded secret. It was that rarest of all features--a perfect mouth! And yet, perchance, I think its perfection was a trifle over-accented. It was, I think, a shade too red, too alluring, too sensuous. It was a veritable Cupid’s bow set about with mocking dimples that changed like light on the mobile surface of the Loire.

“No one could have known less of the world than Sister Seraphine. She had been placed with Les Sœurs Blanches when she was four years old. And she had never once left their sheltering care. She was of noble blood, too, although the bar sinister blackened her birth record. On her father’s side, it was whispered, she came of that royal blood of old France that had never known the meaning of fear. And her mother was the gay Comtesse of Marny.

“Now in all her young life Sister Seraphine had never seen a man except the village priests and those who sat on Sundays beyond the grating in the church. Think of it! Can you even imagine such a condition! Every holiday and fête day before her final vows were taken, plans had been made to give her an outing in the great world, to introduce her to that society to which by birth she belonged. But, some way or other, each time the plans miscarried. Some other person’s welfare and happiness intervened, had to be considered first. The result was that she had never left the convent walls.