“Harkee, my friend,” said Tiretta: “I will buy one of your basils unweaned—that pretty one at the end there in the green jar—and back it against all the rest to flower first and smell the sweetest.”
“As you will, master—and be a fool for your pains.”
Tiretta saw the young lady into her carriage—a service accepted by her very formally and silently—and presently rode back to Colorno, his purchase under his arm.
CHAPTER XII.
PAOLO AND FRANCESCA
“... deep into the dying day
The happy princess followed him.”
It had been one delirious moment snatched from the hands of fate. So it was understood between them—an impulsive contact, passionate, transient, never to be spoken of or repeated. Isabella might, if she would, have made of that mute stipulation a definite compromise with her conscience, since a princess, no less than any other woman, was free to barter her lips for one instant of delight, provided she incurred thereby no after responsibility towards their ravisher. There were flowers, in the world of gallantry, to be sipped, as well as hives to be plundered; and one was not called upon to hold oneself bound to every honey-loving freebooter whom one permitted to settle a moment and taste.
She might have thought thus, I say; only, if she had, she would not have been the passion-pure child, innocent and affectionate, of our knowledge. She was, in fact, very troubled, very shamed, over what she had done, or allowed to be done. And yet her heart, conscious-guilty as it might feel, would thrill in the memory of that moment. Though she had since made one to that unspoken compact of silence and abstention, she never had a thought but that that instant of emotional self-surrender had delivered her, a rightful captive, into the hands of her conqueror. She could never now love another man; only her love must be content to remain for all time an abstraction, a pathetic dream, impossible of realisation. If only they would consent to leave it so; to let her die unwedded—perhaps in the peaceful seclusion of a cloister.
So a single kiss wrought on this loving nature, that it had for her the tragic sanctity of a pledge. It did not matter how extenuated by good resolutions. The fire once kindled would not so be quenched. Nor would the cold water these two engaged themselves to throw on their own heart-burnings have any effect but to make the heat glow presently the fiercer. That is a mere chemical commonplace, and, unless love is to be accepted for something other than a matter of gases and combustion, follows of necessity. Fire, to be put out by water, must be put out, and not simply fed.
It is true that, in the first of the reaction from that madness, they had both shrunk back aghast over the magnitude of the peril they had touched and escaped. Yet the very sympathy engendered of that common fright was fatal. It constituted between them a secret which by habit became a tender and a passionate one. Whatever distance was affected in their relations, there was that knowledge to obliterate it. They were at all times and in all places conscious of it and of one another.