'No, indeed, Your Highness. I feel perfectly well now.'
Nakshidil nodded and turned to look across the arm of the sea to where the clouds were piling up over the hills of Scutari.
'Summer is nearly over,' she observed with a touch of sadness. 'The weather is changing and we shall probably have rain tomorrow. It will be good for the crops because the land is parched but after that will be the winter. It can be bitterly cold here and I dread it… But we will forget all that now. Tell me about yourself.'
'Me? But there is nothing interesting about me, Your Highness, except insofar as I am the mouthpiece of Napoleon.'
The sultana put up her hand with a gesture of impatience.
'Let's leave your emperor for the present. His turn will come, although I cannot see what is to be said about him. Whatever you may think, I find you much more interesting than the great Napoleon. And so I want to know all about you. Tell me of your life.'
'My—my life?'
'Yes, the whole of your life! As though I were your mother.'
'But, Your Highness, it is a long story—'
'Never mind. We have the night before us. But I want to know—everything! There are so many stories about you already and I like to get at the truth. Besides, I am your cousin and would like to be your friend. Don't you need a friend who has some power?'
The sultana's silky little hand was laid on Marianne's, but she was already responding impulsively: 'Oh, yes!' It was spoken with such feeling that her companion smiled and was confirmed in her initial conviction that this young and ravishingly lovely creature stood in desperate need of help. Accustomed by the perilous life she had been forced to lead in this palace before becoming the mistress of it, to watch the slightest change of expression in the faces of others with a closeness on which her very life might depend, Nakshidil had been struck from Marianne's first appearance by the drawn look on her lovely face and by the unconscious pathos of her great green eyes. Napoleon's envoy was very far from anything she had expected.
The rumors which had been going around the Mediterranean in the past weeks had created a fantastic picture of a bold courtesan, a kind of boudoir Messalina, decked out by the emperor her lover in a princess's crown, hardened in every kind of trickery and cunning and ready to stop at nothing, however flagrant, to ensure the success of her mission. Face to face with the reality, it had not taken the sultana long to realize that this picture was a complete fantasy, a mere caricature concocted by the Foreign Office which had nothing to do with reality.
It was a caricature, moreover, which had been causing her a good deal of secret annoyance. The Princess Sant'Anna was a kinswoman, if a distant one, and it was tiresome to have such unpleasant things said about a member of her own family. Consequently, a wish to form her own opinion had played no small part in her decision to grant the accused an audience. Now she wanted to hear all about this strange, beautiful young woman who seemed to bear a burden too heavy for her, yet bore it with pride.
Marianne began, a little shyly and reticently, to give a brief, superficial sketch of her past life but yielded little by little to her companion's very evident sympathy and understanding. Strange as the events of her own life had been so far, Nakshidil's far outdid them, for it was a much longer road from a convent in Nantes to the harem of the Grand Signior and a position of absolute power than from Selton Hall to the Palazzo Sant'Anna, even by the way of Napoleon's bed.
When she fell silent at last, she found that she had described it all down to the smallest detail and that it must be very late because the silence that lay all about the little terrace where the two women sat was much deeper than it had been. The noises of the city had died away and from the sea there came only the gentle slap of the waves and the measured tread of the guards at the seraglio gates.
The sultana, for her part, had not moved. She sat so still in fact that Marianne had the sudden, unnerving thought that she had fallen asleep. But she was only lost in thought, for a moment later Marianne heard her sigh.
'You've done a great many more stupid things than I ever did, for I only went where my fate directed, but I can't see that anyone could possibly blame you. When I think about it, love is to blame. It is love that has brought you both great suffering and great exaltation, set you on the strange road which has brought you to me.'
'Your Highness!' Marianne said, stammering a little. 'I beg you will not judge me too harshly—'
Nakshidil sighed again; then suddenly she laughed.
'Judge you? My poor child! Say rather that I envy you.'
'Envy me?'
'Why, yes! You have beauty, nobility, a famous name, you have wits and courage and you have that most precious and fragile of all gifts: youth. And more than that, you have love. I know, you are going to tell me that love has brought you little joy and that just at this moment you could well do without it, but even so it is there, driving you on and filling your life, coursing with the youth in your veins. And then you are free, you have the right to do what you will with your own life, even to destroy yourself if you like, in pursuit of this love of yours. The whole world is open to you. Yes, I envy you. You can never know how much I envy you.'
'Your Highness!' Marianne said, startled by the depth of sadness and regret in the soft voice, schooled to years of whispers.
But Nakshidil did not hear her. The story told her by her visitor had carved a breach in the wall in which her spirit was imprisoned, and all her regrets, her aching desires, came pouring through it like the pounding seas through a broken dike.
'Do you know what it means,' she went on, more softly still, 'do you know what it means to be twenty years old and to learn about love in an old man's arms? To dream of wide open spaces, of sailing the seas and galloping with the morning breeze on your face, of nights under huge, free skies, listening to the singing of the blacks and breathing in the scents of the islands—only to wake and find yourself in a cage among scheming eunuchs and an army of stupid, vindictive women with the souls of slaves? Do you know what it is to be always longing for a young man's love, for a young man's arms about you, strong and eager, as you lie on your silken cushions in the lonely room whence they take you from time to time to the bed of a man too old to make the contrast anything but bitter… And all this, year after mortal year—the years that might have been the richest and warmest of your life?'
'Do you—do you mean that you have never known—love?' Marianne murmured, at once stricken and incredulous.
The fair head stirred and the movement, slight as it was, drew a flash from the huge rose diamond that adorned it.
'I have known the love of Selim. He was the son of my husband, old Abdul Hamid. He was young, certainly —and he loved me with such passion that he chose to die to save me, me and my son, when the usurper Mustapha and the janissaries swept through the palace. There was much warmth in his love and I was very fond of him, but as for the burning passion I might have known with—with another who filled my dreams when I was fifteen, the fever of love, the need to give and to take, no—those are things I have never known. So, little girl, forget your sufferings, forget all that you have endured because you still have the chance and the right to fight for your happiness. I will help you.'
'Your Highness is very good, but it is not right for me to think only of the man I love. You forget that I am to bear a child, a child who would raise an impassable barrier between us, even if I could ever find him again.'
'That is true. I was forgetting that terrible experience of yours and its consequences. We must find a remedy for those as well. You don't want to keep the child, do you? If I understood you rightly—'
'I hate it, Your Highness, just as I hated the man who fathered it. It is like a monstrous, loathsome thing inside me, feeding on my flesh and blood.'
'I understand. But at this late stage abortion would be dangerous. Your best course would be to retire to one of my houses and live there in seclusion until the child is born. I will take charge of it after that, and I promise you that you will never hear of it again. I will have it brought up by people of my own.'
But Marianne shook her head. She was not prepared to spend the next few months in waiting for an event which both frightened and disgusted her. As for the dangers the sultana had mentioned, she was well aware of them but feared them much less than the thought of living for five months cut off from all possibility of finding Jason again.
'I will have them begin the search for this American privateer of yours first thing in the morning,' Nakshidil
