Clementina Part 25

Upon the other side of the carriage, Misset shouted through the window, "There is a spring by the roadside."

"Drive on," said Wogan.

Gaydon touched him on the arm.

"You will stifle her, man."

Wogan woke to a comprehension of his att.i.tude, and placed Clementina back on her seat. Mrs. Misset by good fortune had a small bottle of Carmelite water in her pocket; she held it to the Princess's nostrils, who in a little opened her eyes and saw her companions in tears about her, imploring her to wake.

"It is nothing," she said. "Take courage, my poor marmosets;" and with a smile she added, "There's my six feet four with the tears in his eyes. Did ever a woman have such friends?"

The sun came out in the sky as she spoke. They had topped the pa.s.s and were now driving down towards Italy. There was snow about them still on the mountain-sides and deep in drifts upon the roads. The air was musical with the sound of innumerable freshets: they could be seen leaping and sparkling in the sunlight; the valleys below were green with the young green of spring, and the winds were tempered with the warmth of Italy. A like change came upon the fugitives. They laughed, where before they had wept; from under the seat they pulled out chickens which Misset had cooked with his own hands at Nazareth, bottles of the wine of St. Laurent, and bread; and Wogan allowed a halt long enough to get water from a spring by the roadside.

"There is no salt," said Gaydon.

"Indeed there is," replied Misset, indignant at the aspersion on his catering. "I have it in my tobacco-box." He took his tobacco-box from his pocket and pa.s.sed it into the carriage. Clementina made sandwiches and pa.s.sed them out to the hors.e.m.e.n. The chickens turned out to be old c.o.c.ks, impervious to the soundest tooth. No one minded except Misset, who had brought them. The jolts of the carriage became matter for a jest. They picnicked with the merriment of children, and finally O'Toole, to show his contempt for the Emperor, fired off both his loaded pistols in the air.

At that Wogan's anxiety returned. He blazed up into anger. He thrust his head from the window.

"Is this your respect for her Highness?" he cried. "Is this your consideration?"

"Nay," interposed Clementina, "you shall not chide my six feet four."

"But he is mad, your Highness. I don't say but what a trifle of madness is salt to a man; but O'Toole's clean daft to be firing his pistols off to let the whole world know who we are. Here are we not six stages from Innspruck, and already we have lost twelve hours."

"When?"

"Last night, before we left Innspruck, between the time when you escaped from the villa and when I joined you in the avenue. I climbed out of the window to descend as I had entered, but the sentinel had returned. I waited on the window-ledge crouched against the wall until he should show me his back. After five minutes or so he did. He stamped on the snow and marched up the lane. I let myself down and hung by my hands, but he turned on his beat before I could drop. He marched back; I clung to the ledge, thinking that in the darkness he would pa.s.s on beneath me and never notice. He did not notice; but my fingers were frozen and numbed with the cold. I felt them slipping; I could cling no longer, and I fell. Luckily I fell just as he pa.s.sed beneath me; I dropped feet foremost upon his shoulders, and he went down without a cry. I left him lying stunned there on the snow; but he will be found, or he will recover. Either way our escape will be discovered, and no later than this morning. Nay, it must already have been discovered. Already Innspruck's bells are ringing the alarm; already the pursuit is begun-" and he leaned his head from the window and cried, "Faster! faster!" O'Toole, for his part, shouted, "Trinkgeldt!" It was the only word of German which he knew. "But," said he, "there was a Saracen lady I learned about at school who travelled over Europe and found her lover in an alehouse in London, with no word but his name to help her over the road. Sure, it would be a strange thing if I couldn't travel all over Germany with the help of 'Trinkgeldt.'"

The word certainly had its efficacy with the postillion. "Trinkgeldt!" cried O'Toole, and the berlin rocked and lurched and leaped down the pa.s.s. The snow was now less deep, the drifts fewer. The road wound along a mountain-side: at one window rose the rock; from the other the travellers looked down hundreds of feet to the bed of the valley and the boiling torrent of the Adige. It was a mere narrow ribbon of a road made by the Romans, without a thought for the convenience of travellers in a later day; and as the carriage turned a corner, O'Toole, mounted on his horse, saw ahead a heavy cart crawling up towards them. The carter saw the berlin thundering down towards him behind its four maddened horses, and he drew his cart to the inside of the road against the rock. The postillion tugged at his reins; he had not sufficient interval of s.p.a.ce to check his team; he threw a despairing glance at O'Toole. It seemed impossible the berlin could pa.s.s. There was no use to cry out; O'Toole fell behind the carriage with his mind made up. He looked down the precipice; he saw in his imagination the huge carriage with its tangled, struggling horses falling sheer into the foam of the river. He could not ride back to Bologna with that story to tell; he and his horse must take the same quick, steep road.

The postillion drove so close to the cart that he touched it as he pa.s.sed. "We are lost!" he shouted in an agony; and O'Toole saw the hind wheel of the berlin slip off the road and revolve for the fraction of a second in the air. He was already putting his horse at the precipice as though it was a ditch to be jumped, when the berlin made, to his astonished eyes, an effort to recover its balance like a live thing. It seemed to spring sideways from the brink of the precipice. It not only seemed, it did spring; and O'Toole, drawing rein, in the great revulsion of his feelings, saw, as he rocked unsteadily in his saddle, the carriage tearing safe and unhurt down the very centre of the road.

O'Toole set his spurs to his horse and galloped after it. The postillion looked back and laughed.

"Trinkgeldt!" he cried.

O'Toole swore loudly, and getting level beat him with his whip. Wogan's head popped out of the window.

"Silence!" said he in a rage. "Mademoiselle is asleep;" and then seeing O'Toole's white and disordered face he asked, "What is it?" No one in the coach had had a suspicion of their danger. But O'Toole still saw before his eyes that wheel slip over the precipice and revolve in air, he still felt his horse beneath him quiver and refuse this leap into air. In broken tones he gasped out his story to Wogan, and as he spoke the Princess stirred.

"Hush!" said Wogan; "she need not know. Ride behind, O'Toole! Your blue eyes are green with terror. Your face will tell the story, if once she sees it."

O'Toole fell back again behind the carriage, and at four that afternoon they stopped before the post-house at Brixen. They had crossed the Brenner in a storm of snow and howling winds; they had travelled ten leagues from Innspruck. Wogan called a halt of half an hour. The Princess had eaten barely a mouthful since her supper of the night before. Wogan forced her to alight, forced her to eat a couple of eggs, and to drink a gla.s.s of wine. Before the half-hour had pa.s.sed, she was anxious to start again.

From Brixen the road was easier; and either from the smoothness of the travelling or through some partial relief from his anxieties, Wogan, who had kept awake so long, suddenly fell fast asleep, and when he woke up again the night was come. He woke up without a start or even a movement, as was his habit, and sat silently and bitterly reproaching himself for that he had yielded to fatigue. It was pitch-dark within the carriage; he stared through the window and saw dimly the moving mountain-side, and here and there a clump of trees rush past. The steady breathing of Gaydon, on his left, and of Mrs. Misset in the corner opposite to Gaydon, showed that those two guardians slept as well. His reproaches became more bitter and then suddenly ceased, for over against him in the darkness a young, fresh voice was singing very sweetly and very low. It was the Princess Clementina, and she sang to herself, thinking all three of her companions were asleep. Wogan had not caught the sound at first above the clatter of the wheels, and even now that he listened it came intermittently to his ears. He heard enough, however, to know and to rejoice that there was no melancholy in the music. The song had the clear bright thrill of the blackbird's note in June. Wogan listened, entranced. He would have given worlds to have written the song with which Clementina solaced herself in the darkness, to have composed the melody on which her voice rose and sank.

The carriage drew up at an inn; the horses were changed; the flight was resumed. Wogan had not moved during this delay, neither had Misset nor O'Toole come to the door. But an ostler had flashed a lantern into the berlin, and for a second the light had fallen upon Wogan's face and open eyes. Clementina, however, did not cease; she sang on until the lights had been left behind and the darkness was about them. Then she stopped and said,-

"How long is it since you woke?"

Wogan was taken by surprise.

"I should never have slept at all," stammered he. "I promised myself that. Not a wink of sleep betwixt Innspruck and Italy; and here was I fast as a log this side of Trent. I think our postillion sleeps too;" and letting down the window he quietly called Misset.

"We have fresh relays," said he, "and we travel at a snail's-pace."

"The relays are only fresh to us," returned Misset. "We can go no faster. There is someone ahead with three stages' start of us,-someone of importance, it would seem, and who travels with a retinue, for he takes all the horses at each stage."

Wogan thrust his head out of the window. There was no doubt of it; the horses lagged. In this hurried flight the most trifling hindrance was a monumental danger, and this was no trifling hindrance. For the hue and cry was most certainly raised behind them; the pursuit from Innspruck had begun twelve hours since, on the most favourable reckoning. At any moment they might hear the jingle of a horse's harness on the road behind. And now here was a man with a great retinue blocking their way in front.

"We can do no more, but make a fight of it in the end," said he. "They may be few who follow us. But who is he ahead?"

Misset did not know.

"I can tell you," said Clementina, with a slight hesitation. "It is the Prince of Baden, and he travels to Italy."

Wogan remembered a certain letter which his King had written to him from Rome; and the hesitation in the girl's voice told him the rest of the story. Wogan would have given much to have had his fingers about the scruff of that pompous gentleman's neck with the precipice handy at his feet. It was intolerable that the fellow should pester the Princess in prison and hinder her flight when she had escaped from it.

"Well, we can do no more," said he, and he drew up the window. Neither Gaydon nor Mrs. Misset were awakened; Clementina and Wogan were alone in the darkness.

She leaned forward to him and said in a low voice,-

"Tell me of the King. I shall make mistakes in this new world. Will he have patience with me while I learn?"

She had spoken upon the same strain in the darkness of the staircase only the night before. Wogan gently laughed her fears aside.

"I will tell you the truest thing about the King. He needs you at his side. For all his friends, he is at heart a lonely man, throned upon sorrows. I dare to tell you that, knowing you. He needs not a mere wife, but a mate, a helpmate, to strive with him, her hand in his. Every man needs the helpmate, as I read the world. For it cannot but be that a man falls below himself when he comes home always to an empty room."

The Princess was silent. Wogan hoped that he had rea.s.sured her. But her thoughts were now turned from herself. She leaned yet further forward with her elbows upon her knees, and in a yet lower voice she asked a question which fairly startled him.

"Does she not love you?"

Wogan, indeed, had spoken unconsciously, with a deep note of sadness in his voice, which had sounded all the more strange and sad to her from its contrast with the quick, cheerful, vigorous tones she had come to think the mark of him. He had spoken as though he looked forward with a poignant regret through a weary span of days, and saw himself always in youth and middle years and age coming home always to an empty room. Therefore she put her question, and Wogan was taken off his guard.

"There is no one," he said in a flurry.

Clementina shook her head.

"I wish that I may hear the King speak so, and in that voice; I shall be very sure he loves me," she said in a musing voice, and so changing almost to a note of raillery. "Tell me her name!" she pleaded. "What is amiss with her that she is not thankful for a true man's love like yours? Is she haughty? I'll bring her on her knees to you. Does she think her birth sets her too high in the world? I'll show her so much contempt, you so much courtesy, that she shall fall from her arrogance and dote upon your steps. Perhaps she is too sure of your devotion? Why, then, I'll make her jealous!"

Wogan interrupted her, and the agitation of his voice put an end to her raillery. Somehow she had wounded him who had done so much for her.

"Madam, I beg you to believe me, there is no one;" and casting about for a sure argument to dispel her conjectures, he said on an impulse, "Listen; I will make your Highness a confidence." He stopped, to make sure that Gaydon and Mrs. Misset were still asleep. Then he laughed uneasily like a man that is half-ashamed and resumed,-"I am lord and king of a city of dreams. Here's the opening of a fairy tale, you will say. But when I am asleep my city's very real; and even now that I am awake I could draw you a map of it, though I could not name its streets. That's my town's one blemish. Its streets are nameless. It has taken a long while in the building, ever since my boyhood; and indeed the work's not finished yet, nor do I think it ever will be finished till I die, since my brain's its architect. When I was asleep but now, I discovered a new villa, and an avenue of trees, and a tavern with red blinds which I had never remarked before. At the first there was nothing but a queer white house of which the original has fallen to ruins at Rathcoffey in Ireland. This house stood alone in a wide flat emerald plain that stretched like an untravelled sea to a circle of curving sky. There was room to build, you see, and when I left Rathcoffey and became a wanderer, the building went on apace. There are dark lanes there from Avignon between great frowning houses, narrow climbing streets from Meran, arcades from Verona, and a park of many thickets and tall poplar-trees with a long silver stretch of water. One day you will see that park from the windows of St. James. It has a wall too, my city,-a round wall enclosing it within a perfect circle; and from whatever quarter of the plain you come towards it, you only see this wall, there's not so much as a chimney visible above it. Once you have crowded with the caravans and traders through the gates,-for my town is busy,-you are at once in the ringing streets. I think my architect in that took Aigues Mortes for his model. Outside you have the flat, silent plain, across which the merchants creep in long trailing lines, within the noise of markets, the tramp of horses' hoofs, the talk of men and women, and, if you listen hard, the whispers, too, of lovers. Oh, my city's populous! There are quiet alleys with windows opening onto them, where on summer nights you may see a young girl's face with the moonlight on it like a glory, and in the shadow of the wall beneath, the cloaked figure of a youth. Well, I have a notion-" and then he broke off abruptly. "There's a black horse I own, my favourite horse."

"You rode it the first time you came to Ohlau," said the Princess.

"Do you indeed remember that?" cried Wogan, with so much pleasure that Gaydon stirred in his corner, and Clementina said, "Hush!"