CHAPTER II.

LOST ON THE SICILIAN SEAS.

How warm and still it was there down by the Mediterranean, through the winter days at Liramar! Was it winter, with the violet odours in the woods, with the noon-light on the amber sands, with the blue waves lying under the golden skies, or rising into purple storm under the lash of the mistral ?-assuredly not winter in any English sense. The great Minister went home; the gathering at Liramar remained with Lady Lessington-Erceldoune with them; the Mediterranean breezes were bringing him back his old life and force into his limbs, and the mellow air was driving away the danger which for a time had threatened his lungs from the deep chest-wound where the ball had lodged. In physics he did not believe he never touched them; air and sea-water were his sole physicians, and under them the fallen Titan rose again in his old might, with the sinewy giant limbs of old.

66

"I took too much killing!" he laughed to one of the men as they drifted down the waters lapping the sunny Sicilian shores, in the brief space which severs the day from the night. He had reported himself ready for fresh service, and the messenger who was to bring the Italian bag to Palermo would deliver him despatches for the Principalities and Asiatic Turkey. Erceldoune was impatient to be on the move, and feel himself in saddle once more; while in inaction, too, he was no nearer on his quest-of those who had attacked his life, and of her who had saved it. Phantom, hallucination, delirious memory, be it what it would, the remembrance which haunted him, and which he had no single proof was anything more tangible than a fever-born fancy, was strong on him-the stronger the more he thrust it away. The woman who had rescued him, and who had since been lost to him in the darkness of mystery and the wide wilderness of the world, he could not recal, save by such intangible, unsubstantiated recollection as had remained to him from unconsciousness; common reason told him that it could be but a folly which haunted the brain from the visions of his long peril, but reason failed to drive it out, or shake the first impression which had ever wakened or seized his imagination. The phantom which pursued him, the face which he had painted in the monastic solitude of the convent, had become a living reality to him; he resisted it, he trampled it out, not unfrequently he recoiled and shuddered from it, as from the phantasia of impending insanity, but it remained there. Her face rose before him from the sea depths, when he plunged down into the dark violet waves, and let them close with cold delicious freshness above his head; he saw it with every gorgeous sunset that flushed the skies with fire; he remembered it with every hour he spent alone lying on the sands, or steering through the waters, or waiting with his rifle for the seabirds on the pine-crowned rocks. He could not banish it; and he used no sophism or half-truths with himself, he knew that, vision or reality, whichever it was, it had dominion over him, and that the search he was athirst to make for his assassins was not more woven with his thoughts than the quest of what was but "un ombre, un rêve, un rien”—a phan

tom and a shadow. Because it was wholly antagonistic and alien to the cast of his mind and character, it was the more forcibly sunk into his impressions, once bedded there. Granite is hard to plant upon, but the fibres once forced into the stone, it holds them, as light soil or shifting sands will never do.

The boat dropped down the Mediterranean that night, while the sun was setting, drifting gently through the blue stretch of the waves, while the striped sails were filled by a west wind that brought over the sea a thousand odours from the far Levant, and the rich voices of the women softly sang the evening hymn, "Ave Maria, Stella Virgine!" Erceldoune lay stretched in the bottom of the boat, at the feet of a fair aristocrate, who leaned her white hand over the leeward side playing with the water, and letting the drops fall, diamond bright as her rings, glancing at him now and then the while, and wondering, as she had wondered long at Liramar, what manner of man this was, who confessed himself "poor and a State courier," yet bore himself like a noble; who had the blood of an ancient race, and the habits of a desert chief; who was indifferent and insensible to all women, yet had, for all, a grave and gentle courtesy, for the grape-girl among the vineyards yonder, as for her, the patrician and the queen of coquettes, leaning here. He was unlike anything in her world-and Lady George would fain have roused in him the forbidden love which she, proud empress though she was, had learned, in her own despite, as her own chastisement.

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 feet and been crushed by him!

"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."

Lady George glanced at her rival across the sea; how strange it was, she thought, that any man should live who could look at a lateen-boat rather than at her!

"As with a bound

Into the rosy and golden half
Of the sky,

I suppose," she quoted listlessly. "How little Browning is read, Sir Fulke?"

"I dare say. It generally takes the English nation five hundred years to find out that they have had a man of genius among them, and not known it; and Browning is not even dead yet!"

“You admire him, then ?”

"I am no fit critic of poets," he answered her, with a laugh; "but I like the fellow's vitality, his living vigour and power. He has a true eye for colour, too; that boat would please him as she comes through the light."

She was silent; Erceldoune lay stretched at her feet; their own vessel floated lazily and slowly; the lateen-craft came on after them, as he had said, turned into a pleasure-boat, and draped with costliness, and laden with a fragrant load of violets gathered for distilling, piled high, and

filling the air with odour. The skiff passed them swiftly ;-half-screened by the rich draperies, the tawny sails, and the purple mound of the violets, and turned half from them, and towards the western skies, as the boat flashed past in the golden haze of light, he saw a woman's face.

"Good God!"

With a loud cry Erceldoune sprang to his feet, the vessel rocking and lurching under the sudden impetus ;-he had seen the face of his dreams, the face of his saviour. And the lateen-boat was cutting its swift way through the waves, away into the misty purple shadow out of reach, out of sight! "Ah! that's always

"Neuralgia, Erceldoune ?" said one of the men.

the worst of shot-wounds."

"You are ill?-you are in pain ?" asked Lady George; and her voice was hurried and very tremulous.

Erceldoune set his teeth hard, his eyes straining into the warm haze where the lateen-boat was winging her rapid way, out of reach, while their own lay idly rocking on the waves.

"Pardon me-no," he said, in answer to them, for the man's nature was too integrally true to seek shelter under even a tacit acceptance of an untruth. "I saw one whom I recognised as having last seen in Moldavia the day the brigands shot me down. I fear that I foolishly startled you, Lady George?"

They thought it nothing strange that any link with the memory of his assassination should have roused him; and Erceldoune leaned over the boat's side following the now distant track of the light lateen-skiff with his eyes-silent. The outbreak wrung from him had been as unlike his habitual reserve and control, as it would have been unlike those of his allies the Arabs; but what were equally unlike him were the wild reasonless joy, and the bitter baffled regret, which swept together through his veins. The divine glory of the face that he had dreamed had bent over him in his anguish and extremity, was then a truth, a living loveliness, a life to be found on earth-no fever phantom of his own disordered brain; he had seen again, and seen now in the clearness of reason, the face of the woman who had been his ministering angel. Yet, as she had been lost to him then, so she was lost to him now; and as the sun sunk down below the waves, and the sudden southern night fell shrouding the Sicilian boat in its shadows, the phosphor light left in its track, and the odour of its violet freight dying off from the sea and the air, he could have believed he had but been dreaming afresh.

Was he mad? Erceldoune almost asked himself the question as he leaned over the vessel's side looking down into the purple shadows of the High-born, by the beauty of her face, and by the luxury with which that little skiff was decked, how should she have been in the wild solitudes of the Moldavian forest? Compassionate to his peril and extremity, would she have cared nothing to know whether death or life had been at last his portion?-and could an act of such noble and pitying humanity have needed the veil of mystery and denial in which it had been shrouded by the Moldavian serfs' repudiation of all knowledge that any save themselves had found him?

Yet, the face of which he had dreamed, he had seen now in the evening light of the Mediterranean-the mere phantom of a delirium could

not have become vivid and living thus. A heavy oath was stifled in his teeth, as he stood with his eyes strained to pierce the cloudy offing. Why had he not been alone, that-a few yards more sail flung out to the winds, and his own hand upon the helm-his boat could have given chase down the luminous sea, and have swept away with hers into that golden mist, that twilight darkness!

CHAPTER III.

THE BADGE OF THE SILVER IVY.

ONCE more in the Principalities;-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 again into Moldavia, through the same defile where his assassins had waylaid him.

He checked his horse, and almost wondered if the horrors of that wild night had been all a dream, as he looked down: the tumbling, foaming water glistened in the sunlight, the grass had grown in ranker luxuriance where the good grey was lain in her last resting-place; over the place where he had fallen, bright clusters of spring-flowers blossomed among the moss; two records of the night's work alone remained: the black and broken pinetrunk that had been flung across the road, and had only been now lifted to one side, and a dark crimsoned stain, where the granite rock had been soaked and crusted with his life-blood, too deeply for even the snows of winter wholly to wash out the shade it left. The most thoughtless man would have felt some shadow of earnestness steal on him in such a place, with such a memory; Erceldoune, though used to meet death in every shape, and too habituated to danger to ever feel its terror, let the bridle slacken on his stallion's neck, and gazed down on the wild ravine round him with gratitude, with something of solemnity-had the shot been one hair's breadth nearer his heart, he had now been rotting there with his dead Syrian; had she who had come as his guardian angel been one instant later, his eyes had now been blind to the light of the sun, and his life numbered with the vast nameless multitudes of the grave.

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 warm flood of sunset light he seemed to see the brilliant 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; here his head had rested on her bosom, here his eyes had looked upward through the mists of agony to hers. The very grasses whispered of her; the very rocks were witness of his debt to her!

In madness with himself, in passionate thought of her, he dashed the spurs into his horse's flanks, and swept, full gallop, down the steep decline. Was this Love?

For a woman seen but twice, for a mere memory, for a loveliness, fugitive, nameless, dreamlike, mourned and lost! If it were not love, love never was.

reason.

For Love is the King of Un

**

That night, under the glitter of a chandelier in the Hôtel du Louvre, before a fire which flung its warmth over the green velvet and walnut wood, the ormolu and silver, the mirrors and consoles of the chamber, two men sat smoking over claret and olives, having dined alone, by a miracle, in the midst of the laughing, dazzling, contagious étouderies of peopled Paris. In these days confederates meet over Regalias and Roussillon, instead of in subterranean caverns; and conspirators plan their check-mates in a cabinet particulier, an opera-box, or a drive to an imperial stag-hunt, instead of by midnight, under masks, and with rapiers drawn.

One of the men was Victor Vane, the other that dashing Free Lance, that Monodist of the Sugared Violet, that political brigand of the Carpathian Pass, whom the telegram had addressed as the Count Conrad Constantine Phaulcon, a man in physical beauty, physical prowess, talent, wit, and bearing, far the superior of the Englishman, yet whom the latter dominated and held in check, simply by that fine and priceless quality, which is colourless because inscrutable, and irresistible because prévoyant-Acumen. It crowns genius, and dethrones kings.

Socially, there was the same anomaly between them. Victor Vane, of whose antecedents none knew very much (except that his mother had been a Venetian, an actress, wedded, but not of very fair fame, and his father a decayed English gentleman, chiefly resident in Naples, both of whom were dead long ago), with no title, with no connexions, with a somewhat notorious association with the ultra parties of Southern Europe, from Galicia to Venice, and with no particular quality of social distinction beyond his perfect breeding, his exquisitely scientific whist, and his most inimitable tact, was, nevertheless, seen at all courts save those of Vienna and the Vatican, and had made himself not only received, but welcomed in many of the best families and highest sets in all countries. Conrad Phaulcon, on the other hand, in whose veins ran blood of purest Hellenic breed, who could trace his chain of descent unbroken, who had a marvellous beauty, a marvellous grace, and a marvellous tact, with many other gifts of fortune and nature, was contraband of courts, had long since closed the good mondes on him, and was considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the Bohemian class of Free Lances, the Chevaliers d'Industrie of politics, the wild lawless Reiters of plot and counterplot, of liberalism and intrigue, who are the abomination of the English mind which commonly understands not one whit about them, and the arch disturbers of continental empires, where the people recognise at the bottom of all their schemes and crimes the germ and memory of one great, precious, living truth and treasure-Liberty. At the core, both these men were as deeply dyed, and as utterly unscrupulous, the one as the other, the only difference being that the one was the more wilily dangerous, the other the more visibly lawless; both deserved equally to be out of the presence-chamber of princes and the pale of aristocratic