CHAPTER XVII. PARTED LOVERS.
The last word has been spoken, the last look exchanged between the lovers, and the wrench of parting is over. Gustav declined to accompany Selaka back to Xinara; he was too shaken for society other than his own. Inarime had bent to her father’s decision, and had accepted the sundering of their lives. More than this he hardly knew.
When Selaka rode down the village, Gustav followed on foot, and knew not whither he went,—content to drift along without purpose or desire. Yet he dreaded the weakness of succumbing to a merely whimpering sorrow. That something had gone from him to which he clung with a kind of frenzied fervour he felt, but he was resolved that the sense of desolation should not conquer him. He had said that he would accept his fate at Inarime’s bidding; now, that that fate seemed harder than human endurance, it was not for him to rebel in impotent anguish, but to endeavour bravely to face the empty world.
As he entered the village of Steni, he saw a little band of villagers approach the Greek church, and, hardly knowing why, he followed them. The church was lit, and in the middle upon a table was a tray of sweets and two long candles, upon which rested two wreaths joined by a long white ribbon. Pricked by the dull curiosity of a man who no longer feels interested in himself, he pushed his way on up the church, lounged against the pillar and gazed with a strange calmness upon the ceremonial, that soon began. No one who saw him would interpret his impassivity of attitude and look as the despair of a suddenly wrecked life.
The man beside him, standing with his hat on his head, and wearing the preoccupied air with a visible nervousness that usually betokens the happy man upon the portals of marriage, was a mere village clod in an unpicturesque European garb, who stood beside his best man waiting for the bride. A stout, plain, village girl was ushered into the church in a whirlwind of excitement, surrounded by a circle of feminine satellites. She neither looked at the bridegroom, nor at any one else, but kept her eyes fixed in sullen acquiescence on the ground.
She wore a bright-coloured kerchief on her head, with a band of coins round her forehead; and a profusion of jewellery decked her muscular throat and arms. Very expensively and tastelessly was she arrayed, and most miserable did she look in her finery. The fixed misery of her face interested Gustav, who naturally thought it quite in keeping with the lesson of life, that every one should look wretched. Three priests advanced to wed this uncomely couple, and the evolutions that followed struck Gustav with astonishment. He listened to the priests as they droned out the wedding service, and held the Gospel now to the bridegroom’s lips and then to the bride’s; and so on, three times; watched them place the long lighted tapers in the hands of each; watched the pair give and accept rings, and passively submit to the decoration of the wreaths of artificial flowers, exchanged three times upon either head.
Involuntarily Gustav smiled at the grotesque sight presented by the village clod in his wreath of roses, and then marvelled when the priests and principal personages, with their attendant swains and nymphs, caught hands in a circle, and danced with inconceivable gravity round the table backwards and forwards three times, the bride and bridegroom still wearing their look of dull wretchedness. Good heavens! Was this the kind of ceremony he would have been bound to go through in his marriage with Inarime? to find himself hauled round a table, as sailors haul in the anchor, bound in that degrading fashion with roses! It was some slight salve for his wound to gaze in contempt at this pastoral introduction to marriage, and when a little mischievous boy upset the tray in order that he and his friends might taste of its contents in the scuffle that ensued, and was frantically cuffed and sworn at by the angry priests, Gustav burst out into gloomy laughter, and made his way as well as he could out of the church.
He walked down the darkened street heavy-hearted, thinking of Inarime; he dropped into the rough decline that leads to Xinara, and mingled with the sad images of the day were the cruel dulness of the bride’s face and the tame acceptance of the bridegroom. After all, perhaps it was so; this might be the symbol of marriage, and not the high ideal he yearned for.
Under a rocky projection he saw a man who had been pointed out to him as a semi-idiot. An ambitious mother had sent him as a lad to Marseilles; thence he had made his way up to Paris; and now this was his state. Three years of stormy life in that nefarious city had turned a bright lad into a bald, aged idiot, only twenty-five, looking more than fifty. He was staring stupidly down through the thickening shadows to where the sea beat against the distant shore: staring out from the barren island that oppressed him; living acutely and horribly in memory.
Comforted by the sight of a fellow-sufferer, Gustav stopped and said good-night. The wretched man glanced at him in dreary reproach.
“It used to be good-night over there in Paris; the boulevards were lit and there were laughter and gaiety around, happy voices, music, cabs, and pretty women. Here nothing, nothing, nothing, but the everlasting sea and sky and the pathless mountain sides. Don’t say good-night to me, sir, I am dead, irretrievably damned, damned, damned in hell!”
Gustav thought he was not the only living man who thought this world a hell, and turned round by the desolate Castro. He climbed up the rocks, overjoyed by the sensation of complete discomfort, of torn hands and bruised members. Then he stretched himself on the top of the rock, and looked out across the shadowy waters. The first faint glimmer of the crescent shone in the glossy sky, and the stars looked like drops of fire hanging above the world. There was no sound save the far-off roar of the waterfalls thundering down their marble rocks, or the musical clang of the goat and sheep bells as the shepherds gathered in their flocks for the night. Sometimes a light flamed from a distant window. Gustav thought of old stories he had read, in which maidens placed lights in their windows to light their lovers, or wives as a message to their husbands. The loneliness of his future broke in upon him in a flood of self-pity. There was only one window he wanted to see lighted for him, and that now would be eternally dark. Tears sprang to his eyes, and then, fearful of the horror of the gathering outburst he felt within him, he jumped down the rocks, now sliding, now racing on, tangling his limbs in the bushes and furzes, and shot down the path that hung over the little village of Xinara.
Demetrius saw him pass with flying feet, with set lips, and unseeing eyes; and the popular shop-keeper turned to his patient satellites, Johannes and Michael, and observed:
“He’s been to Mousoulou; I heard it all; the wedding takes place immediately.”
“He’s a good-looking fellow,” said Johannes, apprehensive of the reception of this innocent remark from so susceptible a leader.
“As for that, yes, and he’s getting a good-looking wife, though she does dress outlandishly, and turns up her nose at my stuffs. She got that yellow gown at Syra, and I can’t say I admire the big buttons she wears.”
“Well,” said Michael, reflectively, “she is a very learned young woman, and writes very fine letters for our women. I don’t know what they’ll do when she goes away. I know my girl in Constantinople won’t be in the way of hearing much from my wife.”
“Ay, that’s so,” said Demetrius, “she’ll be missed as letter-writer, and I’m not so sure that the place won’t seem a good deal smaller and duller when we’ve not her handsome face to look at.”
In the courtyard Gustav brushed up against Aristides, who glared at him and muttered a curse as he removed his frame from the doorway, where he had been airing his ill-humour for the benefit of Annunziata, busy making the new Misythra.
“Here he is,” he said to his good-tempered listener, engaged just then on the delicate process of straining off the sheep’s milk and tying up the remainder of clotted cream tightly in a linen cloth.
Gustav strode up to her and said in an unfamiliar voice, chill and remote like an echo:
“I am going.”
The pleasant old woman laid down her jar, dried her hands, and took hold of his, tightening upon them with an inspiriting and sympathetic grasp.
“My poor child, may God and His saints go with you! I know all. By my faith, I see no reason why you should go. The Turk, we know, is a heretic, but you would marry my Inarime according to the Greek rite. You would be faithful to her as a Christian should be.”
“Faithful!” cried Gustav, vehemently. “Gladly would I die for her.” But he did not see that of the two this is much the easier to do.
“Yes, yes,” said Annunziata, “young men in love talk very tall; when the fit passes, they do very little. But I like you, and I am sorry for you. Go away now; it is better so. Be assured that your interests here will not suffer by being left in my hands.”
The tears were perilously near his eyelids; he struggled with rising emotion, flung himself round, and in a moment his figure made a vanishing and graceful shadow in the upper air. Selaka was within, pacing the room in perplexed thought, when the young man entered.
“Sir, is this your last word? Must I go and not bear with me the hope of returning?” demanded Gustav.
“You must,” said Selaka, gravely, “you cannot undo your birth, nor can I.”
Gustav waited not for another word, but rushed into his room, hastily gathered his things together, and reappeared in the little parlour with his portmanteau in his hand. He stood in front of Selaka, and looked at him steadily.
“Should this grief be too much for her?”
“She is strong, and she is brave,” said Selaka, “and she will overcome it.”
“Good God!” said Gustav, “have you no thought of the girl’s heart? Are there forces in nature, think you, to dispel or even dull its yearning? Is there ever a barrier to the union of two souls! What you play with is her happiness, for the sake of your own patriotic pride.”
Selaka did not answer, but covered his eyes with his hand, and said:
“It must be so. We are bound irrevocably by ties nearer, more sacred, than any impulse of nature. There are animosities that cannot shrink and vanish under such considerations as you urge; there is a degradation that cannot be faced by any free spirit! Under other circumstances, I should have regarded your marriage with my daughter as an honour for me and a happiness for her. But that is at an end. You will go hence, and you will forget us, but you may believe that our kindest wishes will follow you wherever you may go.”
They shook hands, and thus they parted. Gustav found Aristides waiting for him outside, with a mule for himself and a donkey for his portmanteau; and through the increasing darkness and the shadows of night, which lay like extended wings on the landscape, they rode silently down into the town.
* * * * * * * * *
The next morning Pericles was shaken out of his moody disappointment by Constantine’s wild letter written the night before his duel with the lawyer Stavros, and an accompanying note from the brave Captain, dwelling pompously on his gallant demeanour, and explaining that the wound, the result of an awkward shot, was not in the least dangerous, but simply troublesome, and that the presence of Dr. Selaka’s family in Athens was desirable.
“The very thing. Inarime needs a change,” Pericles cried, brightening at the prospect of getting outside his daughter’s grief.
He and Inarime embarked from the little pier for Athens late that afternoon, and it seemed to him a hopeful omen that the forlorn girl looked about her with eyes of interest.