Gerald Fitzgerald: The Chevalier Part 9

Simply turning his steps westward, in the direction where he knew the Maremma lay, Gerald set out on his lonely journey. It was nothing new in his habits to be absent the entire day, and even night, so that no attention was drawn to his departure till late the following day; nor, perhaps, would it have been noticed then, if a summons had not come from the Contessina that she desired to speak with him. A search was at once made, inquiries inst.i.tuted on every side, and soon the startling fact acknowledged, that he had gone away, none knew whither or why.

The Contessina at once ordered a pursuit; he was to be overtaken and brought back. Mounted couriers set off on every side, scouring the high-roads, interrogating hotel-keepers, giving descriptions of the fugitive at pa.s.sport stations--taking, in short, all the palpable and evident means of discovery; while he--for whose benefit this solicitude was intended--was already deep among the dreary valleys to the west of the Lake of Bolseno. The country through which he journeyed was, indeed, sad-coloured as his own thoughts. Hills, not large enough to be called mountains, succeeded each other in unbroken succession, their sides covered with a poor and burned-up herbage, interspersed with ma.s.ses of rock or long patches of shingle; no wood, no cultivation on any side. A few starved and wretched sheep, watched by one even more wretched still, were all that represented life; while in the valleys, a stray hut or two, generally on the borders of a swampy lake, offered the only thing in the shape of a village. After he had crossed the great post-road from Sienna to Rome, Gerald entered a tract of almost perfect desolation.

He bought two loaves of rye-bread and some apples at a small house on the road, and with this humble provision slung in a handkerchief at his side, set out once more. At first it was rather a relief to him to be utterly alone; his own thoughts were his best companions, and he would have shrunk from the questionings his appearance was certain to elicit; but as the time wore on, and the noon of the second day was pa.s.sed, he felt the dreariness of the solitude creeping over him, and would gladly have met with one with whom he could have interchanged even a few words of greeting. Not a human trace, however, was now to be seen; for he had gained that low-lying district which, stretching beneath the mountain of Bolseno, extends, in patches of alternate lake and land, to the verge of the Maremma. This tract is not even a sheep-walk, and although in mid-winter the sportsman may venture in pursuit of the wild duck or the mallard, the pestilential atmosphere produced by summer heat makes the spot a desert. Gerald was not long a stranger to the sickly influences of the place: a strange sense of dizziness would now and then come over him--something less than sickness, but usually leaving him confused and half stunned; great weariness, too, beset him; a desire to lie down and sleep, so strong as almost to be irresistible, seized him, but a dread of wild beasts--not unfrequent in these places--enabled him to conquer this tendency. The sun bore down with all its noonday force upon him, while an offensive odour from the stagnant waters oppressed him almost to choking.

He walked on, however, on and on, but almost like one in a dream.

Thoughts of the past superseded all sensations of the present in his mind, and he fancied he was back once more in the old college of the Jesuit fathers. He heard the bell that summoned him to the schoolroom, and he hastened to put himself in his place, marching with crossed arms and bent-down head, in accustomed fashion. Then he heard his name called aloud, and one of the fathers told him to stand aside, for he was 'up'

for punishment; and Fra Luke was there, wishing to speak to him, but not admitted; and then--how, he knew not--but he was gazing on grizzly bears and white-tusked boars, in great cages; and there they stood spell-bound and savage, but unable to spring out, though it was but gla.s.s confined them; and through all these scenes the wild strains of the tarantella sounded, and the light gestures and wistful looks of Marietta, whose hair, however, was no longer dark, but golden and bright, like the Contes-sina's. And as suddenly all changed, and there stood the Contessina herself, with one hand pressed to her eyes, and she was weeping, and Gerald felt--but how he did not know--he had offended her; and he trembled at his fault and hated himself, and, stooping down, he fell at last at her feet, and sobbed for pardon.

And there he lay, and there night found him sleeping--the long sleep that awakes to fever. Damp mists arose, charged with all the deadly vapours of the spot; foul airs steamed from the hot earth, to mingle with his blood, and thicken and corrupt it. Though the sky was freckled with stars, their light was dimmed by the dull atmosphere that prevailed, for the place was pestilential and deadly.

When day broke racking pains tortured him in every limb, and his head felt as though splitting with every throb of its arteries. A dreadful thirst, almost maddening in its craving, was on him, and though a rivulet rippled close by, he could not crawl to it; and now the hot sun beamed down upon him, and the piercing rays darted into his brain, penetrating it in all directions--sending wild fancies, horrible and ghastly visions, through his mind. And combats with wild beasts, and wounds, and suffering, and long days of agony and suspense, all came pouring in upon him, as vial after vial of misery bathed his poor, distracted intellect.

Three days of this half-conscious state--like so many long years of suffering they were--and then he sank into the low torpor that forms the last stage of the fever. It was thus, insensible and dying, a traveller found him, as the third evening was falling. The stranger stooped down to examine the almost lifeless figure, and it was long before he could convince himself that vitality yet lingered there: from the dried and livid lips no breath seemed to issue; the limbs fell heavily to either side as they were moved; and it was only after a most careful examination that he could detect a faint fluttering motion of the heart.

Whether it was that the case presented so little of hope, or that he was one not much given to movements of charity, but the traveller, after all these investigations, turned again to pursue his path. He had not gone far, however, when, gaining the rise of a hill, he cast his eyes back over the dreary landscape, and again they fell upon that small mound of human clay beside the lake. Moved by an impulse that, even to himself, was unaccountable, he returned to the spot and stood for some minutes contemplating Gerald. It might be that in the growing shades of the evening the gloomy desolation spoke more touchingly to his heart; it might be that a feeling of compa.s.sionate pity stirred him; as likely as either was it a mere caprice, as, stooping down, he raised the wasted form, and threw it loosely over one shoulder, and then strode out upon his way once more.

The stranger was a man of great size and personal strength, and though heavily framed, possessed considerable activity. His burden seemed little to impede his movements, and almost as little to engage his thoughts, and as he breasted the wild mountain, or waded the many streams that crossed his path, he went along without appearing to think more of him he was rescuing. It was a long road, too, and it was deep into the night ere he reached a solitary house, in a little slip of land between two lakes, and over whose door a withered bough denoted a cabaret.

'What, in the name of all the saints, have you brought us here?' said an old man who quickly responded to his knock at the door.

'I found him as you see beside the Lagoscuro,' said the other, laying down his burden. 'How he came there I can't tell you, and I don't suspect you'll ever get the report from himself.'

'He's not a contadino,' said the old man, as he examined the boy's features, and then gazed upon the palms of his hands.

'No; nor is he a Roman, I take it: he's of German or English blood. That fair skin and blonde hair came from the north.'

'One of the Cavalrista, belike!'

'Just as likely one of the circus people; but why they should leave him there to die seems strange, except that strangers deem this Maremma fever a sort of plague, and, perhaps, when he was struck down they only thought of saving themselves from the contagion.'

'That wouldn't be human, Master Gabriel----'

'Wouldn't it, though!' cried Gerald's rescuer, with a bitter laugh.

'That's exactly the name for it, caro Pippo. It is the beasts of prey--the tiger and lion--that defend their young; it is the mild rabbit and the tender woman that destroy theirs.' The innkeeper shook his head, as though the controversy were too subtle for him, and, bending down to examine the boy more closely, 'What's this, Master Gabriel,' said he, taking a peculiar medal that hung suspended round his neck.

'He was a colleger of some sort certainly,' cried Gabriel. 'It's clear, therefore, he wasn't, as we suspected, one of the Cavalrista. I'll tell you, Pippo; I have it: this lad has made his escape from some of the seminaries at Rome, and in his wanderings has been struck down by the fever. The worthy Frati have, ere this, told his parents that he died in all the hopes of the church, and is an angel already----'

'There, there,' interposed Pippo rebukingly; 'no luck ever came of mocking a priest. Let's try if we can do anything for the lad. Tina will be up presently, and look to him'; and with this he spread out some leaves beside the wall, and covering them with a cloak, laid the sick boy gently on them.

'There, see; his lips are moving--he has swallowed some of the water--he'll get about--I'll swear to it!' cried the other. 'A fellow that begins life in that fashion has always his mission for after years.

At all events, Pippo, don't disturb me for the next twelve hours, for I mean to sleep so long; and let me tell you, too, I have taken my last journey to Bon Convento. The letters may lie in the post-office till doomsday, ere I go in seach of them.'

'Well, well, have your sleep out, and then----'

'And then?' cried Gabriel, turning suddenly round, as he was about to quit the room. 'I wish to Heaven you could tell me, what then!'

Old Pippo shook his head mournfully, heaved a heavy sigh, and turned away.

Tina, a peasant girl, pale and sickly, but with that energy of soul that belongs to the Roman race, soon made her appearance, and at once addressed herself to nurse the sick boy. 'I ought to know this Maremma fever well,' said she, with a faint sigh; 'it struck me down when a child, and has never left my blood since.' Making a polenta with some strong red wine, she gave him a spoonful from time to time, and by covering him up warmly induced perspiration, the first crisis of the disease. 'There,' cried she, after some hours of a.s.siduous care; 'there, he is safe; and G.o.d knows if he 'll bless me for this night's work after all! It is a sad, dreary life, even to the luckiest!'

While Gerald lay thus--and it was his fate in this fashion to pa.s.s some six long weeks, ere he had strength to sit up or move about the house--let us say a few words of those to whose kindness he owed his life. Old Pippo Baldi had kept the little inn of Borghetto all his life. It was his father's and grandfather's before him. Situated in this dreary, unwholesome tract, with a mere mountain bridle-path--not a road--leading to it, there seemed no reason why a house of entertainment--even the humblest--could be wanted in such a spot; and, indeed, the lack of all comfort and accommodation bespoke how little trade it drove. The 'Tana,' however, as it was called, had a brisk business in the long dark nights of winter, since it was here that the smugglers from the Tuscan frontier resorted, to dispose of their wares to the up-country dealers; and bargains for many a thousand scudi went on in that dreary old kitchen, while bands of armed contrabandieri scoured the country. To keep off the Pope's carbineers--in case that redoubtable corps could persuade themselves to adventure so far--the Maremma fever, a malady that few ever eradicated from their const.i.tution, was the best protection the smugglers possessed; and the Tana was thus a sanctuary as safe as the rocky islands that lay off St.

Stephano. A disputed question of boundary also added to the safety of the spot, and continual litigation went on between the courts of Florence and Rome as to which the territory belonged--contests the scandal-mongering world implied might long since have been terminated, had not the cardinal-secretary Manini been suspected of being in secret league with the smugglers. The Tana was, therefore, a sort of refuge; and more than one, gravely compromised by crime, had sought out that humble hostel, as his last place of security. To the refugee from the north of Italy it was easily available, lying only a few miles beyond the Tuscan frontier, while it was no less open to those who gained any port of the sh.o.r.e near St. Stephano.

In a wild and melancholy waste, with two dark and motionless lakes girt in by low mountains, the Tana stood, the very ideal of desolation. The strip of land on which it was built was little wider than a mere bridge, between the lakes, and had evidently been selected as a position capable of defence against the a.s.sault of a strong force, and two rude breastworks of stone yet bore witness that a military eye had scanned the place, and improved its advantages. Within, a stray loop-hole for musketry still showed that defence had occupied the spirits of those who held it, while a low, flat-bottomed boat, moored at a stake before the door, provided for escape in the last extremity. The great curiosity of the place, however, was a kind of large hall or chamber, where the smugglers transacted business with their customers, and the walls of which had been decorated with huge frescoes, in charcoal, by no less a hand than Franzoni himself, whose fate it had once been to pa.s.s months here. Taking for his subjects the lives of the various refugees who had sojourned in the Tana, he had ill.u.s.trated them in a series of bold and vigorous sketches, and a.s.suredly every breach of the Decalogue had here its portraiture, with some accompanying legend beneath to show in whose honour the picture had been painted. Pippo, who had supplied from memory all the incidents thus communicated, regarded these as perfect treasures, and was wont to show them with all the pride of a connoisseur. 'The maestro '--so he ever called Franzoni--'the maestro,'

said he, 'never saw Cimballi, who strangled the Countess of Soissons, and yet, just from my description, he has made a likeness his brother would swear to. And there, look at that fellow asking alms of the Cardinal Frescobaldi--that 's Fornari. He 's merely there to see the cardinal, and he's sure he can recognise him; for he is engaged to stab him on his way to the Quirinal, the day of his election for Pope. The little fellow yonder with the hump is the Piombino, who poisoned his mother. He was drowned in the lake out there. I don't think it was quite fair of the maestro to paint him in that fashion'; and here he would point to a little humped-backed creature rowing in a boat, with the devil steering, the flashing eyes of the fiend seeming to feast on the tortures of fear depicted in the other's face.

Several there were of a humorous kind. Here, a group of murderous ruffians were kneeling to receive a pontifical blessing. There, a party of Papal carbineers were in full flight from the pursuit of a single horseman armed with a bottle; while, in an excess of profanity that Pippo shuddered to contemplate, there was a portrait of himself, as a saint, offering the safeguard of the Tana to all persecuted sinners; and what an ill-favoured a.s.semblage were they who thus congregated at his shrine!

Poor Gerald had lain for days gazing on the singular groupings and strange scenes these walls presented. At first, to his disordered intellect, they were but shapes of horror, wild and incongruous. The savage faces that scowled on him in paint sat, in his dreams, beside his pillow. The terrible countenances and frantic gestures were carried into his sleeping thoughts, and often did he awake, with a cry of agony, at some fearful scene of crime thus suggested. As his mind acquired strength, however, they became a source of endless amus.e.m.e.nt.

Innumerable stories grew out of them: romances, whose adventures embraced every land and sea; and his excited imagination revelled in inventing trials and miseries for some, while for others he sought out every possible escape from disaster. His solitude had no need of either companionship or books; his mind, stimulated by these sketches, could invent unweariedly, so that, at last, he really lived in an ideal world, peopled with daring adventurers, and abounding in accidents by flood and field.

One day, as Gerald lay musing on his bed of chestnut-leaves, the door of his room was opened quietly, and a large, powerfully-built man entered.

He walked with noiseless steps forward, placed a chair in front of Gerald, and sat down. The boy gazed steadfastly at him, and so they remained a considerable time, each staring fixedly at the other. To one who, like Gerald, had pa.s.sed weeks in weaving histories from the looks and expressions of the faces around him, the features on which he now gazed might well excite interest. Never was there, perhaps, a face in which adverse and conflicting pa.s.sions were more palpably depicted. A n.o.ble and ma.s.sive head, covered with a profusion of black hair, rose from temples of exquisite symmetry, greatly indented at either side, and forming the walls of two orbits of singular depth. His eyes were large, dark, and l.u.s.trous, the expression usually sad. Here, however, ended all that indicated good in the face. The nose was short, with wide expanded nostrils, and the mouth large, coa.r.s.e, and sensual; but the lower jaw, which was of enormous breadth, and projected forward, gave a character of actual ferocity that recalled the image of a wild boar. The whole meaning of the face was power--power and indomitable will. Whatever he meditated of good or evil, you could easily predict that nothing could divert him from attempting; and there was in the carriage of his head, all his gestures, and his air, the calm self-possession of one that seemed to say to the world, 'I defy you.'

As Gerald gazed in a sort of fascination at these strange features, he was almost startled by the tone of a voice so utterly unlike what he was prepared for. The stranger spoke in a low, deep strain of exquisite modulation, and with that peculiar mellowness of accent that seems to leave its echo in the heart after it. He had merely asked him how he felt, and then, seeing the difficulty with which the boy replied, he went on to tell how he himself had discovered him on the side of the Lagoscuro at nightfall, and carried him all the way to the Tana. 'The luck was,' said he, 'that _you_ happened to be light, and _I_ strong.'

'Say, rather, that _you_ were kind-hearted and _I_ in trouble,' muttered the boy, as his eyes filled up.

'And who knows, boy, but you may be right!' cried he, as though a sudden thought had crossed him; 'your judgment has just as much grounds as that of the great world!' As he spoke, his voice rose out of its tone of former gentleness and swelled into a roll of deep, sonorous meaning; then changing again, he asked--'By what accident was it that you came there?'

Gerald drew a long sigh, as though recalling a sorrowful dream; and then, with many a faltering word, and many an effort to recall events as they occurred, told all that he remembered of his own history.

'A scholar of the Jesuit college; without father or mother; befriended by a great man, whose name he has never heard,' muttered the other to himself. 'No bad start in life for such a world as we have now before us. And your name?'

'Gerald Fitzgerald. I am Irish by birth.'

The stranger seemed to ponder long over these words, and then said: 'The Irish have a nationality of their own--a race--a language--traditions.

Why have they suffered themselves to be ruled by England?'

'I suppose they couldn't help it,' said Gerald, half smiling.

'Which of us can say that? who has ever divined where the strength lay till the day of struggle called it forth? Chance, chance--she is the great G.o.ddess!'

'I'd be sorry to think so,' said Gerald resolutely.

'Indeed, boy!' cried the other, turning his large, full eyes upon the youth, and staring steadfastly at him; then pa.s.sing his hand over his brow, he added, in a tone of much feeling: 'And yet it is as I have said. Look at the portraits around us on these walls. There they are, great or infamous, as accident has made them. That fellow yonder, with that n.o.ble forehead and generous look, he stabbed the confessor who gave the last rites to his father, just because the priest had heard some tales to his disadvantage; a scrupulous sense of delicacy moved him--there was a woman's name in it--and he preferred a murder to a scandal! There, too, there's Marocchi, who poisoned his mother the day of her second marriage. Ask old Pippo if he ever saw a gentler-hearted creature: he lived here two years, and died of the Maremma fever, that he caught from a peasant whom he was nursing. And there again, that wild-looking fellow with the scarlet cap--he it was who stole the Medici jewels out of the Pitti to give his mistress, and killed himself afterwards when she deserted him. Weigh the good and evil of these men's hearts, boy, and you have subtle weights if you can strike the balance for or against them. We are all but what good or evil fortune makes us, just as a landscape catches its tone from light; and what is glorious in sunshine is bleak and desolate and dreary beneath a leaden sky and lowering atmosphere!'

'I'll not believe it,' said the boy boldly. 'I have read of fellows that never showed the great stuff they were made of until adversity had called it forth. They were truly great!'

'Truly great!' repeated the other, with an intense mockery. 'The truly great we never hear of. They die in workhouses or garrets--poor, dreary optimists, working out of their finespun fancies hopeful destinies for those who sneer at them.

The idols men call great are but the types of Force--mere Force. One day it is courage; another, it is money; another day, political craft is the object of worship. Come, boy,' said he, in a lighter vein, 'what have these worthy Jesuits taught you?'

'Very different lessons from yours,' said the youth stoutly. 'They taught me to honour and reverence those set in authority over me.'

'Good; and then----'

'They taught me the principles of my faith; the creed of the Church.'