THE DUCHESS OF THEBES
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
McCarthy, Justin H. (Justin Huntly)
His haggard eyes wandered over the moonlit space towards the darkling wood and marvelled at the solemn presence of the men-at-arms. Again Esclaramonde wound her arms around him, reluctant, and there was an agony of solicitude in the duchess's voice, an ecstasy of tenderness in her eyes, as she cried to him, clasping him tighter to her warm body:
"My lord, my dear lord, what trouble has come to you? It was but a few poor moments ago that you told me how you loved me."
The prince looked despairingly into that beautiful, sensual face, and he remembered how it had shone in its splendor over the festivals at Paris. It was very lovely to behold, alluring, commanding, yielding, insisting, but it was not the loveliness his white spirit had longed for then or the worshipped loveliness his memory longed for now.
"I told you that I loved you?" The sound of his voice was full of doubt, and yet it went hard with his knightly heart to doubt the word of a woman.
Esclaramonde's pale cheeks filled with flame.
"With words too flattering sweet for me to echo," she whispered, and she stooped, and her eager face was close to his and her dark hair brushed his forehead, and she kissed him on the mouth at once sharply and suavely, and the fire from her lips ran through his veins.
"You gave me a ring which I shall wear forever." She withdrew one clinging arm from about his neck and held a smooth hand before him, and he saw on her finger the ring that had been his own for so long, the ring that had been his mother's, that she had made him promise when she gave it to him never to part with save to the loveliest and the worthiest. "You took a ring from me." She lifted his hand a little and he stared stupidly at the great ruby.
"Have you forgotten?" Esclaramonde cried. "Can men forget so soon?" Her eyes swam in obedient tears.
The maze of the man's mind showed tragically in his eyes, and then he spoke, but rather to himself than to the woman by his side.
"Which is the dream?" he asked. "I thought when I fell that a white girl came from the woods and succored me, a divine child, the loveliest—"
Esclaramonde shifted her body a little away from him, though still she clasped him fast and he could not in courtesy release her clinging fingers.
"Dear my lord," she protested, pathetically, "my overvaunted beauty may be of little account; still it is not many seconds since you chose to call me passing fair."
The prince, looking at Esclaramonde, knew that she was very fair indeed. There was for the merely desirous no more desirable woman of all the French dames dwelling in Greece.
"You are very fair," he said, truly, "but you are not she whom I saw." And once again his anxious eyes looked longingly over the silver grass towards the implacable silence of the wood.
"She was some dream," Esclaramonde answered him, earnestly, her warm lips close to his flushed cheek, her soft breath fanning his troubled face. "She was a vision born of the quick fever of your wounds. You swooned again after our change of vows and change of rings, and in this swoon you must have dreamed this dream of another who was not I. Indeed, you murmured snatches of strange speech in your sleep which astounded me, but such delirium is common with men in your case. Will you stain your knightly faith and deny your honor for the sake of a sick dream?"
Great waves of doubt flooded the prince's struggling consciousness, overwhelming it, drowning it. Was she, in very fact, no more than a vision, that white child of the woods with her yellow hair and her haunting eyes and her perfect body? Did the help he had dreamed of really come to him from this splendid, voluptuous creature who had striven to allure him in France? Was it those insistent hands that had brought healing to his hurt? Was it those passionate lips that had soothed him to sleep? Was it those enticing eyes that had summoned love to take possession of his stainless soul? His thoughts were all a tangle, his fever burned bright as his eyes travelled vaguely from the unfamiliar ring upon his finger to his mother's ring upon the finger of Esclaramonde. One thing alone seemed plain to him where all was imbroglio. If in whatever bewildering way he had pledged his word to this lady, his word must be kept.
"If I gave you my knightly faith, lady," he said, faintly, "I may not take it again."
The eyes of the duchess were triumphant torches, success was throned in her smiling face. But the pallor of Rainouart's face grew greater, for the spiritual strife within him had weakened him more than his loss of blood, and Esclaramonde, watching him, believed he was about to swoon again. She turned and made a sign in the direction where her following stood, huddled together, a group of lances and flaring torches on the lip of the wood. The golden page quitted the little throng and ran to his mistress.
"Bring me some wine, Bohemond," she ordered.
The page sped back to the litter and returned to his mistress with a golden flagon and a golden cup. Esclaramonde took the cup and held it while Bohemond poured out red wine that glowed like dragon's blood in the moonlight. Then a gesture dismissed the page to his companions, and the duchess set the golden cup upon the grass. She was still supporting Rainouart with one arm, his eyes were closed, and his lips had lost their color. From the jewelled pouch that hung at her girdle the duchess drew with her free hand a tiny phial, and, cuddling it in her palm, drew the stopper with her finger and thumb. She poured the contents into the cup and thrust the empty phial back into her pouch. Then she lifted the cup and pressed it to the young man's pale lips.
"Drink, my lord, drink," she entreated, and her voice could implore and command with the same breath and charm the listener away from reason. She was eager that he should drink, for she knew that what he drank would make him sleep sound, and that when he woke he must needs think as she would have him think, and so she said again:
"Drink, my lord, drink."
Rainouart opened his eyes wearily and looked up. He had hoped that he might sleep, and, waking, find the coming of the duchess a fever's fantasy. But she was still with him, his imperial deliverer, and the white child only the picture of a dream. Esclaramonde tilted the cup a little at his lips, and he drank at it eagerly, sucking in surcease of memory, sucking in unconquerable sleep. It was delicious, that draught of dark and deep oblivion; the tired senses relaxed.
"I thank you, lady," he sighed, in relief, and then all knowledge slipped from him and he lay his length unconscious. The duchess called to her page, and Bohemond raced across the grass to her side. Him the duchess commanded:
"Let two of my people carry this lord to my litter. We will make sure of his safe convoy to Athens. I will ride for the rest of the journey."
Her orders were swiftly and instantly obeyed. Three tall fellows of her men-at-arms, picked by the knight who led the van of her escort, came to where Rainouart lay and carried him as easily and as gently as if he had been a sleeping child to their lady's litter. A servitor moved from the rear of the little army leading a white riding palfrey, valiantly caparisoned. As she made to mount she paused, missing something, and her quick eyes sought for Simon.
"Where is the braggart we talked with but now?" she asked, sharply, and her question proved hard to answer. The men-at-arms into whose charge Simon had been put looked at one another with dismay, for truly Simon had disappeared. The disappearance, very surprising to the soldiery, was not very surprising in itself. The fact of the matter was that Simon had decided some time back that it would be excellent well for him to be quite clear of the complication that the coming of the duchess had created. It was plain to the adventurer that the duchess had taken a fancy for the heir of Athens. It was also patent to his understanding that he himself existed an undesirable witness of that earlier passage between Rainouart and the woman of the wood, the story of which the duchess had so vehemently resented. Simon, who had something of the art of reading women's natures in their faces, imagined, not unwisely, that the Duchess of Thebes was not a woman to stick at much if the removal of a disagreeable witness might be convenient to her. Once Simon had made up his mind that it were well for him to go, he lost no time in making the experiment.
It was no very difficult enterprise. The men in whose custody he stood, occupied to their greater interest in watching the duchess's attentions to the wounded knight, though they could see little and hear less, paid scant heed to Simon, who, on his side, had done nothing to provoke watchfulness by any resistance to their guardianship. So, finding them thus indifferent, little by little he edged him away from their neighborhood, moving very cautiously and gradually as one who scarcely seemed to move at all till he backed against a tree, against which he leaned lazily for some seconds. Once in front of a tree it was but simple strategy to slip to the other side of its trunk, and this feat Simon, choosing his time wisely, accomplished dexterously and unnoticed. Had he been by misluck interrupted in his progress, he relied upon his mighty strength to overthrow any six who sought to restrain him, and to make a bolt for it into the thickness of the wood where he believed he might effectually evade pursuit. But he wished, if it might be, to glide away in quiet, and fortune favored the adventurer. A floating fleece of cloud, stray fragment of the shattered dragon that seemed to obey Argathona's incantation, had again muffled the moonlight. In the gloom Simon was on his hands and knees in the brushwood and threading his way on all-fours with amazing celerity among the trees into the deep of the forest. Thus it came to pass that when the duchess demanded Simon, Simon was not forthcoming.
"He was here a moment since," one man-at-arms asserted, lying hardily, as he stared into the vacant faces of his fellows.
"Belike he has slipped into the wood," another suggested, shading his eyes with his hands and peering into the impenetrable gloom behind him.
"Shall we search for him with torches?" Bohemond proposed, briskly, while the men-at-arms looked sheepish over their blunder and wished Simon at the devil. The duchess shook her head impatiently.
"No, it is no matter," she said.
She believed that she would recognize the man again if she saw him in Athens. She was confident, too, that the man could have little power, even if he had the inclination, to interfere with her plans. The immediate need was to carry Rainouart quickly to Athens and there to work her will upon his troubled wits. She mounted lightly into the saddle of her horse, her spirits were nimble, her heart gay, her brain elated. She had taken at last a prize that she had long desired, a prize that she would not lightly yield again. All was very well with her.
"Onward!" she commanded, "onward! Athens, ho!" So she and her company resumed their measured journey to Athens, a line of torches on the white highway, while the prince slept a dreamless sleep on the litter still warm with the pressure of the limbs of Esclaramonde.