The Mystery of a Turkish Bath
Then something--a sound sweet as song--yet without the vibratory passion
of a human voice--seemed to float out of the darkness and hold his ear
enchained like a spell. It was the divinest beauty of music, divinely
interpreted, and it seemed to him as he listened that all the discord
and woe and misery that oppressed his earthly senses, disappeared and
died away into the very perfection of peace.
He stood there quite silent--quite motionless--waiting, so it seemed to
himself, for some fuller revelation to which these exquisite sounds were
but a prelude.
It was a matter of no surprise when he quietly lifted his dreamy glance
to the stone balcony above, and saw there, in the soft glow of light
from the rooms beyond, the fair form of the woman he had expected to
see.
A faint tremor of fear and apprehension thrilled his heart, but it died
away as a low remembered voice stole through the space that parted him
from a visible form he had never thought to see again.
"I told you we should meet. But I scarcely thought it would be so soon.
Will you come up here, or shall I join you?"
The voice and greeting roused him. He bared his head and bent low to
the speaker in a deeper homage than that of conventional courtesy.
"Is it really you, Princess? And may I be permitted to join you?"
The mute sign of assent showed him also a flight of steps leading up
from the terrace to the balcony. A moment, and he was by her side.
No ordinary greeting passed between them. Perhaps none could have
conveyed what that long silent gaze did; seeming to go straight to the
heart of each, full of memories that time had softened, but sad with the
sadness that is in all deep human love.
"A strange meeting-place," she said. "Yet why more strange than the
mountains of the East, or the lonely plains of the Desert, the steppes
of Russia, or the house-tops of Damascus?"
"You read my thoughts, as ever," he said. "I must confess that it
seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English
conventionalism, after--after--"
"I know," she said. "But life is full of the unexpected. You do not
ask how these five years have been spent. The years that have changed
the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you."
"I do not ask," he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could
not conceal, "because it can be no pleasure to me to learn. Do you
forget what I told you? Do you think that the memory of these five
years is a pleasant one for me? Against my prayers, against my
warnings, you chose your own life. Are you free--now?"
"No," she said, in a strange stifled voice, "never _that_--never while I
wear the shackles of humanity!" She sank suddenly down in a low seat,
and buried her face in her hands. "Oh," she cried, faintly, "if I could
tell you--if I only dared; but I cannot! My bondage is deeper--my
chains are heavier. Sometimes I think those years were only a dream--a
horrible, frightful dream--but then, again, I _know_ they were not."
"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this
shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common
weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to
the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.
"I cannot tell you," she said, "I dare not."
"Do you forget," he said, severely, "that if I _wish_ to know, I shall
learn it?"
"Not now," she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly,
yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely
eyes. "I have passed beyond your power," she went on. "Beyond most
human influence, I might say--" then she shuddered and her eyes sank
again. "But oh!" she cried, "at what a cost!--at what a cost!"
He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony. "I believe you
are right," he said; "my power is gone--yours is the strongest now."
He was silent for a few moments. "One question only," he then said; "I
don't wish to pry into your past. It is enough that we have met--for
that would never have taken place if you had not needed me. So much I
know. Your marriage--was it as I foretold?"
"It was worse," she said, bitterly--"a million times worse! Body and
soul, how I have suffered! And yet, as I told you then, _it had to
be_."
"I did not believe it then," he said stormily; "I refuse to believe it
now. Your misery was self-created. You voluntarily degraded yourself.
What result could there be? Only suffering and shame."
"The good of others," she answered mournfully. "You cannot see it yet;
but I know--it was foretold me. I did my work there. Sometimes I hope
it is finished; but I do not know. One can never tell; at any time the
summons may come again. God help me if it does."
"Is your life in danger, then?" he asked, and again that chill and
horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.
"My life!" She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something
intensely mournful in her gaze. "As if _that_ mattered! What is my
life to me now, any more than it was then? Did I count the cost--did I
call it a sacrifice? Life--the mere material actual life of the body--
has never weighed with me for one moment. And yet," she added, in a
dull, strange voice, "I failed at the crucial test! Failed!--I, who had
denied to myself all woman's weakness, all mortal love, all fleshly
vanities--failed! I am no more now than the veriest beginner on the
path. I, who deemed myself so wise!"
Then she rose and came close to him, and laid her white hand on his arm.
"That," she said, "is why I needed you again. You can help me--you can
tell me where and how I failed."
That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery. He bent his head and
passionately kissed the white, soft hand. "You failed, oh, my Princess!
because you are still mortal woman. Thank Heaven for it! You failed
because memory and love were still strong in your heart. You failed--
and I am by your side once more. Oh, let the past be forgotten! Brief
is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once
strayed. Fate stayed them on the threshold. But now--now--"
She raised her white face. "Do not deceive yourself," she said. "You
have always loved me too well--but I--"
"Only _let_ me love you!" he whispered passionately. "It is honour
enough. All the wide earth holds no other woman such as you. Having
once known you, there has never been a disloyal thought within my heart.
Read it--see for yourself."
"I read it," she said, "even while the music was sounding in your ears,
as you stood on the terrace there below; even while you moved amidst
that chattering, flippant throng, and heard what they said of me. No,
dear friend. You have nothing in that great frank, loyal soul to hide.
But I--there is something that whispers I shall only bring you
suffering. I am not for mortal love. True, I cannot see beyond, but
Fear meets me on the threshold. The hour I gave myself to you would
bring you an evil I dimly realise. I cannot foretell, and I cannot
avert it; but it is there. It lurks like a hidden foe where our lives
should join... No, no!--do not tempt me. Happiness is not for me, as
we count it on the earth plane."
"And in the next I may lose you altogether. Oh listen--listen, and let
the woman defy the priestess. Give me your love, and, even with Death
as its bridal gift I shall receive it as the deepest joy of earth."
"There," she said sadly, "speaks the mortal. Passion sways your senses.
You too will lose your powers--and for what?--a few brief years of
joy--a longer darkness--then the old weary round--the old sad effort to
climb the long stairway from the bottom rung that once you proudly
spurned. It was not this that Channa taught us in the sweet peace of
our youth--it was not this for which our souls thirsted, and to which
our faces were set."
"Channa is dead, and to the dead all is peace. Even he said that Life's
one good gift was Love."
"True, but not selfish love. `The feet of the soul must be washed in
the blood of the heart.' Love to all humanity--to the poor--the sad--
the suffering. Love, even to the Fate that gives us sorrow and
misfortune. Love to the eternal and immutable. Love for all that is
purest and best in each life with which we mingle. Such a love is not
sensual--not earthly. It gives without necessity of return; it is the
soul's devotion, not the heart's impulse. But you are not content with
loving me, you claim mine in return, and so far as I have lost or you
have gained a firmer foothold since last we met, so far you can compel
my lower nature to answer yours. We have loved before, and unhappy was
our fate. Once more we meet, and your cry is still for me. And I--"
She ceased; her arms fell to her side. Her face, lovely beyond all mere
mortal loveliness, looked back to his yearning, passionate gaze. Had
she been temptress, devil, saint, there could have been but one answer
from the throbbing heart and leaping pulse of manhood. He caught her to
his heart, and his lips drank from hers the sweetness that only earthly
passion drains from earthly love.
She did not resist. She lay there like a white lily in the moonlight,
but her lips were cold as marble and her eyes held the mute sorrow of
despair, not the rapture of a granted joy.
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CHAPTER SIX.
ENCHANTMENT.
When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with
a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom
coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.
The Princess Zairoff, to whom men's admiration was as familiar as the
air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as
dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of
tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her
strange nature, to any beseechment.
But now, for one brief hour she threw back the portals of emotion. She
was a woman, pure and simple. The man beside her was the one man in the
world to whom her memory had been faithful. Boy and girl they had known
each other in years long past. As boy and girl they had shared in the
same tastes, and been penetrated with the same desires for the Mystic
and the Unknown.
Living in a remote part of India under very careless guardianship, and
with no one to care for their pursuits, or remark them, they had made
the acquaintance of a learned and somewhat mysterious native, and from
his lips they first heard some hints of the wonders that nature reveals
to the earnest student. As time went on they were separated--the boy
was sent to England, the girl remained in the East. When they met again
he was a young lieutenant in an infantry regiment stationed at one of
the most popular stations of a popular Presidency, and she was the
reigning queen of the same station. Again fate parted them. Two years
went by. Their next meeting was in Egypt, where she was travelling with
her guardian.
Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart's secret by then, but there was a
coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's
friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of
love-making.
Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those
talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and sex, and, however
much the young man's heart might throb with its hidden passion, there
yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely
strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished
devotion.
Another separation--another meeting. Time had worked changes in both.