Chapter III: The Betrothal

In the wooded slopes on the Asian side of the Bosphorus it was a sultry evening of midsummer. The sun had already descended behind the mountains of Thrace, in a deep glow which was reflected in the glassy sea. A single worshipper was prostrated before the chief ikon in the tiny shrine of St. Demetrius that stood in the forest not far from the house of Craterus the Laconian. The humble dome, lit only by one struggling lamp beneath the image, was dark and silent. The eye that had become accustomed to the gloom could have perceived at last the figure of a girl at her devotions, completely enveloped in a long, dark cloak. "Mother of God, be of help to Anastasia," she murmured again and again; then she listened, now she waited in silence, and at last she drew furtively from her bosom a slip of writing that had been flung at sunset into the open casement of her chamber--"Be to-night at the shrine of Demetrius."

Yes, at last a light step was heard; and though she forbore to raise her eyes from the altar and remained in prostration before it, the worshipper's eager ear perceived the alert pace of a man who swiftly came up beside her. It was the tall and graceful youth whose wound she had tended, now restored to health, in all the glow of his young beauty and the graceful assurance of his high estate. He was again in hunting garb, but round his neck and on his fingers glittered jewels which even to the rustic eye of Anastasia seemed worthy of a king's son; and his dagger was of the most exquisite Damascene work mounted with precious stones and enamel. He raised her from the ground with smiles of mingled triumph and admiration, as if he were a young god who had descended to toy with an earthly lover. "I told you, my nymph of the woodman's hermitage, that we should meet again. And now that they have put back into my veins all the blood that I lost that night, I come to present my thanks to the beautiful nurse to whom I owe my life. Tell me, my lovely wood-nymph, what gift would please thee most." And, without waiting for an answer, he threw his powerful arm round the girl and pressed on her lips a passionate kiss.

Anastasia flung herself out of his arms and started back, the long, dark cloak falling from her shoulders to the ground. She stood there in flowing robes of pure-white gauze that clung to her rounded form and made her look like the Virgin as she stood abashed and listened to the angel at the Annunciation. Her bosom heaved with emotion and indignation; her cheek was pale but lovely in its pallor, her eyes glowed with fire, and her open lips seemed to tremble with unspoken words. At last she found voice to speak: "Forbear, rude man, to insult a maiden whom our Lady of Mount Damatrys has taken under her holy keeping." The gay youth laughed aloud. "Why, my forest beauty, I thought you knew me! I am Romanus, son of the Basileus, at your service, to give you whatever you please to ask--be it jewels, robes, or charms, but in any case the love of a king's son," he murmured, seizing her again, and with a look of genuine rapture.

"This to me, thy consecrated maiden, O Holy Theotokos!" shrieked Anastasia, with an air of frantic disdain, as she sank to the pavement and flung herself down sobbing before the image of the saint. Her agony and outraged modesty quite touched the young Cæsar, who, profligate as he had already become, was still very young and had gentle feelings by nature. In all his experience of the houris of the palace and the city, he had met nothing like this before, and the sight of such wonderful beauty, united to such miraculous modesty, filled him with a new love, such as he had never dreamed of in all the adventures of his gay young life. "Nay," he said, at last, after trying in vain to alleviate her sobs, "I mean not to offer you any offence, nor am I such a brute as could give a moment's pain to the loveliest woman in my father's empire--to her who has saved my life. Anastasia, I have loved you since that hour when you seemed to have come down like the angel who comforts a dying man. I love you now; I love you to distraction. I would fling away empire itself if I might keep you. I swear by our own St. Stephen of the Daphne that I will give thee a palace near the Augusteum, and thou shalt have the establishment of a princess. I will have thee acknowledged by the palace as the chosen love of Cæsar; and when I am autocrator myself thou shalt ask of me what thou wilt, O thou most lovely and dearest of women! I will--"

"Ah, saints in heaven, and thou, Holy Mother of God!" shrieked Anastasia again, with a fresh outburst of convulsive sobs, "must I listen to such insults? If thou art, indeed, Romanus, son of Constantine Born-in-the-Purple, thou knowest not to whom thou darest to offer thy dishonorable love. No breath of scandal has ever tainted me or mine. My birth is, indeed, far above thine, proud as thou boastest thine. My ancestors were kings in Greece when all in this land were barbarians. My blood for a thousand years has run in royal houses--fallen, despoiled, forgotten, but pure as the snow on Mount Olympus. Who was thy great-grandfather's sire, O Romanus of the race of Basil the Macedonian? Did he know himself--did any man know--or his own mother? And thou, his direct descendant, offerest outrages to me, the daughter of a hundred kings, the chosen maiden of Our Lady here!"--and she sank back exhausted with her passion, sobbing aloud--"because I am lonely, poor, an orphan, and unprotected by man, though watched over by the Queen of Heaven above."

And here she broke away with a faint scream; and, whirling around her limbs the flowing draperies of white gauze, like a mænad chased by a satyr, she rushed across the chapel, and, dashing into a small, dark oratory at the other side, she seemed to seize the ikon of Our Lady with her hand as if claiming sanctuary of her patron divinity.

Romanus followed her as soon as his eyes could detect her in her retreat; and, panting with his effort, he cried: "Anastasia, listen to me again, and forgive my words of mad love! I swear by the saints above that I will make you my wife, so soon as I am seated on the golden throne," gasped Romanus, now wild with love, passion, and excitement.

"Swear that we are betrothed this moment in the sight of God and His saints. Swear it with thy hand placed on the ikon of Our Lady here, as God shall save thy soul in the last judgment. Swear thus--'I, Romanus, take thee, Anastasia, for my wedded wife, till death do us part.' Swear it with thy hand on this ikon, made, as thou knowest, by no earthly hand. Swear as I tell thee, or never see me again!"

Mad with love and half intoxicated with adventure as he was, Romanus uttered the sacramental words half in jest and half in earnest; he hardly knew what he was doing. And as he spoke, the venerable hermit whose cell adjoined the chapel, a priest who had long forsaken the world, stepped forth in his ceremonial robes from the dark corner in which he had been on his face at his devotions quite concealed from view. "Amen, amen," the venerable man of God said, with profound solemnity in the ritual chant. "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. My son and my daughter, go your ways in peace. Ye are betrothed husband and spouse. May Mary the Divine Mother and St. Demetrius guide ye both in blessed wedlock."

And as he spoke Anastasia slipped back into the arms of her old nurse, Charmion, who was holding her cloak hard by in another dark corner of the chapel. The hermit and the two women passed noiselessly out into the night; and the young Romanus stood alone in the dark chapel, revolving in his mind what it meant and what was to be the end of this amour. He had caught sight of the girl already once or twice in the three months that had passed during his convalescence, but always in presence of her nurse or father, and he felt himself to have sunk madly in love with her marvellous beauty and queenly air. Of a truth, she could be no burgher's daughter: he had already heard vague rumors about Craterus and his royal ancestors. And where had he seen that old hermit who had so mysteriously sprung up out of the dark cell beside the altar of Our Lady? He thought he had once before met those foxlike eyes and that lofty brow. But the long, white beard and priestly robes? Priest, monk, hermit! Had he sworn wedlock before the priest of the Most High? Betrothed! Married! Was it a jest or something more? And the wild lad laughed, and then he drew a deep sigh, and then again he laughed, and as he left the sacred spot he swore a deep oath by the saint to whom he never was forsworn that Anastasia should be his, come what might. And as he passed on to his attendants who waited for him in the copse hard by he determined to call to his counsels the chamberlain, the Lord Theodore, whose skill in intrigue he knew to be unrivalled, and of whose fidelity to himself he was entirely assured.

The lord chamberlain listened carefully to the story of the young prince's adventure and asked him again and again to repeat exactly what had passed. But the youth was in a state of transport and excitement so wild that the true facts were only drawn out of his memory by degrees. "It would be too great a risk," said the courtier at last, "to stir up a scandal in connection with the shrine of St. Demetrius so near to the city which holds this particular ikon in such awe. And if the girl still resists all promises and gifts, your Imperial Highness would be wise to think of her no more."

"Never! never!" shouted the prince, in a passion; "I will give up the throne itself, my life, my chance of heaven, but not this girl, whom I have sworn by St. Stephen of the Daphne to make my wife."

"Surely not!" said Lord Theodore, now in genuine alarm. "How often has the patriarch, in confession, warned your Highness against being forsworn by that saint of all others! But tell me precisely the words that passed. You never have vowed marriage in presence of a witness?"

And now the youth, sobered by the evident anxiety of the wily courtier, rehearsed all the circumstances and the words spoken in presence of the hermit who had pronounced at the altar the fatal words of the betrothal, as the old nurse would witness.

"And the old hermit betrothed you two, if he did not actually marry you to the woman?" stammered out the chamberlain; and he struck his forehead in dismay as he muttered, "God in heaven help us!" For he well knew the close confidence that existed between the hermit of St. Demetrius and the venerable patriarch of Constantinople. He well knew also how deeply the patriarch abhorred the character and parasites of the young prince, and how gladly the bold and sincere high-priest of Hagia Sophia would see the succession of Romanus fail or be set aside. Even the experienced craft of Theodore did not suspect the identity of the hermit, and he never doubted for an instant that the old priest of St. Demetrius thoroughly understood and would use all the power over the court which the incident had given him.

"If, indeed, the sacramental words of marriage, or even of betrothal, have been pronounced before and by such a holy man as the hermit, and one so deeply reverenced in the city, the case is assuredly fit for all our care and thought," at last murmured the chamberlain. Should he not himself promote this intrigue? He reflected. He had heard much already of the surpassing beauty of Anastasia, of her consummate grace and adroitness, and of all her pretension to royal birth in Greece. He began to run over in his mind the marvellous history of humble beauties who had mounted the throne of the Sacred Palace. He saw, as in a vision, how he, Theodore, might rule supreme in a new reign if he could bind to himself the infatuated prince and this lovely but utterly untutored girl as his wife. And he well knew that the title and the reign of Constantine Born-in-the-Purple were running down fast into their final sands.

And so the lord chamberlain escorted homeward his young lord and his apt pupil, himself deeply meditating on the future and its vast possibilities, while the love-sick prince lay silent in his barge on the moonlit water, wrapt in delicious reveries as he recalled every word and look of his betrothed and pressed to his lips the kerchief that he had snatched from her bosom when he held her in his arms.