Nicanor - Teller of Tales Part 6

"Nay, lady; what use? Something is wanting--the words will not come. I know not why, whether it be in me, or whether--"

"Nay, but I'll have one more. Once thou didst begin to tell of a youth who was poor and lowly, who lived in the country of the north--"

"Does she, then, remember that?" Marcus muttered, "she, whose mind is water, where an image fades with the changing light? Eh, thou black-headed slaveling, what miracle hast thou wrought?"

"Wouldst have that tale?" Nicanor asked. "Ay, lady, once I did begin, and dared not finish. Dare I now? My faith! the trouble will not be for lack of words in this! So then; it was even as thou hast said. The youth lived in the gray northlands, up by the Great Wall, where gray hills roll over all the earth and gray skies look down upon them. He tended sheep upon these hills for his father's lord, and lived upon black porridge and sour bread, and went clad in a sheepskin. And because he had never known that life held other things than these, it was all to him as it should have been. But there came a time when this youth went out into the world. He left his flocks and herds, with his lord's permission, and went down the long road to the south, past great cities where men lived in luxury and ease and other men toiled and sweated that this might be. He saw many strange faces, heard the babble of many tongues; and it seemed to him that each face was seeking for a thing which had no name, and each tongue was calling for what might not be found. And after a while the youth knew that he too was seeking what he could not find, and he wondered if it might be that same thing for which those stranger faces hungered. In the end, he came to a fair house, and dwelt there, among those ones who sat in luxury and ease and those others who toiled for them. And in this house was a certain place, of which was said: 'This spot is holy ground. Here none may enter rashly.'

But the youth was rash, and entered."

His voice faltered. On the seat beside him the Lady Varia leaned forward.

"And then?--" she said softly.

"And there he found what he had been seeking," said Nicanor, very low.

"What every soul upon this earth has a right to search for, but not every soul has a right to take. The name of this thing, O lady of mine, was Happiness; and some there be who call it also Love, and others there be who know that it is Pain. For in the garden dwelt one fair and pure and holy,--a daughter of the great ones of the earth. And because she was fair he loved her; and because she was great he might not woo her; and because she was pure he would not stain her. For she had taught him to love as a woman may teach a man."

"He loved her?" Lady Varia said. Her voice was low and dreaming under the spell of his.

"Ay, lady of mine, he loved her!" Nicanor said; and in place of the vibrant tenderness of his voice was a swift fierce triumph. "He loved her, and nothing could do away with that." Once more his tones were hushed.

"On earth, between man and woman, are two kinds of love, my lady,--one which a man may teach a woman, which is quick desire and the bitter sweetness of pa.s.sion, the meaning of a kiss, the thrill of a caress: and this, when all is said and done, is of earth, and of the flesh; and one which a woman may teach a man: and this is reverence, and tenderness, and holiness, and of the spirit. And she taught the youth this kind of love, my lady; taught him to revere and honor what in other women he had ever held lightly; taught him that because she was weak she was so strong that nothing he might do could prevail against her. And so--he went away."

"And she?" said the dreaming voice. "Did she love him?"

There fell a pause. In the bushes, close at hand, one strained his ears to listen, a naked knife gleaming in his hand.

"Ay," Nicanor answered slowly. He turned to her, not touching her, yet so close that he felt her breath on his sleeveless arm. "She loved him.

And she did not know it."

"Not know it?" Varia said. She turned her face toward him, and the moonlight fell full on the warm whiteness of her throat. "I think she should have known. And then, she being great, and he so lowly, I think she should have told him that she knew."

"If--if you were she," said Nicanor, and his voice shook, "would you have told him?"

"Oh, I should have told him!" Varia said, and her voice was low and strained. "I should have said--'I want you to love me! I want you to love me and stay with me always--'"

Nicanor bowed his face forward on his hands. Lady Varia, leaning forward, put her hand upon his shoulder.

"Were I that woman, I should have wanted to love him if he had been like that," she said, tremulously, yet very sweetly.

Nicanor straightened up and caught both her hands.

"Ah, no, my lady, you would not!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "You would have driven him from you and been angered beyond forgiveness. You would have hated and despised him, because--oh, don't you understand, it is the only thing you could have done! If she had said that--how could--how could he have left her?"

"But why did he leave her?" Varia asked. "Could he not have stayed always in the garden?"

Nicanor mastered himself with an effort.

"No," he said thickly. "Because he was only a man--and some day--it would be more than he could endure. If he saw that in her sweet innocence she did not realize the temptation she held out to him, he might--he might have done that which always after he must regret."

He raised her face with one hand and looked at her. Her eyes were closed, her red mouth quivered. He hesitated, his breath coming hard; then he bent his head and kissed her. As he took her in his arms, she shivered, crying softly:

"I am afraid! Oh, what is this that you would do!"

But when he loosened his hold she clung to him, murmuring:

"Nay, I am not afraid! I love your kisses. Oh, you must not go as did that youth--always you must stay within this garden--"

Then Marcus crept from his shelter and stood before them, silent, his knife gleaming in his hand. Nicanor, lifting his head, saw him suddenly, and started, for this meant death by tortures no man might name. He sprang to his feet and thrust Lady Varia behind him in the same motion, so that in the darkness his body hid her as she crouched upon the bench.

Marcus snarled, like an aroused watch-dog, and said:

"Thou more than fool! Dost know what this night's work will bring thee?"

Nicanor, his heart pounding hard, his hands clenched, answered nothing, glancing about him to see if the old man might be alone. But the garden lay silent. Then he sprang, as a wolf springs, straight for the old slave's throat, and felled him. Lady Varia screamed,--a quick, shrill sound which stabbed the night stillness like a knife, and cried:

"Oh, kill him not--kill him not! I pray thee, kill him not!"

"Hush thee, dear lady, or the house will be upon us!" Nicanor exclaimed, his words rushing through locked teeth. "Get quickly to thy chamber and leave all things to me."

She sped away over the turf, panting with fear and excitement, and flitted up the steps and across the marble walk and into her room, and closed the window. Nicanor, kneeling on the slave's chest, gagging him with a wad torn from his own garment, heard the doors shut with a gasp of relief. He tied the old man's arms tightly with his girdle, trussing him as he had trussed the carca.s.ses of sheep to be loaded upon mules.

Then, having him bound and helpless, he rose and stood over him, whetting his knife on his hand, with senses keyed to hear footsteps in every stir of leaf and sigh of wind. But the garden lay always silent under the moon's cold eye. He spoke to his captive, in a voice which grated just above a whisper.

"I'll not kill thee now, since she begged thy life, old man. But while thou'rt above the ground there's no more peace for me. Now what to do with thee?"

He stood over his prisoner, motionless in meditation, muttering his thoughts aloud.

"There's no place within the house to keep thee safe. And if that clacking tongue of thine betrays us, it needs not much to fancy what will happen then. This is what comes to pa.s.s when one serves a brutal master, old man; one must e'en be a brute one's self. I cannot kill thee; they'd miss thee and start a search--besides, my lady said me nay.

Ha, that makes thee squirm? Ay, she'd be mine for the lifting of my finger--even I, Nicanor, thy master's slave, have but to say to her, thy master's daughter, 'Go thither!' and she goes, and 'Come!' and she comes to me as I will. Hearest thou that, old man? Her lips have been defiled by a slave's kisses; she hath lain unresisting in a slave's arms, to the unending shame of her proud lord father. And why do I tell thee this, old man? To see thee writhe, thou also, at that shame; to have thee know the whole, and never profit by thy knowledge. Again I say, I cannot kill thee, but none the less I'll stop that tell-tale mouth of thine. Look you, it's the choice between my life and thy eager tongue which even now yearns to blab the tale of my sin and her disgrace. Therefore--"

He knelt above his captive, who glared at him with bloodshot eyes that glittered in the moonlight. He tested the keenness of his blade, shook back his s.h.a.ggy hair, and with a sudden twist removed the gag from the old man's jaws, choking back, at the same moment, with pitiless hands, the cry which rose to his lips. Then he bent over, so that the bulk of him hid from the moonlight his victim and his work. There was a single glint of steel, a convulsion of the thin figure on the ground; a faint click, and a choked and gurgling cry, instantly suppressed. Then Nicanor cleaned his blade by driving it thrice deep into the soft ground, and stood up; and Marcus rolled over and over in agony at his feet, with inarticulate animal cries which scarcely rose above the silence of the night. Nicanor unloosed his bonds and touched him with his foot.

"Hereafter thou'lt hold thy peace, old man! Neither good nor ill wilt thou ever prate of mortal more, for I've drawn thy sting. Once thou wert kind to me; twice, in return, did I steal for thee, and once took a beating from thy shoulders. But thou wert more loyal to thy master than thou wert friend to me--and in a matter such as this, I take no chances. As I have served thee, so will I serve any man who crosses me.

Now go. Wash thy mouth with cold water and chew pounded leaves of betel.

It will stop the blood."

He left the garden with noiseless strides, a black shadow in the moonlight. Marcus got himself slowly to his feet, moaning like an animal in pain. He shook his fist at the vanishing figure, with uncouth and terrible sounds which had once been speech, but even then were none the less a curse. So, shuddering and crying, he crept from the sleeping garden, where all was still and peaceful, and where pain and sorrow should have had no place.

And never again was that garden so peaceful and so still, for Life had entered it, by the little narrow door, bringing with it what Life must bring.

IV

Nicodemus, the freedman, one-eyed, short, immensely broad, beetle-browed, and grizzled, stood in the door of his wine-shop and watched the crowding press of travellers at the marsh-ford, fore-runners of the throng which nightly descended upon Thorney. Behind him, in the dim recesses of the smoky shop, his wife, Myleia, hawk-nosed and slatternly, prepared food for the strangers who would soon be upon them clamoring for bed and board. It was early evening, with a faint twilight haze still tinged with pink and primrose; but already lights were twinkling here and there among the cl.u.s.tered houses, and fires had been started on the beach.

There was no more excitement at the ford than was usual at that hour; the noise was no greater, the confusion no more profound; yet Nicodemus watched it all intently, as though he had not seen it every night before. His one eye, small and hotly blue beneath its bushy brow, glinted over the bustling scene; watched a dozen men flogging a horse that had slipped in mid-stream and fallen with its pack, blocking a long file of animals and carts behind it; followed three half-drunken soldiers lurching through the shallow water, using their pikes as staves; lingered over a b.l.o.o.d.y battle between two carters whose wheels had locked; and suddenly sobered into gravity at sight of a figure striding through the ford, in worn leathern jerkin and brazen cap, with a ponderous leaf-shaped sword swinging at its side. At sight of this one, Nicodemus turned and went within.

The shop, lighted dimly by an evil-smelling lamp, showed small and low-ceiled. Jars of cheap wine and casks of ale and beer, with an array of drinking-cups of all shapes and sizes, stood on shelves along the wall at one side. A trestled board, much scarred and hacked, ran down the centre of the room, flanked by rows of stone stools. Built around two sides of the room was a series of rude bunks. Over the edge of one of these a head of rough and matted black hair was visible. An odor of stale liquor, scorched meat, and pungent wood-smoke hung heavy in the air. Myleia entered, from the kitchen beyond, with a tray of half-cooked beef. Nicodemus went to the bunk and shook the occupant ungently.

"Valerius is here!" he said. His voice, like himself, was rough and brusque, rumbling hollow from the depths of his cavernous chest. The figure in the bunk stirred and muttered. Nicodemus turned his head.