Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “I was quite sure it would be all right,” said Alexander to her, presently. It was more than the young girl could bear. She turned upon him fiercely, and her beautiful face was very white.

  “I despise you!” she exclaimed. That was all she said, but in the next moment she turned and threw her arms about Paul’s neck, and kissed his burnt and wounded face before them all.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  There is little more to be said, for my story is told to the end. When I found them all together, Gregorios took me aside and drew a crumpled mass of papers from his pocket with his uninjured hand.

  “I stayed behind to save your papers and your money,” he said quietly. “I have seen houses burn before, and there is generally no time to be lost.”

  I wonder what there is at the bottom of that man’s strange nature. Cold, indifferent, and fatalistic, apparently one of the most selfish of men, he nevertheless seems to possess somewhere a kind of devoted heroism, an untainted quality of friendship only too rare in our day.

  Hermione Carvel is to be married to Paul in the autumn, but there is reason to believe that Alexander, who has rejoined his regiment in St. Petersburg, will not find it convenient to be at the wedding. When Balsamides was crying for help from the upper window, and when Alexander stood quietly by Hermione’s side while his brother faced the danger, the die was cast, and she saw what a wide gulf separated the two men, and she knew that she loved the one and hated the other with a fierce hatred.

  Poor Madame Patoff is dead, but before he left Constantinople Professor Cutter spent half an hour in trying to demonstrate to me that she might have been cured if Hermione had married Alexander. I am glad he is gone, for I always detested his theories.

  So the story is ended, my dear friend; and if it is told badly, it is my fault, for I assure you that I never in my life spent so exciting a year. It has been a long tale, too, but you have told me that from time to time you were interested in it; and, after all, a tale is but a tale, and is a very different affair from an artistically constructed drama, in which facts have to be softened, so as not to look too startling in print. I have given you facts, and if you ever meet Gregorios Balsamides he will tell you that I have exaggerated nothing. Moreover, if you will take the trouble to visit Santa Sophia during the last nights of Ramazán, you will understand how Alexander Patoff disappeared; and if you will go over the house of Laleli Khanum Effendi, which is now to be sold, you will see how impossible it was for him to escape from such a place. In the garden above Mesar Burnu you will see the heap of ashes, which is all that remains of the kiosk where I gave my unlucky tea-party; and if you will turn up the bridle-path at the left of the Belgrade road, a hundred yards before you reach the aqueduct, you will come upon the spot where Gregorios threatened to kill Selim, the wicked Lala, on that bitter March night. I dare say, also, that if you visit any of these places by chance you will remember the strange scenes they have witnessed, and I hope that you will also remember Paul Griggs, your friend, who spun you this yarn because you asked him for a story, when he was riding with you on that rainy afternoon last month. I only wish you knew the Carvels, for I am sure you would like them, and you would find Chrysophrasia very amusing.

  With the Immortals

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  TO DIANA, AND TO GWENDOLINE

  THESE MEMORIES

  OF HAPPY HOURS

  BY THE SEA

  ARE LOVINGLY INSCRIBED

  CHAPTER I.

  THE SOUTHERN SHORE of the Sorrentine peninsula offers a striking contrast to the northern side. Towards the north the mountain opens into a broad basin, filled to the brim with soft tufo rock, upon which the vegetation of ages has deposited a deep and fertile soil. The hills slope gently to the cliffs which overhang the bay of Naples and they seem to bear in their outstretched arms a rich offering of Nature’s fairest gifts for the queen city of the south. The orange and the lemon, the olive and the walnut elbow each other for a footing in the fat dark earth; and where there is not room for them, the holes and crannies of the walls shoot out streamers of roses and thrust forth nosegays of white-flowered myrtle. Westward from the enchanted garden of Sorrento the rocky promontory juts far into the sea, so that only a narrow channel, scarcely three miles wide, separates the mainland from sea-girt Capri, towering up from the blue water and rearing his rocky crest to heaven like some enormous dragon-beast of fable. Far down in the deep mid-channel, lies the watch-tower bell stolen by the Saracen corsairs from the little fort upon the shore; on Saint John’s Eve the fishermen, casting their nets in the orange-tinted twilight, hear the tones of the long-lost bronze ringing up to them out of the depths, and the rough men tell each other how, on that very night of the year, long ago, Saint Nicholas raised a fierce storm in the “Bocca di Crape” and forced the heathen pirates to lighten their craft by heaving overboard the bell and the rest of the booty they had carried off.

  Doubling the point, and running along the southern shore of the little peninsula, the scene changes. The rocks, which on the other side slope gently down, here rise precipitously from the dark water, throwing up great rugged friezes of hacked stone against the sky, casting black shadows under every sharpened peak and seeming to defy the foot of man and beast. Here and there, a little town hangs like the nest of a sea-bird in a cranny of the cliffs, poised on the brink as you may fancy a sea-nymph drawing up her feet out of reach of the waves, facing the fierce, hot south-west, whence the storms sweep in, black and melancholy and wrathfully thundering. A mile away, but seemingly within a stone’s throw of the cliffs, lie three tiny islands, green in the short spring months, but parched and brown in summer, dark and dangerous in the stormy winter. They are the isles of the Sirens; past them once sailed the mighty wanderer, bound to the mast of his long black ship, listening with delight and dread to the song of the sea-women, his heart beating fast and his blood on fire with the wild strains of their music. Ligeia and Leucosia and Parthenope are not dead, though they plucked the flowers with Persephone, and though the Muses outrivalled them in harmony and Orpheus vanquished them in song. Still, in calm nights, when the waning moon climbs slowly over the distant hills of the Basilicata, her trembling light falls on the marble limbs and the snowy feathers, the rich wet hair and the passionate dark eyes of the three maidens, and across the lapping waves their voices ring out in a wild, despairing harmony of long-drawn complaint. But when the storm rises and the hot south wind dashes the water into whirlpools and drives clouds of warm spray into the crevices of the islets, the sisters slip from the wet rocks and hide themselves in the cool depths below, where is perpetual calm and a dwelling not fathomed by man.

  But man visits the shore and the islands too, from time to time, though he rarely stays long. It is too unlike what man is accustomed to, too far removed from the sphere of the modern world’s life, to be a sympathetic resting-place for most of our kind. Hither people come in yachts, or upon skinny donkeys from Sorrento, or in little open boats rowed by lazy fishermen; and they gaze and say that it is very classic, and they go away with their cheap impressions and tell their friends that it is hardly worth while after all. That is what everybody does. My tale concerns a little party of persons, not absolutely like every one else, who one day said to each other that it would be possible to live among those wild rocks, and that they believed themselves sufficiently interesting to each other to live a life of temporary exile in an inaccessible region. Such a resolution must at once brand those who entered upon it with the stamp of eccentricity, with the Cain’s mark which society abhors, and it is necessary to say something of the circumstance
s which led those four persons to determine upon so desperate a course.

  Three of the settlers were young. The fourth was older by some years than any of the rest, but possessed that quality of youth which defies time and, especially, that little moiety of time which we call age. The party then, consisted of a man and his wife, of his mother-in-law and his sister. By the silly calculations of social humanity they ought to have quarrelled. As a matter of fact they did not. This was the first step towards eccentricity, and it can only be explained by an honest and dispassionate description of the four persons.

  Lady Brenda was five and forty years of age — with extenuating circumstances. A German wag once remarked that money alone does not constitute happiness, but that it is also necessary to possess some of it. So years alone do not make age unless one has some of the ills which age brings. No woman has any right to be old at five and forty, but it may be questioned whether at five and forty any woman has a right to be taken for her daughter’s sister. Lady Brenda was in some respects the youngest of the party; for she had been young when youth was regarded as an agreeable period of life, and she had brought her traditions with her. In appearance she was of medium height but of faultless figure, slender and rounded as a girl. Her complexion was of the kind produced by avoiding cosmetics. Her thick brown hair grew low upon her forehead and was not supplemented by any artful arrangement of other women’s tresses among her own. Her features were very straight, and her large, bright blue eyes, rather deep-set but wide apart, met everything frankly and surveyed the world with an air of radiant satisfaction which was as contagious as her own humour. She moved quickly, laughed easily and felt sincerely the emotions of the hour. Her voice was so fresh and ringing that people liked to listen to it, and the things she said were generally to the point. The basis of her mind was an intuitive comprehension of what was best to be done and said in the manifold situations in which she might find herself placed. Logic she had none, but she arrived at perfectly just conclusions by methods of thought which seemed absurdly illogical. As a matter of fact she did not really arrive at conclusions at all, but having determined a priori what she intended to believe, she thought any argument good enough to support that of which she was already convinced. On the other hand her experience of people was immense, and she understood human nature marvellously well. She had lived in every capital of Europe and had found herself at home everywhere, received into the intimacy of a society exclusive to all other strangers, and she had gathered a vast mass of anecdote and experience, by turns startling, tragic, dramatic and comic which would have sufficed to fill many deeply interesting volumes. With all this, she was a little tired of the great world and had gladly accepted her son-in-law’s invitation to pass a year in the south of Italy.

  Lady Brenda’s only daughter had been married to Augustus Chard two years before this time, and had presented her husband with a baby which was universally declared to be at all points the most extraordinary baby ever born, seen, or heard of. Mrs. Chard’s name was Gwendoline. Lady Brenda, in the secrecy of her own heart, knew that the combination of names, “Gwendoline Chard,” made her think of a race-horse charging into a brick wall. Otherwise she liked her son-in-law very much. The Chards adored each other when they were married, which is usual; but they continued to adore each other after marriage, which is not. There were many reasons why their lives should be harmonious, however, for they were a pair well assorted to live together. Gwendoline differed from her mother in that she had dark eyes, and that her hair was of a reddish gold colour full of magnificent lights. Her skin was paler than her mother’s, and her figure, perfectly proportioned and well designed, was a little slighter.

  She was an inch taller than Lady Brenda and carried her beautiful head erect upon her shoulders with an air of dignity beyond her years. Gwendoline was a woman who thought much and who generally decided beforehand exactly what she wanted. When she had decided, she proceeded to obtain her wish, and when she had got it, she was perfectly satisfied. These qualities placed her entirely beyond the pale of ordinary humanity. Her feelings were strong and deep, and her nature was noble and elevated; her wishes were therefore good, and for good things. Though young, she had travelled much and had seen much that was interesting. Gwendoline’s principal taste was for music, an art in which she attained to great excellence, for her playing was original, passionate and artistic. As has been said, she worshipped her husband, who in his turn adored her. She could not deny that he held highly original views upon most points, and that his ideas about things in general were a trifle startling, but he had a way of making himself appear to be right which was very convincing to any one who was already disposed to be of his opinion. Lady Brenda was very fond of Augustus Chard, but considered him more than half a visionary; Gwendoline on the other hand was willing to spend her time in helping him to demonstrate that all existing things and conditions of things, with the exception of domestic felicity, were arrant humbug.

  Augustus used to say that the taste for the visionary ran in his family. His sister, who had joined the party, illustrated the truth of his statement. Diana Chard had the temperament of a poet with the mind of a lawyer. Philosophy may be defined to mean the poetry of logic, and accordingly Diana’s nature had led her to the study of philosophy. She had read enormously, and she argued keenly with a profound knowledge of her subject. But the hypothesis generally belonged to the transcendental region of thought, where, as the problems proposed are beyond the sphere of all possible experience, the discussion also may be prolonged beyond the bounds of all possible time. She enjoyed the pleasure of argument much more than the hope of solution; and life never seemed dull when she could discuss the immortality of the soul with an unbeliever, or the existence of the supernatural with a well-trained and thoroughly prejudiced materialist. She was moreover a musician, and an accomplished one, like her sister-in-law, but her playing differed so entirely from Gwendoline’s that no one thought of comparing the two. Each was perfect in her own way; but each raised entirely different trains of thought in her hearers. Of the three ladies Diana was the tallest. She was very slender and very graceful, slow and even languid in her movements, but animated in her speech. Her skin was very dark and pale, her hair abundant and of a dark brown colour, her eyes, a deep grey with strongly marked eyebrows and black lashes; her mouth large and expressive, smiling easily and showing very beautiful teeth.

  Last of the four to be described is Augustus Chard. Imagine a big, well-knit man of bronzed complexion, with colourless hair, neither fair nor brown, average-sized blue eyes set very deep under an overhanging forehead, possessed of a remarkable constitution and of unusual physical strength. That was all there was to be seen, and from the exterior no one would have been likely to guess at the man’s queer mental tendencies. It would not have struck the observer that Augustus Chard’s mind was a mixture of revolutionary and of conservative ideas, leavened with an absurd taste for mysticism and magic, tempered by a considerable experience of more serious science, in which his immense wealth has permitted him to make experiments beyond the reach of ordinary men — a man in love with his wife, and to some extent in love with existence; active in mind and body, but seemingly under the influence of some strange planet which causes him to think differently from other people, and sometimes not very wisely either. Augustus either talked not at all, or talked excessively. Habitually a silent man, when roused in discussion his naturally combative temper showed itself, and, though patient in argument, he could not bear to abandon his point and would prolong a discussion for hours rather than own himself vanquished. Lady Brenda knew this and took a fantastic delight in combating his visionary ideas. Nevertheless they were very fond of each other, as people must be if they can discuss without quarrelling. Augustus Chard would say he believed in astrology and declare his intention of having the baby’s horoscope cast, without further hesitation. Lady Brenda would reply for the twentieth time that she could not see how the stars could possibly have any influence upon
human beings, and thereupon the discussion would begin again. In the course of an hour Augustus would demonstrate that Lady Brenda could not decide upon taking an extra cup of tea without the direct influence of Jupiter and that the appearance of beings from another world was not a whit more remarkable than the production of the electric light, nor more incomprehensible than the causes of attraction. He easily showed that nobody knew anything and that, consequently, no one had the right to deny anything; and he ended by prophesying such dreadful and extraordinary things, which must occur in the world in the course of a few years, that Lady Brenda felt her breath taken away. But a quarter of an hour later, when it was discovered to be twelve o’clock, they all laughed and remarked that they had had a most delightful evening, as they separated and went to bed.

  Of Augustus Chard it is only necessary to say that he had considerable powers of organisation, in spite of some eccentricities of mind, and that he generally succeeded in what he undertook. When, therefore, he suggested to his wife, his sister and his mother-in-law, that it would be very amusing to buy a half-ruined castle perched upon the wild rocks and overlooking the isles of the Sirens, to furnish the place luxuriously and to pass the summer in a pleasant round of discussion, music and semi-mystic literary amusement, varied by a few experiments on the electric phenomena of the Mediterranean, it did not strike those amiable ladies that the scheme was wholly mad. They agreed that it would be very novel and interesting and that if they did not like it they could go away — which is the peculiar blessing of the rich. The poor man sometimes finds it necessary to cut his throat in order to go away; the rich man orders his butler to examine the time-tables, and his valet to pack his belongings, dines comfortably and changes his surroundings as he would change his coat.