Under Two Flags

O >> Ouida [Louise de la Ramee] >> Under Two Flags


He bowed low before her, preserving that distant ceremonial due from the
rank he ostensibly held to hers.

"Madame, this is very merciful! I know not how to thank you."

She motioned to him to take a seat near to her, while the Levantine, who
knew nothing of the English tongue, retired to the farther end of the
tent.

"I only kept my word," she answered, "for we leave the camp to-morrow;
Africa next week."

"So soon!"

She saw the blood forsake the bronzed fairness of his face, and leave
the dusky pallor there. It wounded her as if she suffered herself. For
the first time she believed what the Little One had said--that this man
loved her.

"I sent for you," she continued hurriedly, her graceful languor and
tranquillity for the first time stirred and quickened by emotion, almost
by embarrassment. "It was very strange, it was very painful, for me to
trust that child with such a message. But you know us of old; you know
we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest
or outward semblance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue
constructions. There are many things I desire to say to you----"

She paused; he merely bent his head; he could not trust the calmness of
his voice in answer.

"First," she continued, "I must entreat you to allow me to tell Philip
what I know. You cannot conceive how intensely oppressive it becomes to
me to have any secret from him. I never concealed so much as a thought
from my brother in all my life, and to evade even a mute question from
his brave, frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him."

"Anything else," he muttered. "Ask me anything else. For God's sake, do
not let him dream that I live!"

"But why? You still speak to me in enigmas. To-morrow, moreover, before
we leave, he intends to seek you out as what he thinks you--a soldier
of France. He is interested by all he hears of your career; he was first
interested by what I told him of you when he saw the ivory carvings at
my villa. I asked the little vivandiere to tell you this, but, on second
thoughts it seemed best to see you myself once more, as I had promised."

There was a slow weariness in the utterance of the words. She had said
that she could not reflect on leaving him to such a fate as this of his
in Africa without personal suffering, or without an effort to induce him
to reconsider his decision to condemn himself to it for evermore.

"That French child," she went on rapidly, to cover both the pain that
she felt and that she dealt, "forced her entrance here in a strange
fashion; she wished to see me, I suppose, and to try my courage too.
She is a little brigand, but she had a true and generous nature, and she
loves you very loyally."

"Cigarette?" he asked wearily; his thoughts could not stay for either
the pity or interest for her in this moment. "Oh, no! I trust not.
I have done nothing to win her love, and she is a fierce little
condottiera who disdains all such weakness. She forced her way in here?
That was unpardonable; but she seems to bear a singular dislike to you."

"Singular, indeed! I never saw her until to-day."

He answered nothing; the conviction stole on him that Cigarette hated
her because he loved her.

"And yet she brought you my message?" pursued his companion. "That
seems her nature--violent passions, yet thorough loyalty. But time is
precious. I must urge on you what I bade you come to hear. It is to
implore you to put your trust, your confidence in Philip. You have
acknowledged to me that you are guiltless--no one who knows what you
once were could ever doubt it for an instant--then let him hear this,
let him be your judge as to what course is right and what wrong for you
to pursue. It is impossible for me to return to Europe knowing you are
living thus and leaving you to such a fate. What motive you have to
sentence yourself to such eternal banishment I am ignorant; but all
I ask of you is, confide in him. Let him learn that you live; let him
decide whether or not this sacrifice of yourself be needed. His honor is
an punctilious as that of any man on earth; his friendship you can never
doubt. Why conceal anything from him?"

His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once before had
chilled her to the soul.

"Do you think, if I could speak in honor, I should not tell you all?"

A flush passed over her face, the first that the gaze of any man had
ever brought there. She understood him.

"But," she said, gently and hurriedly, "may it not be that you overrate
the obligations of honor? I know that many a noble-hearted man has
inexorably condemned himself to a severity of rule that a dispassionate
judge of his life might deem very exaggerated, very unnecessary. It
is so natural for an honorable man to so dread that he should do a
dishonorable thing through self-interest or self-pity, that he may very
well overestimate the sacrifice required of him through what he deems
justice or generosity. May it not be so with you? I can conceive
no reason that can be strong enough to require of you such fearful
surrender of every hope, such utter abandonment of your own existence."

Her voice failed slightly over the last words; she could not think with
calmness of the destiny that he accepted. Involuntarily some prescience
of pain that would forever pursue her own life unless his were rescued
lent an intense earnestness, almost entreaty, to her argument. She did
not bear him love as yet; she had seen too little of him, too lately
only known him as her equal; but there were in her, stranger than she
knew, a pity, a tenderness, a regret, an honor for him that drew her
toward him with an indefinable attraction, and would sooner or later
warm and deepen into love. Already it was sufficient, though she deemed
it but compassion and friendship, to make her feel that an intolerable
weight would be heavy on her future if his should remain condemned
to this awful isolation and oblivion while she alone of all the world
should know and hold his secret.

He started from her side as he heard, and paced to and fro the narrow
limits of the tent like a caged animal. For the first time it grew a
belief to him, in his thoughts, that were he free, were he owner of his
heritage, he could rouse her heart from its long repose and make
her love him with the soft and passionate warmth of his dead Arab
mistress--a thing that had been so distant from her negligence and
her pride as warmth from the diamond or the crystal. He felt as if the
struggle would kill him. He had but to betray his brother, and he would
be unchained from his torture; he had but to break his word, and he
would be at liberty. All the temptation that had before beset him paled
and grew as naught beside this possibility of the possession of her love
which dawned upon him now.

She, knowing nothing of this which moved him, believed only that he
weighed her words in hesitation, and strove to turn the balance.

"Hear me," she said softly. "I do not bid you decide; I only bid you
confide in Philip--in one who, as you must well remember, would sooner
cut off his own hand than counsel a base thing or do an unfaithful
act. You are guiltless of this charge under which you left England; you
endure it rather than do what you deem dishonorable to clear yourself.
That is noble--that is great. But it is possible, as I say, that you
may exaggerate the abnegation required of you. Whoever was the criminal
should suffer. Yours is magnificent magnanimity; but it may surely be
also false justice alike to yourself and the world."

He turned on her almost fiercely in the suffering she dealt him.

"It is! It was a madness--a Quixotism--the wild, unconsidered act of
a fool. What you will! But it is done; it was done forever--so long
ago--when your young eyes looked on me in the pity of your innocent
childhood. I cannot redeem its folly now by adding to it baseness. I
cannot change the choice of a madman by repenting of it with a coward's
caprice. Ah, God! you do not know what you do--how you tempt. For pity's
sake, urge me no more. Help me--strengthen me--to be true to my word. Do
not bid me do evil that I may enter paradise through my sin!"

He threw himself down beside her as the incoherent words poured out, his
arms flung across the pile of cushions on which he had been seated, his
face hidden on them. His teeth clinched on his tongue till the blood
flowed; he felt that if the power of speech remained with him he should
forswear every law that had bound him to silence, and tell her all,
whatever the cost.

She looked at him, she heard him, moved to a greater agitation than ever
had had sway over her; for the first time the storm winds that swept by
her did not leave her passionless and calm; this man's whole future was
in her hands. She could bid him seek happiness dishonored; or cleave to
honor, and accept wretchedness forever.

It was a fearful choice to hold.

"Answer me! Choose for me!" he said vehemently. "Be my law, and be my
God!"

She gave a gesture almost of fear.

"Hush, hush! The woman does not live who should be that to any man."

"You shall be it to me! Choose for me!"

"I cannot! You leave so much in darkness and untold----"

"Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for me, save one thing
only--that I love you."

She shuddered.

"This is madness! What have you seen of me?"

"Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no other woman.
Ah! I was but an African trooper in your sight, but in my own I was your
equal. You only saw a man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle
charity were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but
I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness
of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every
grace and gesture. You forget! I was nothing to you; but you were so
much to me. I loved you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear.
It is madness! Oh, yes! I should have said so, too, in those old years.
A madness I would have sworn never to feel. But I have lived a hard life
since then, and no men ever love like those who suffer. Now you know
all; know the worst that tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no
obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my
happiness with the price of dishonor as the one desire--to stand in my
rightful place before men, and be free to strive with you for what they
have not won!"

As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her face; it
grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, as though to
draw her breath was oppressive. The wild words overwhelmed her with
their surprise not less than they shocked her with their despair.
An intense truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and
reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had done. She
had no love for him yet, or she thought not; she was very proud, and
resisted such passions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that
such love might be possible. It was the nearest submission to it she
had ever given. She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept silence
long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and her dignity could be
touched with it, she felt something akin to terror at the magnitude of
the choice left to her.

"You give me great pain, great surprise," she murmured. "All I can trust
is that your love is of such sudden birth that it will die as rapidly--"

He interrupted her.

"You mean that, under no circumstances--not even were I to possess
my inheritance--could you give me any hope that I might wake your
tenderness?"

She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, haughty
instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had made her so
indifferent--and many said so pitiless--to all. At his gaze, however her
own changed and softened, grew shadowed, and then wandered from him.

"I do not say that. I cannot tell----"

The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal from him what
half dawned on herself--the possibility that, more in his presence and
under different circumstances, she might feel her heart go to him with a
warmer and a softer impulse than that of friendship. The heroism of his
life had moved her greatly.

His head dropped down again upon his arms.

"O God! It is possible, at least! I am blind--mad. Make my choice for
me! I know not what to do."

The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down over her
colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that made her heart ache
with a sorrow only less than his own. The grief was for him chiefly; yet
something of it for herself. Some sense of present bitterness that
fell on her from his fate, some foreboding of future regret that would
inevitably and forever follow her when she left him to his loneliness
and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed
and cloudless existence had encountered. Love was dimly before her as
the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unacknowledged,
but possible under certain conditions, only known as such when it was
also impossible through circumstances.

He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; these
were the only means through which any man could have ever reached her
sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, though a very noble and a
very generous woman, she was also a woman of the world. She knew that
it was not for her to say even thus much to a man who was in one sense
well-nigh a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime
whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt sick at
heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had moved her
previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, and throw off
the imputed shame that lay on him. Yet all the grand traditions of her
race forbade her to counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led
through a forfeiture of honor.

"Choose for me, Venetia!" he muttered at last once more.

She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and thrust the gold
hair off her temples.

"Heaven help me, I cannot--I dare not! And--I am no longer capable of
being just!"

There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt that so
greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, his return to
all which was his own--desired even his presence among them in her own
world--that she could no longer give him calm and unbiased judgment. He
heard, and the burning tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked almost
ere it was known, by the dread lest for her sake she should ever give
him so much pity that such pity became love.

He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her eyes--a look
under which her own never quailed or drooped, but which they answered
with that same regard which she had given him when she had declared her
faith in his innocence.

"If I thought it possible you could ever care----"

She moved slightly from him; her face was very white still, and her
voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it answered him.

"If I could--believe me, I am not a woman who would bid you forsake your
honor to spare yourself or me. Let us speak no more of this. What can it
avail, except to make you suffer greater things? Follow the counsels of
your own conscience. You have been true to them hitherto; it is not for
me, or through me, that you shall ever be turned aside from them."

A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard.

"They are noble words. And yet it is so easy to utter, so hard to follow
them. If you had one thought of tenderness for me, you could not speak
them."

A flush passed over her face.

"Do not think me without feeling--without sympathy--pity--"

"These are not love."

She was silent; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than any emotion
she had ever known.

"If you loved me," he pursued passionately--"ah, God! the very word from
me to you sounds insult; and yet there is not one thought in me that
does not honor you--if you loved me, could you stand there and bid me
drag on this life forever; nameless, friendless, hopeless; having all
the bitterness, but none of the torpor of death; wearing out the doom of
a galley slave, though guiltless of all crime?"

"Why speak so? You are unreasoning. A moment ago you implored me not to
tempt you to the violation of what you hold your honor; because I bid
you be faithful to it, you deem me cruel!"

"Heaven help me! I scarce know what I say. I ask you, if you were a
woman who loved me, could you decide thus?"

"These are wild questions," she murmured; "what can they serve? I
believe that I should--I am sure that I should. As it is--as your
friend--"

"Ah, hush! Friendship is crueler than hate."

"Cruel?"

"Yes; the worst cruelty when we seek love--a stone proffered us when we
ask for bread in famine!"

There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer; she was moved
and shaken by it--not to fear, for fear was not in her nature, but to
something of awe, and something of the despairing hopelessness that was
in him.

"Lord Royallieu," she said slowly, as if the familiar name were some tie
between them, some cause of excuse for these, the only love words she
had ever heard without disdain and rejection--"Lord Royallieu, it is
unworthy of you to take this advantage of an interview which I sought,
and sought for your own sake. You pain me, you wound me. I cannot tell
how to answer you. You speak strangely, and without warrant."

He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on his chest.
He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew that he had broken through
every law he had prescribed himself, and that he had sinned against the
code of chivalry which should have made her sacred from such words while
they were those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in secrecy and
shame. Unless he could stand justified in her sight and in that of all
men, he had no right to seek to wring out tenderness from her regret and
from her pity. Yet all his heart went out to her in one irrepressible
entreaty.

"Forgive me, for pity's sake! After to-night I shall never look upon
your face again."

"I do forgive," she said gently, while her voice grew very sweet. "You
endure too much already for one needless pang to be added by me. All I
wish is that you had never met me, so that this last, worst thing had
not come unto you!"

A long silence fell between them; where she leaned back among her
cushions, her face was turned from him. He stood motionless in the
shadow, his head still dropped upon his breast, his breathing loud and
slow and hard. To speak of love to her was forbidden to him, yet the
insidious temptation wound close and closer round his strength. He had
only to betray the man he had sworn to protect, and she would know his
innocence, she would hear his passion; he would be free, and she--he
grew giddy as the thought rose before him--she might, with time, be
brought to give him other tenderness than that of friendship. He seemed
to touch the very supremacy of joy; to reach it almost with his hand; to
have honors, and peace, and all the glory of her haughty loveliness,
and all the sweetness of her subjugation, and all the soft delights of
passions before him in their golden promise, and he was held back in
bands of iron, he was driven out from them desolate and accursed.

Unlike Cain, he had suffered in his brother's stead, yet, like Cain,
he was branded and could only wander out into the darkness and the
wilderness.

She watched him many minutes, he unconscious of her gaze; and while she
did so, many conflicting emotions passed over the colorless delicacy
of her features; her eyes were filled and shadowed with many altering
thoughts; her heart was waking from its rest, and the high, generous,
unselfish nature in her strove with her pride of birth, her dignity of
habit.

"Wait," she said softly, with the old imperial command of her voice
subdued, though not wholly banished. "I think you have mistaken me
somewhat. You wrong me if you think that I could be so callous, so
indifferent, as to leave you here without heed as to your fate.
Believe in your innocence you know that I do, as firmly as though you
substantiated it with a thousand proofs; reverence your devotion to your
honor you are certain that I must, or all better things were dead in
me."

Her voice sank inaudible for the instant; she recovered her self-control
with an effort.

"You reject my friendship--you term it cruel--but at least it will be
faithful to you; too faithful for me to pass out of Africa and never
give you one thought again. I believe in you. Do you not know that that
is the highest trust, to my thinking, that one human life can show in
another's? You decide that it is your duty not to free yourself from
this bondage, not to expose the actual criminal, not to take up your
rights of birth. I dare not seek to alter that decision. But I cannot
leave you to such a future without infinite pain, and there must--there
shall be--means through which you will let me hear of you--through
which, at least, I can know that you are living."

She stretched her hands toward him with that same gesture with which she
had first declared her faith in his guiltlessness; the tears trembled
in her voice and swam in her eyes. As she had said, she suffered for him
exceedingly. He, hearing those words which breathed the only pity that
had ever humiliated him, and the loyal trust which was but the truer
because the sincerity of faith in lieu of the insanity of love dictated
it, made a blind, staggering, unconscious movement of passionate, dumb
agony. He seized her hands in his and held them close against his breast
one instant, against the loud, hard panting of his aching heart.

"God reward you! God keep you! If I stay, I shall tell you all. Let me
go, and forget that we ever met! I am dead--let me be dead to you!"

With another instant he had left the tent and passed out into the red
glow of the torchlit evening. And Venetia Corona dropped her proud head
down upon the silken cushions where his own had rested, and wept as
women weep over their dead--in such a passion as had never come to her
in all the course of her radiant, victorious, and imperious life.

It seemed to her as if she had seen him slain in cold blood, and had
never lifted her hand or her voice against his murder.

His voice rang in her ear; his face was before her with its white,
still, rigid anguish; the burning accents of his avowal of love seemed
to search her very heart. If this man perished in any of the thousand
perils of war she would forever feel herself his assassin. She had his
secret, she had his soul, she had his honor in her hands; and she could
do nothing better for them both than to send him from her to eternal
silence, to eternal solitude!

Her thoughts grew unbearable; she rose impetuously from her couch and
paced to and fro in the narrow confines of her tent. Her tranquillity
was broken down; her pride was abandoned; her heart, at length, was
reached and sorely wounded. The only man she had ever found, whom it
would have been possible to her to have loved, was one already severed
from her by a fate almost more hideous than death.

And yet, in her loneliness, the color flushed back into her face; her
eyes gathered some of their old light; one dreaming, shapeless fancy
floated vaguely through her mind.

If, in the years to come, she knew him in all ways worthy, and learned
to give him back this love he bore her, it was in her to prove that
love, no matter what cost to her pride and her lineage. If his perfect
innocence were made clear in her own sight, there was greatness and
there was unselfishness enough in her nature to make her capable of
regarding alone his martyrdom and his heroism, and disregarding the
opinion of the world. If, hereafter, she grew to find his presence the
necessity of her life, and his sacrifice of that nobility and of that
purity she now believed it, she--proud as she was with the twin pride of
lineage and of nature--would be capable of incurring the odium and the
marvel of all who knew her by uniting her fate to his own, by making
manifest her honor and her tenderness for him, though men saw in him
only a soldier of the empire, only a base-born trooper, beneath her as
Riom beneath the daughter of D'Orleans. She was of a brave nature, of a
great nature, of a daring courage, and of a superb generosity. Abhorring
dishonor, full of glory in the stainless history of her race, and
tenacious of the dignity and of the magnitude of her House, she yet
was too courageous and too haughty a woman not to be capable of braving
calumny, if conscious of her own pure rectitude beneath it; not to
be capable of incurring false censure, if encountered in the path of
justice and of magnanimity. It was possible, even on herself it
dawned as possible, that so great might become her compassion and her
tenderness for this man that she would, in some distant future, when the
might of his love and the severity of his suffering should prevail with
her, say to him: