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Ziska

<h2 id="id00844" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XII.</h2> A curious yet very general feeling of superstitious uneasiness and discomfort pervaded the Gezireh Palace Hotel the day after the Princess Ziska's reception. Something had happened, and no one knew what. The proprieties had been outraged, but no one knew why. It was certainly not the custom for a hostess, and a Princess to boot, to dance like a wild bacchante before a crowd of her invited guests, yet, as Dr. Dean blandly observed,— "Where was the harm? In London, ladies of good birth and breeding went in for 'skirt-dancing,' and no one presumed to breathe a word against their reputations; why in Cairo should not a lady go in for a Theban dance without being considered improper?" Why, indeed? There seemed no adequate reason for being either surprised or offended; yet surprised and offended most people were, and scandal ran rife, and rumor wagged all its poisonous tongues to spread evil reports against the Princess Ziska's name and fame, till Denzil Murray, maddened and furious, rushed up to his sister in her room and swore that he would marry the Princess if he died for it. "They are blackguarding her downstairs, the beasts!" he said hotly. "They are calling her by every bad name under the sun! But I will make everything straight for her; she shall be my wife! If she will have me, I will marry her to-morrow!" Helen looked at him in speechless despair. "Oh, Denzil!" she faltered, and then could say no more, for the tears that blinded her eyes. "Oh, yes, of course, I know what you mean!" he continued, marching up and down the room excitedly. "You are like all the others; you think her an adventuress. I think her the purest, the noblest of women! There is where we differ. I spoke to her last night,—I told her I loved her." "You did?" and Helen gazed at him with wet, tragic eyes,—"And she …" "She bade me be silent. She told me I must not speak—not yet. She said she would give me her answer when we were all together at the Mena House Hotel." "You intend to be one of the party there then?" said Helen faintly. "Of course I do. And so do you, I hope." "No, Denzil, I cannot. Don't ask me. I will stay here with Lady Fulkeward. She is not going, nor are the Chetwynd Lyles. I shall be quite safe with them. I would rather not go to the Mena House,—I could not bear it …" Her voice gave way entirely, and she broke out crying bitterly. Denzil stood still and regarded her with a kind of sullen shame and remorse. "What a very sympathetic sister you are!" he observed. "When you see me madly in love with a woman—a perfectly beautiful, adorable woman—you put yourself at once in the way and make out that my marriage with her will be a misery to you. You surely do not expect me to remain single all my life, do you?" "No, Denzil," sobbed Helen, "but I had hoped to see you marry some sweet girl of our own land who would be your dear and true companion,—who would be a sister to me,—who … there! don't mind me! Be happy in your own way, my dear brother. I have no business to interfere. I can only say that if the Princess Ziska consents to marry you, I will do my best to like her, for your sake." "Well, that's something, at any rate," said Denzil, with an air of relief. "Don't cry, Helen, it bothers me. As for the 'sweet girl' you have got in view for me, you will permit me to say that 'sweet girls' are becoming uncommonly scarce in Britain. What with bicycle riders and great rough tomboys generally, with large hands and larger feet, I confess I do not care about them. I like a womanly woman,—a graceful woman,—a fascinating, bewitching woman, and the Princess is all that and more. Surely you consider her beautiful?" "Very beautiful indeed!" sighed poor Helen.—"Too beautiful!" "Nonsense! As if any woman can be too beautiful! I am sorry you won't come to the Mena House. It would be a change for you,—and Gervase is going." "Is he better to-day?" inquired Helen timidly. "Oh, I believe he is quite well again. It was the heat or the scent of the flowers, or something of that sort, that made him faint last night. He is not acclimatized yet, you know. And he said that the Princess's dancing made him giddy." "I don't wonder at that," murmured Helen. "It was marvellous—glorious!" said Denzil dreamily. "It was like nothing else ever seen or imagined!" "If she were your wife, would you care for her to dance before people?" inquired Helen tremblingly. Denzil turned upon her in haughty wrath. "How like a woman that is! To insinuate a nasty suggestion—to imply an innuendo without uttering it! If she were my wife, she would do nothing unbecoming that position." "Then you did think it a little unbecoming?" persisted Helen. "No, I did NOT!" said Denzil sharply. "An independent woman may do many things that a married woman may not. Marriage brings its own duties and responsibilities,—time enough to consider them when they come." He turned angrily on his heel and left her, and Helen, burying her fair face in her hands, wept long and unrestrainedly. This "strange woman out of Egypt" had turned her brother's heart against her, and stolen away her almost declared lover. It was no wonder that her tears fell fast, wrung from her with the pain of this double wound; for Helen, though quiet and undemonstrative, had fine feelings and unsounded depths of passion in her nature, and the fatal attraction she felt for Armand Gervase was more powerful than she had herself known. Now that he had openly confessed his infatuation for another woman, it seemed as though the earth had opened at her feet and shown her nothing but a grave in which to fall. Life—empty and blank and bare of love and tenderness, stretched before her imagination; she saw herself toiling along the monotonously even road of duty till her hair became gray and her face thin and wan and wrinkled, and never a gleam again of the beautiful, glowing, romantic passion that for a short time had made her days splendid with the dreams that are sweeter than all realities. Poor Helen! It was little marvel that she wept as all women weep when their hearts are broken. It is so easy to break a heart; sometimes a mere word will do it. But the vanishing of the winged Love-god from the soul is even more than heart-break,—it is utter and irretrievable loss,—complete and dominating chaos out of which no good thing can ever be designed or created. In our days we do our best to supply the place of a reluctant Eros by the gilded, grinning Mammon-figure which we try to consider as superior to any silver-pinioned god that ever descended in his rainbow car to sing heavenly songs to mortals; but it is an unlovely substitute,—a hideous idol at best; and grasp its golden knees and worship it as we will, it gives us little or no comfort in the hours of strong temptation or trouble. We have made a mistake—we, in our progressive generation,—we have banished the old sweetnesses, triumphs and delights of life, and we have got in exchange steam and electricity. But the heart of the age clamors on unsatisfied,—none of our "new" ideas content it—nothing pacifies its restless yearning; it feels—this great heart of human life—that it is losing more than it gains, hence the incessant, restless aching of the time, and the perpetual longing for something Science cannot teach,—something vague, beautiful, indefinable, yet satisfying to every pulse of the soul; and the nearest emotion to that divine solace is what we in our higher and better moments recognize as Love. And Love was lost to Helen Murray; the choice pearl had fallen in the vast gulf of Might-have-been, and not all the forces of Nature would ever restore to her that priceless gem. And while she wept to herself in solitude, and her brother Denzil wandered about in the gardens of the hotel, encouraging within himself hopes of winning the bewitching Ziska for a wife, Armand Gervase, shut up in his room under plea of slight indisposition, reviewed the emotions of the past night and tired to analyze them. Some men are born self-analysts, and are able to dissect their feelings by some peculiar form of mental surgery which finally leads them to cut out tenderness as though it were a cancer, love as a disease, and romantic aspirations as mere uncomfortable growths injurious to self-interest, but Gervase was not one of these. Outwardly he assumed more or less the composed and careless demeanor of the modern French cynic, but inwardly the man was a raging fire of fierce passions which were sometimes too strong to be held in check. At the present moment he was prepared to sacrifice everything, even life itself, to obtain possession of the woman he coveted, and he made no attempt whatever to resist the tempest of desire that was urging him on with an invincible force in a direction which, for some strange and altogether inexplicable reason, he dreaded. Yes, there was a dim sense of terror lurking behind all the wild passion that filled his soul—a haunting, vague idea that this sudden love, with its glowing ardor and intoxicating delirium, was like the brilliant red sunset which frequently prognosticates a night of storm, ruin and death. Yet, though he felt this presentiment like a creeping shudder of cold through his blood, it did not hold him back, or for a moment impress him with the idea that it might be better to yield no further to this desperate love-madness which enthralled him. Once only, he thought, "What if I left Egypt now—at once—and saw her no more?" And then he laughed scornfully at the impossibility proposed. "Leave Egypt!" he muttered, "I might as well leave the world altogether! She would draw me back with those sweet wild eyes of hers,—she would drag me from the uttermost parts of the earth to fall at her feet in a very agony of love. My God! She must have her way and do with me as she will, for I feel that she holds my life in her hands!" As he spoke these last words half aloud, he sprang up from the chair in which he had been reclining, and stood for a moment lost in frowning meditation. "My life in her hands!" he repeated musingly. "Yes, it has come to that! My life!" A great sigh broke from him. "My life—my art—my work—my name! In all these things I have taken pride, and she—she can trample them under her feet and make of me nothing more than man clamoring for woman's love! What a wild world it is! What a strange Force must that be which created it!—the Force that some men call God and others Devil! A strange, blind, brute Force!—for it makes us aspire only to fall; it gives a man dreams of ambition and splendid attainment only to fling him like a mad fool on a woman's breast, and bid him find there, and there only, the bewildering sweetness which makes everything else in existence poor and tame in comparison. Well, well—my life! What is it? A mere grain of sand dropped in the sea; let her do with it as she will. God! How I felt her power upon me last night,—last night when her lithe figure swaying in the dance reminded me …" He paused, startled at the turn his own thoughts were taking. "Of what? Let me try and express to myself now what I could not express or realize last night. She—Ziska—I thought was mine,—mine from her dimpled feet to her dusky hair,—and she danced for me alone. It seemed that the jewels she wore upon her rounded arms and slender ankles were all love-gifts from me—every circlet of gold, every starry, shining gem on her fair body was the symbol of some secret joy between us—joy so keen as to be almost pain. And as she danced, I thought I was in a vast hall of a majestic palace, where open colonnades revealed wide glimpses of a burning desert and deep blue sky. I heard the distant sound of rolling drums, and not far off I saw the Sphinx—a creature not old but new—resting upon a giant pedestal and guarding the sculptured gate of some great temple which contained, as I then thought, all the treasures of the world. I could paint the picture as I saw it then! It was a fleeting impression merely, conjured up by the dance that dizzied my brain. And that song of the Lotus-lily! That was strange—very strange, for I thought I had heard it often before,—and I saw myself in the vague dream, a prince, a warrior, almost a king, and far more famous in the world than I am now!" He looked about him uneasily, with a kind of nervous terror, and his eyes rested for a moment on the easel where the picture he had painted of the Princess was placed, covered from view by a fold of dark cloth. "Bah!" he exclaimed at last with a forced laugh, "What stupid fancies fool me! It is all the vague talk of that would-be learned ass, Dr. Dean, with his ridiculous theories about life and death. I shall be imagining I am his fad, Araxes, next! This sort of thing will never do. Let me reason out the matter calmly. I love this woman,—love her to absolute madness. It is not the best kind of love, maybe, but it is the only kind I am capable of, and such as it is, she possesses it all. What then? Well! We go to-morrow to the Pyramids, and we join her at the Mena House, I and the poor boy Denzil. He will try his chance—I mine. If he wins, I shall kill him as surely as I myself live,—yes, even though he is Helen's brother. No man shall snatch Ziska from my arms and continue to breathe. If I win, it is possible he may kill me, and I shall respect him for trying to do it. But I shall satisfy my love first; Ziska will be mine—mine in every sense of possession,—before I die. Yes, that must be—that will have to be. And afterwards,—why let Denzil do his worst; a man can but die once." He drew the cloth off his easel and stared at the strange picture of the Princess, which seemed almost sentient in its half-watchful, half-mocking expression. "There is a dead face and a living one on this canvas," he said, "and the dead face seems to enthral me as much as the living. Both have the same cruel smile,—both the same compelling magnetism of eye. Only it is a singular thing that I should know the dead face even more intimately than the living—that the tortured look upon it should be a kind of haunting memory—horrible—ghastly. …" He flung the cloth over the easel again impatiently, and tried to laugh at his own morbid imagination. "I know who is responsible for all this nonsense," he said. "It is that ridiculous little half-mad faddist, Dr. Dean. He is going to the Mena House, too. Well!—he will be the witness of a comedy or a tragedy there,—and Heaven alone knows which it will be!" And to distract his thoughts from dwelling any longer on the haunting ideas that perplexed him, he took up one of the latest and frothiest of French novels and began to read. Some one in a room not far off was singing a French song,—a man with a rich baritone voice,—and unconsciously to himself Gervase caught the words as they rang out full and clearly on the quiet, heated air— O toi que j'ai tant aimee Songes-tu que je t'aime encor? Et dans ton ame alarmee, Ne sens-tu pas quelque remord? Viens avec moi, si tu m'aimes, Habiter dans ces deserts; Nous y vivrons pour nous memes, Oublies de tout l'univers! And something like a mist of tears clouded his aching eyes as he repeated, half mechanically and dreamily— O toi que j'ai tant aimee, Songes-tu que je t'aime encor? <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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