CHAPTER XXVIII - SELF-CONDEMNED

As the sun is to the springtime, so was Vedrona's presence to Æna. The pleasure and enjoyment of life was increased tenfold to the slave in the company of her royal mistress. The infatuation had become so complete that it was nothing unusual for the girl to steal from the side of the soundly-sleeping Zillah and creep noiselessly back to the room of the Princess, where she would sit in wrapt contemplation of the sleeper for a time, then return to enjoy her rest the more by reason of the tribute of her faithful devotion.

The thought that something might be required of her was always an antidote against sleep with Æna, and though she had been so confidently assured that there would be no further occasion for her presence to­night, she was pleased to hope that an unforeseen necessity might arise, therefore she waited until her wish began to give place to a sense of disappointment, then, like a guilty soul, she cautiously crept into the scene of death.

We know the result.

A sudden surprise will oftentimes produce almost miraculous effects. Just so the cyclone of horror with which Æna rushed into the presence of Glarces and Tasha cleft the stupor of the Prince far more effectually than all the affectionate treatment or the wounded suspicion of his foster­mother.

In her wild agony the girl neither anticipated nor had interest to notice his presence, and the crowd of excited followers who sought to learn the cause of the alarm naturally regarded his silence and confusion as the result of her injudicious announcement, therefore was he undesignedly shielded, and left to bear the first effects of the blow in the considerate care of his trusted valet. The guards without would protect him from intrusion until someone in authority could summon such courage as could minister to his sorrow.

But the brief respite Casca had counselled him to give to the old Glarces was over, and he had returned to find himself surrounded by the irreparable ruins of every fondly cherished hope. Principle, honour, love and life, all gone - shattered and irretrievably lost! His divine ideal broken, his reputation blasted, his sister cruelly murdered! And all by his own hand. Never had a more disastrous crisis fallen to the lot of man! The consummation was too horribly complete to be the creature or sport of the imagination. The outrageous romance of nightmare was not equal to the creation of such a horror! It left no doubt about its reality if only by reason of its unparalleled enormity!

No wonder he was silent-dumbfounded! We can also excuse the crowd for mistaking his bewilderment for the paralysis of grief.

But did he not really suffer so? It was not the yielding, intoxicated victim and tool of Casca and Lais who stood before them. This new Glarces had been subdued by treachery, lured into the net spread for his unwary feet, had drunk the maddening draught, and, fired by its jealousy, had struck a double-edged blow reaching to the devastation of the kingdom, then hied away amid a chorus of fiendish applause to watch the consternation he had wrought. The old Glarces - with his inflexible sense of honour, justice and equity - was himself again, and at the tribunal of his own bar of inexorable rectitude he proceeded to arraign himself for judgment.

When the last of the excited crowd had gone, Orasus took him by the arm, and indicated the advisability of his lying down, but did not venture to speak.

“Let me alone, Orasus,” he replied, with a heart-broken, tremulous plea, “and if the gods have so much pity, or the furies have so much power as to slay me, make no attempt to interfere with either. It were better a thousand times that I should die than live to spread the poison of my presence. Yet, whither could I go?” he asked himself.

He had, however, thrown himself down while speaking, and the slave, not understanding his language, gave to it the most sympathetic interpretation, and was, so far as circumstances would permit, satisfied with the succeeding quiet which he hoped would lead to sleep.

With his arms folded tightly across his eyes Glarces lay, sternly prosecuting the charge against himself. We know something of his nature, how he was ever ready to depreciate himself in the generous confidence he placed in the goodness of others. It has already been hinted that the abnormal development of this trait in his character amounted almost to a deformity, but never hitherto had it so blinded him to the real appreciation of facts as at this fatal juncture of his history. His self­examination began with a recognition of his own guilt, and from the first he disdained the cowardice of seeking to find even the smallest contributing influence in the action of another. Harking back to his familiar habit of thought he recalled his frequent contention that once in the life of every man there comes a test of supreme importance, when every cherished ideal, principle and aspect of truth is cast into the crucible of temptation and assayed in the discriminating presence of the gods. In such assize every secret motive is laid bare, every fibre of the man tested and strained, now in one direction, then in another, to discover if worthy to receive the divine approbation. How often had he, in the days gone by, taken pleasure in pointing out such weaknesses in the nature of others and counselled their correction; now the trial had come to himself, the censor, and it had not only brought one unexpected blemish to light, but the whole character had broken to pieces - the whole life was proved to be a worse than wretched hypocrisy. The moralist at heart was proved to be outrageously vicious, the judge was himself a criminal, and the man who talked of charity was discovered to have both hands steeped in innocent blood.

But in strict justice would it not be found that Lais was in a certain measure responsible, and that he, by so much, ought to be exonerated?

His soul rose in immediate rebellion against such an accusation. Had he hitherto been willing to allow that Lais possessed a clearer vision of the purposes of the gods than given to himself? If the first trial of his strength was ordained to be made in the subtle discrimination between old wine and new - for in this he plainly saw was to be found the origin of all that had taken place - was it to be expected that she should discern the closely veiled significance more than he? Had such been the case and she cautioned him, to have been apprised of the purpose of the gods would have robbed the trial of its force, and hence its merit if resisted. Rather did his failure prove his own neglect to watch, his infidelity and empty profession of all he had advocated. Had Lais only conceived the barest suspicion of the facts he was confident she would have cried aloud - have sacrificed herself, if need be, in order to save him. If but a suspicion of the part the gods had destined for her to play had crossed her mind she would have pointed it out to him, though she had braved the tortures of Tartarus in doing so. The bare thought of such a baseless and outrageous calumny towards her indicated the depth of the depravity which had existed - though unsuspected - in his mind; it revealed to him the horrible possibilities of hypocrisy which may lie concealed, even from ourselves, by the fallacious veneer of prejudice and self-deception.

So this excursus in search of extenuating circumstances ended by increasing the enormity of his crime. Vedrona was dead - there was no doubt of that; Lais was lost to him - how dare he hope to retain even a consideration at her hands; he could not look upon his mother again; and the people who had made so much of him would henceforth execrate his name.

Oh, what a relief it would be to die! But if such a coveted exit could be discovered would he find the promise of relief to be realised, or would it prove to be an ignis fatum luring him on to even greater suffering? How confidently had he expounded the idea that love is the brightest, noblest, purest altitude of immortality, while passion crashes the soul downward into the bottomless pit of love's antithesis. With the sweet divinity of such affection Vedrona had loved him, and while he had persuaded himself it was returned with equal, even stronger devotion, he now found the restraining influence she so often regretted was not his nobler ideal, but rather the incompetence of unsuspected hypocrisy. What an awful revelation was contained in that one look of unutterable forgiveness, but eternal farewell, from which he fled when falling into the abyss of despair! Only now did he begin to comprehend something of its fearful, unendurable portent! The vision of the impassable gulf which would henceforth keep them apart was beginning to rise upon him - the recognition that he was for ever separated from her for whom his heart hungered - without whom he could not live. But oh - horrible thought - he had sacrificed the power to die!

What could he do? Suppose his mother and Lais, by the memory of their former love for him, should in mistaken kindness, save him from the merited punishment of his inhuman act, where should he go? He must be a wanderer from home, friends, people and nation, with no companion save his ever-accusing and never silent conscience. The one desire of his pilgrimage would be death, from which his soul would be affrighted by the consciousness that it could only increase his agony. In hunger, thirst, cold and heat he must go on, footsore, sick and weary, but afraid to rest or sleep because the hands of men and the desire of beasts would be against him, seeking to exact the penalty he had incurred, and hurry him into the more exquisite torture of the beyond. And when, at length, the one great and irresistible demand was made upon him, in some unknown region, far away from home and friends, he would fall, with no one to whisper “Peace” or breathe a word of hope, and hungry brutes would turn away with sickening disgust, refusing to make a meal of such accursed flesh.

But after that? Now the supreme torture of his inexorable penalty rose before him in the long eternal night with out a single ray of hope. In comparison with this the suffering of his wandering was like the softening glow of a summer's twilight succeeded by the howling tempest of pitiless winter. It would begin in the lack of a funeral pyre to set his spirit free, and with every other sense merged into that of feeling he would be compelled to linger, a powerless, un-befriended ghost, unresistingly carried hither and thither where earth could inflict the greatest pain upon him! Hope, desire, rest, promise - everything gone but pain! And yet there would be one desire left to him at intervals - coming when other circumstances failed to maintain the inevitable crescendo of his agony. It would be to catch only one brief glance of his sister - only to be assured that she was safe. He would not ask to speak to her, or that she should speak to him; but if the gods would grant him the knowledge of her peace it would strengthen him to endure his unending penance. Even though she might recall her forgiveness the thought of her happiness would comfort him! But at such a time fate would mock and remind him that he could not hope, since hope for him would be dead! In the feverish throes of such a sea of despair he was tossed from wave to wave, until the moaning pain-throbs surged with a suffocating, dreamy monotony, and his overstrained suffering died into unconsciousness, as the billows rolled him into the arms of sleep where outraged Nature took a long revenge.