Chapter 24
First Attempts

ate in the night, unable to sleep, Magenta went out into the garden where black hollyhock grew in abundance, clinging to and consuming the stone walls. The air was burdened with the perfume of many flowers, some of which only bloom under moonlight. The seductions of their scent, haunting and unsettling, mingled with the stillness of the night and induced a dim sense of longing and disquiet to any unfortunate enough to inhale the bitter sweetness of their commingled perfumes, which conveyed an elusive sense of some forbidden and hidden qualities.

Magenta drifted listlessly through the lonely, enclosed garden, her quiet carriage like the slow gentle sweeping of a breeze. It was not a prim establishment with well-tended flower beds but was dark and overgrown, choked with plants that seemed to mourn and to shy from flaunting their graces. Yet the garden was of uncommon beauty, its vanities characterised by a sweetness, shaded with sorrow, and subdued by resignation rather than passionate life.

However, not all the garden was in sedate beauty. Lurking within the melancholy was a sting of treachery. Plants were apt to seize and torment any who ventured too near. Their caustic flesh would sting and irritate and burn. Not all the perfumes which sweetened the air were kind. Many were decidedly injurious, burdening the air, verging on the excessive. Yet the very worst was not to be wholly despised. Its attributes often inspired sentiments of yearning and insufferable desire, tempting the organ of smell insatiably.

Resting in its shadow, a stranger leaned against the stone wall. The figure was hidden by darkness, but the stature and broadness of shoulder indicated it was a man. He watched the form of beauty in her every motion, eagerly, greedily.

As she approached, the unshaven, disheveled figure of the ranger languidly stepped out into view. “Four times I sent request to have you see me,” he began, hoping at once to gain her sympathy. “What a torment a woman can be!”

Magenta greeted him without smiling and waited for him to come forward to her, as she knew he would. She was dismayed to find herself alone with him but would not let him see. “The hour is late,” she said with a shade of reproof.

“And yet here you are,” he said, antagonistic, “wandering the garden, alone.” He moved toward her gradually, cautiously, so that she would not attempt an escape before he was near enough to prevent it. “I wasn’t expecting to speak with you until morning,” he said, as if addressing a long known friend.

“Perhaps I shall leave and not disappoint your expectations,” she replied but did not act upon the statement: although he made no such attempt, he positioned himself in such a way as to give her the impression that should she provoke such an action, he would lurch and seize her.

“I will not hold you here,” he said, as if her thoughts could be read plainly on her face. “But first I will plead that you stay awhile and listen. I wish to speak on a subject important to your future happiness.” He did not allow her look of mistrust to discourage him. “You will not ask me the nature of the subject?”

“My freedom?” she said. There was no sarcasm, but contempt and suspicion in her voice.

“Yes.” Fraomar smiled, though he was filled with a sore irritability. “Have you given consideration to my offer?”

“There is no need. Without reflection, my answer is the same as before.”

“You gave no answer before,” he said, then added as he came closer, “Now that we are alone, let us talk openly together.” His look urged her to mistrust him more wholly than she had previously.

“There is nothing to be said between us that has not already been spoken,” she said, removing herself from his reach and walking over to where a thick flowering vine grew, hanging down with insufferable indolence. Fraomar watched the delicate creature, feeling relaxed and calm. He felt now that he had her in the seclusion of the garden, with only himself and the plants, that he was in command of the situation. She could not put him off.

“Mind yourself,” she cautioned, “not to brush too close by them.”

He saw the plant of which she warned him, and with a smile, moved from its grasp. For a time he left her to herself, then to renew conversation said, “You are to see your father tomorrow?” His eyes looked to where a pretty flower hung carelessly near to her face. “Perhaps afterwards, for a short moment, you would permit me to see you, away from here?”

As he spoke he approached near. She did not withdraw but stood constrained, untouchable, her contemptuous eyes fastened on him. In his hand he materialized a dagger, swiftly cut down the pendulous blossom and took it in his hand. Then with a languid gesture, the same insufferable ease with which he conjured it, he dismissed the weapon with a smile on his face. He knew the use of magic at the temple was forbidden and took a strange pleasure in it. To Magenta he offered the flower, which she did not take. Despite her refusal, already his heart began to beat high with the hope of success. He felt from her the clinging, faltering resistance that precedes surrender.

The refused flower he did not toss aside, but instead, lowering his face, offered himself. He would, within plain sight, taste of her lips. He no longer cared. “They will not see,” he said, lifting his hand to caress her. She withdrew before the touch of rough fingers had chance even to brush her cheek.

“You forget yourself and the customs of my kind,” she said.

There was something that angered yet amused him about the lofty manner in which she disregarded his entreaties. With a peculiar, quivering smile, he bowed his face to the flower, caressing his lips with the soft petals. The scent made him shudder. It was hurtfully sweeter than she. From over the blossom he observed her in silence, and she remained the same elusive creature whose secret soul he could never touch. She did not meet his advances as he had hoped. She did not, however, succeed in making a man with such determination hopeless. He tossed the flower aside and said coldly, “It might assist you a little to estimate your obligations to the priestesshood, if you knew—”

“There is nothing you can tell me I don’t already know of their infamies,” she answered, equally as coldly.

“Then why remain with them? You cannot believe what is told to be anything but false. You know of what they do. Perhaps it is that your heart has turned as black as theirs?”

She did not answer, but as he looked at her it seemed to him that she was somehow defeated. Nevertheless, she did not lower her eyes.

He went up to her and, in a low voice, said, “I can take you away from all this; just speak the word.” His face was shrewd and intelligent, rather than tender and sympathetic. He already exulted in her capture.

Magenta wondered with dismay how she had fallen prey to such a man. It was not known quite what he was capable of, but that he was a man of uncommon gifts was plain.

“Why do you look alarmed?” he said, bewildered. “I cannot think of reasons for you to refuse.” He passed a hand over his brow. He began to suffer mildly. The odour of the flowers was oppressive. The untended plants had abundant disregard of space and the breathing of others, yet he could not have longed for space around them. He felt that now, within this moment, while alone, he must get her settled upon him.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice gentler. “What are your wishes? What aim do you pursue?” She remained before him, her dark, steady eyes fixed on his wild, excited ones. “I wish to know and understand you. I can help, if you would speak with me.” In excitement he drew forward an inch. “You recoil from me,” he said, almost amused. “If I didn’t know you well enough, I should think you were trying to play a game with me.”

The idolator kept close watch over his valuable prize. He knew she was mistrustful of him.

“I only ask that you allow me to ease your suffering,” he said in a tone he believed persuasive, then with horrid suggestiveness: “It won’t hurt, I swear.” He stretched forth a hand for her to come. When she did not, her cold response roused fitful gleams within the eyes previously voluptuous in their attention. “These words would lose their bitterness if you would but allow me a single chance,” he said, becoming intolerable.

He found it difficult to breathe the air, trying to inhale as little of the noxious vapours as possible. He began to feel their ill-effects. They did not affect her. She breathed with the same ease she would the purest air, and he knew her very blood must be tainted. “Let me take you from here,” he persisted. “Leave this place. It’s riddled with darkness and suffering. There’s nothing here for you but falsehoods and hopelessness. The very air you breathe is a malicious fume. There is no sensible reason to refuse, and I cannot believe you a fool …There is nothing here for you but death.”

Magenta stood as one paralyzed. She felt herself overcome with the same anguish that had seized upon her before at his speech.

“I know what you would say,” he ventured to speak in the absence of response. “You believe she will not allow it. She uses fear and despair to destroy all hope. But I know of places that are safe, where no one will know who you are, where she cannot find you. There is hope for you yet.”

“It’s long since I’ve had any hope,” Magenta answered sadly, cautious of him still.

“But why?” he asked, madly perplexed. “If you would come with me I could help you be at peace, start afresh!” After a time he added coolly, “I’m all you have—of that single truth you may be certain.”

“My hope does not rest on a single certainty,” Magenta said, at last regaining her self-possession. She remained distant and never let his strong hands get in reach of her. It was her preference to throw herself into the black water and be drowned rather than to have this man lay his hands on her.

He was dismayed that she was unkind to him and would not give him a chance. “Why do you stand so far away?” He looked to her with tormented eyes. She would not go to him, and he would not venture to force her. He was savage, prepared to resort to any form of cruelty to get his own way, but fear of the consequences such an action would produce paralyzed his yearning. “You know what I feel for you, do you not?” he inquired, helplessly.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps, then,” he continued, agitated, “you do not know the depths to which I feel it.” He swallowed with difficulty. His supreme request that she unveil the mysteries of her kind was so needful it hurt.

“I fear I do,” was the brief reply.

The pallor that overspread his countenance, the clench of his jaw, and the tremor in his voice, told at once she had touched a tender chord. “Then why do you keep from me? Why do you treat me with only contempt and coldness?” He watched her closely. She would not support the conversation, keeping always out of his reach.

“There is not sufficient audience to give reason for you to shun me as you do,” he said, his tone ever increasing in fervor, resentful of the reluctance she had shown him and the distress he suffered. Persistently he sniffed and rubbed his irritated eyes. His flesh felt prickly and twitchy. The ill-effects of the commingled perfumes had him in keen, aromatic pain. Their burning sweetness scalded the tongue and eyes with caustic severity. Another man would have been seized with violent sickness.

“Have you nothing to say?” he demanded finally, much excited that several of his attempts to renew the conversation were ineffectual. “You have yet to answer my question.”

“Would you have my answer?”

“Yes,” he said. “I would have it.”

Magenta looked at him long and steadily. “Then let it be understood that there is, and never can be, even a breath of hope beyond the notion of acquaintance for you and me.”

For a long moment Fraomar regarded her. His set smile belied the intense hate in his eyes. He despised and was infatuated with her within the same moment. He rubbed his eyes furiously. He began to suffer giddiness. The mingled scents seemed with deliberate and purposeful intent to get inside his brain and drive him to insanity.

“You think me unworthy of your esteem,” he said, his voice tight. “Perhaps there is another?”

The mere thought of another man’s attainment of the unattainable, roused in him a fierce jealousy, that by some perversity, increased by the impossibility of his own success, heightened his desire. His want for her unsatisfiable, he fought a mad desire to force from her some sign of feeling, anything but this aloof indifference.

Profoundly agitated, Fraomar had until now retained the appearance of self-command, when, seized with a sudden attack of weakness, he turned recklessly upon a hapless plant, tore it half-down and cried, “Tell me there is another, and I shall cut out his heart!”

His eyes were mad with suffering. A hot flame ran in his blood. He wanted to get hold of her. When she had roused him into a fit of madness he felt he would kill her. Magenta was struck with the sudden change that appeared in his countenance but remained unmoved.

“There is no other,” she said calmly.

Fraomar, believing that a heart such as hers had not the strength to bear the cold alone, was convinced there must be another. For a long while he looked into her face as if to reach into the very heart of her and uncover the secret love which she kept hidden there. Suddenly he drew very close to her, filled with the mad jealousy and the delusion of hope of one desperately infatuated.

“Then I would leave now, if I might carry with me a hope of being permitted to renew my sentiments—when you’ve had time enough to reconsider,” he said, trembling all over as he spoke. His eyes looked as if they hurt him. They burned and stung from emotion and from the torment of poisonous vapours.

“You have my answer,” replied Magenta. “Take it and be done with it.”

“I see I have nothing to hope for.” There was an expression of caustic despair on his countenance, but his defeat was false. Never before had he been denied, and he would not be denied her. Whether she wished it or not, he would tear from her the veil of mystery. “And you are to tell me there is no other?” he said doubtfully.

“There is no one.”

“That can be amended.”

“It has no need for amendment,” she said.

Her standing there like that, soft and passive, but unknown, untouchable, enraged him beyond measure. “I believe you are made of marble,” he said scornfully. He had grown white with anger. “You are to tell me you are sorrowless, without need and without fear?”

“I say none of those things,” she answered. “Only I wish not for companionship.”

Drunk on the garden’s perfume, the benighted ranger yielded at last to his passionate nature. His body was pained with an unmitigated longing, and with his body he expressed it. “Tonight at least you shall!” He broke forth with sudden violence, and seizing her, made an attempt to lay his wild lips on hers.

Swiftly she retreated out of arm’s length, and to his dismay, he discovered it impossible to follow. The black vines had made quick work round his arms and legs, preventing the forward movement he attempted. He had not perceived them creeping upon him. “Curse you!” he cried in a fury, with a face made of hate itself. He struggled against the snare with a force made of wounded pride, hatred, and desire unsatisfied. After a short minute he had exhausted himself and momentarily let his head droop in agonized defeat. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes, but she, turning to leave, did not see.

“Magenta,” he whimpered in a voice so meek, and so weakly uttered, it passed unheard. “Magenta, I’m sorry.” He had not intended to make his voice so pathetic. At last he cried: “Magenta!” He sent a desperate plea after her not to leave, but she did not heed his cries. A violent exclamation tore from his throat, and he wrenched his arm savagely in the viney ensnarement, as if he might tear it from its very roots. He wept as he spoke: “Those walls will be your grave! Death will find you alone and in darkness!”

His voice rang clear in the night and shook her bleak soul. He knew the very thing she feared would come to pass; she would be locked away within that terrible darkness, alone, hopeless, desolate, left to wither and deteriorate with no sympathetic soul to hear her cries. This gave him a strange satisfaction.