The Purple Cloud
Page 47
her well, I knew the whole history ofthe creature standing silent by my side.
She is the daughter of the Sultan, as I assumed when I had oncedetermined that the skeleton is both the skeleton of her mother, and theskeleton of the Sultana.
That the skeleton was her mother is clear: for the cloud occurred justtwenty-one years since, and the dead woman was, of course, at thatmoment in the prison, which must have been air-tight, and with her thegirl: but since the girl is quite certainly not much more thantwenty--she looks younger--she must at that time have been either unbornor a young babe: but a babe would hardly be imprisoned with another thanits own mother. I am rather inclined to think that the girl was unbornat the moment of the cloud, and was born in the cellar.
That the mother was the Sultana is clear from her fragments of dress,and the symbolic character of her every ornament, crescent earrings,heron-feather, and the blue campaca enamelled in a bracelet. This poorwoman, I have thought, may have been the victim of some unbounded fit ofimperial passion, incurred by some domestic crime, real or imagined,which may have been pardoned in a day had not death overtaken her masterand the world.
There are four steep stone steps at about the centre of the cellar,leading up to a locked iron trap-door, apparently the only opening intothis great hole: and this trap-door must have been so nearly air-tightas to bar the intrusion of the poison in anything like deadly quantity.
But how rare--how strange--the coincidence of chances here. For, if thetrap-door was absolutely air-tight, I cannot think that the supply ofoxygen in the cellar, large as it was, would have been sufficient tolast the girl twenty years, to say nothing of what her mother used upbefore death: for I imagine that the woman must have continued to livesome time in her dungeon, sufficiently long, at least, to teach herchild to procure its food of dates and wine; so that the door must havebeen only just sufficiently hermetic to bar the poison, yet admit someoxygen; or else, the place may have been absolutely air-tight at thetime of the cloud, and some crack, which I have not seen, opened toadmit oxygen after the poison was dispersed: in any case--theall-but-infinite rarity of the chance!
Thinking these things I climbed out, and we walked to Pera, where Islept in a great white-stone house in five or six acres of gardenoverlooking the cemetery of Kassim, having pointed out to the girlanother house in which to sleep.
This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunlessworld hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only skywhich she knew collapse at one point! a hole appeared into yet a worldbeyond! It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set herfree.
* * * * *
Ah, I see something now! I see! it was for this that I was preserved: Ito be a sort of new-fangled Adam--and this little creature to be my Eve!That is it! _The White_ does not admit defeat: he would recommence theRace again! At the last, the eleventh hour--in spite of all--he wouldturn defeat into victory, and outwit that Other.
However, if this be so--and I seem to see it quite clearly--then in thatWhite scheme is a singular flaw: at _one point_, it is obvious, thatelaborate Forethought fails: for I have a free will--and I refuse, Irefuse.
Certainly, in this matter I am on the side of the Black: and since itdepends absolutely upon me, this time Black wins.
No more men on the earth after me, ye Powers! To _you_ the question maybe nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome ofyour aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs,Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hardearnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness--the deep, deep pain--of thatbungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ...she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayedthe gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman kingnamed Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, Gilles de Raiz:and the rest were all much the same, much the same. Oh no, it was not agood race, that small infantry which called itself Man: and here,falling on my knees before God and Satan as I write, I swear, I swear:Never through me shall it spring and fester again.
* * * * *
I cannot realise her! Not at all, at all, at all! If she is out of mysight and hearing ten minutes, I fall to doubting her reality. If I loseher for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, comeback, that I have only been dreaming--that this appearance cannot be anactual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.
Seventeen long years, seventeen long years, of madness....
* * * * *
To-morrow I start for Imbros: and whether this girl chooses to followme, or whether she stays behind, I will see her from the moment I landno more.
* * * * *
She must rise very early. I who am now regularly on the palace-roof atdawn, sometimes from between the pavilion-curtains of the galleries, orfrom the steps of the telescope-kiosk, may spy her far down below, adainty microscopic figure, generally running about the sward, or gazingup in wonder at the palace from the lake-edge.
It is now three months since she came with me to Imbros.
I left her the first night in that pale-yellow house with the two greenjalousies facing the beach, where there was everything that she wouldneed; but I knew that, like all the houses there now, it leakedprofusely, and the next day I went down to the curving stair, cutthrough the rock at the back and south of the village, climbed, and halfa mile beyond found that park and villa with gables, which I had notedfrom the sea. The villa is almost intact, very strongly built ofpurplish marble, though small, and very like a Western house, withshingles, and three gables, so that I think it must have been the yaliof some Englishman, for it contains a number of English books, thoughthe only body I saw there was what looked like an Aararat Kurd, withspiral string wound down his turban, yellow ankle-pantaloons, and flungred shoulder-cloak; and all in the heavily-wooded park, and all aboutthe low rock-steps up the hill, profusions of man-dragora; and from therock-steps to the house a narrow long avenue of acacias, mossyunderfoot, that mingle overhead, the house standing about four yardsfrom the edge of the perpendicular sea-cliff, whence one can see the_Speranzas_ main top-mast, and broken mizzen-mast-head, in her quiethaven. After examining the place I went down again to the village, andher house: but she was not there: and two hours long I paced about amongthe weeds of these amateur little alleys and flat-roofed windowlesshouses (though some have terrace-roofs, and a rare aperture), whoseonce-raw yellows, greens, and blues look now like sunset tints when thelast flush is gone, and they fade dun. When at last she came runningwith open mouth, I took her up the rock-steps, and into the house, andthere she has lived, one of the gable-tips, I now find (that overlookingthe sea), being just visible from the north-east corner of thepalace-roof, two miles from it.
That night again, when I was leaving her, she made an attempt to followme. But I was resolved to end it, then: and cutting a sassafras-whip Icut her deep, three times, till she ran, crying.
* * * * *
So, then, what is my fate henceforth?--to think always, from sun tomoon, and from moon to sun, of one only thing--and that thing an objectfor the microscope?--to become a sneaking Paul Pry to spy upon the sillymovements of one little sparrow, like some fatuous motiveless gossip ofold, his occupation to peep, his one faculty to scent, his honey and hisachievement to unearth the infinitely unimportant? I would kill herfirst!
* * * * *
I am convinced that she is no stay-at-home, but roams continually overthe island: for thrice, wandering myself, I have come upon her.
The first time she was running with flushed face, intent upon strikingdown a butterfly with a twig held in the left hand (for both hands sheuses with dexterity). It was at about nine in the morning, in her park,near the bottom where there are high grass-growths and ferny luxuriancebetween the close tree-trunks, and shadow, and t
he broken wall of an oldfuneral-kiosk sunk aslant under moss, creepers, and wild flowers, behindwhich I peeped hidden and wet with dew. She has had the assurance tomodify the dress I put upon her, and was herself a butterfly, forinstead of the shintiyan, she had on a zouave, hardly reaching to thewaist, of saffron satin, no feredje, but a scarlet fez with violettassel, and baggy pantaloons of azure silk; down her back the longauburn plait, quite neat, but all her front hair loose and wanton, thefez cocked backward, while I caught glimpses of her fugitive heelslifting out of the dropping slipper-sole. She is pretty clever, but notclever enough, for that butterfly escaped, and in one instant I saw herchange into weary and sad, for on this earth is nothing more fickle thanthat Proteus face, which resembles a landscape swept with cloud-shadowson a bright day. Fast beat my heart that morning, owing to theconsciousness that, while I saw, I was unseen, yet might be seen.
Another noontide, three weeks afterwards, I came upon her a good way upyonder to the west of the palace, sleeping on her arm in an alleybetween overgrown old trellises,