Sir John Constantine Part 35

"Lead her away," said I, "and leave me now to mourn my friend."

He touched her by the arm, at the same time promising me with a look that he would return for an explanation. The Princess shivered, but, as he stood aside to let her pa.s.s, recollected herself and went before him up the path beneath the pines.

I stepped to where Nat lay and bent over him. I had never till now been alone with death, and it should have found me terribly alone.

. . . I closed his eyes. . . . And this had been my friend, my schoolfellow, cleverer than I and infinitely more thoughtful, lacking no grace but good fortune, and lacking that only by strength of a spirit too gallant for its fate. In all our friendship it was I that had taken, he that had given; in the strange path we had entered and travelled thus far together, it was he that had supplied the courage, the loyalty, the blithe confidence that life held a prize to be won with n.o.ble weapons; he who had set his face towards the heights and pinned his faith to the stars; he, the victim of a senseless bullet; he, stretched here as he had fallen, all thoughts, all activities quenched, gone out into that night of which the darkness gathering in this forsaken glade was but a phantom, to be chased away by to-morrow's sun. To-morrow . . . to-morrow I should go on living and begin forgetting him. To-morrow? G.o.d forgive me for an ingrate, I had begun already. . . . Even as I bent over him, my uppermost thought had not been of my friend. I had made, in the moment almost of his death and across his body, my first acquaintance with pa.s.sion.

My blood tingled yet with the strange fire; my mind ran in a tumult of high resolves of which I understood neither the end nor the present meaning, but only that the world had on a sudden become my battlefield, that the fight was mine, and at all cost the victory must be mine. It was, if I may say it without blasphemy, as if my friend's blood had baptized me into his faith; and I saw life and death with new eyes.

Yet, for the moment, in finding pa.s.sion I had also found self; and shame of this self dragged down my elation. I had sprung to my feet in wild rage against Nat's murder; I had spoken words--fierce, unpremeditated words--which, beginning in a boyish defiance, had ended on a note which, though my own lips uttered it, I heard as from a trumpet sounding close and yet calling afar. In a minute or so it had happened, and behold! I that, sitting beside Nat, should have been terribly alone, was not alone, for my new-found self sat between us, intruding on my sorrow.

I declare now with shame, as it abased me then, that for hours, while the darkness fell and the stars began their march over the tree-tops, the ghostly intruder kept watch with me as a bodily presence mocking us both, benumbing my efforts to sorrow. . . . Nor did it fade until calm came to me, recalled by the murmur of unseen waters.

Listening to them I let my thoughts travel up to the ridges and forth into that unconfined world of which Nat's spirit had been made free.

. . . I went to the hut for a pail, groped my way to the stream, and fetched water to prepare his body for burial. When I returned the hateful presence had vanished. My eyes went up to a star--love's planet--poised over the dark boughs. Thither and beyond it Nat had travelled. Through those windows he would henceforth look back and down on me; never again through the eyes I had loved as a friend and lived to close. I could weep now, and I wept; not pa.s.sionately, not selfishly, but in grief that seemed to rise about me like a tide and bear me and all fate of man together upon its deep, strong flood. . . .

At daybreak Marc'antonio and Stephanu came down the pa.s.s and found me digging the grave. I thought at first that they intended me some harm, for their faces were ill-humoured enough in all conscience; but they carried each a spade, and after growling a salutation, set down their guns and struck in to help me with my work.

We had been digging, maybe, for twenty minutes, and in silence, when my ear caught the sound of furious grunting from the sty, where I had penned the hogs overnight, a little before sundown. Nat had watched me as I numbered them, and it seemed now so long ago that I glanced up with a start almost guilty, as though in my grief I had neglected the poor brutes for days. In fact I had kept them in prison for a short hour beyond their usual time, and some one even now was liberating them.

It was the Princess, of whose presence I had not been aware.

She stood by the gate of the pen, her head and shoulders in sunlight, while the hogs raced in shadow past her feet.

Marc'antonio glanced at her across his shoulder and growled angrily.

"Your pardon, Princess," said I, slowly, as she closed the gate after the last of the hogs and came forward. "I have been remiss, but I need no help either for this or for any of my work."

She halted a few paces from the grave. "You would rather be alone?"

she asked simply.

"I wish you to understand," said I, "that for the present I have no choice at all but your will."

She frowned. "I thought to lighten your work, cavalier."

I was about to thank her ironically when the sound of a horn broke the silence about us, its notes falling through the clear morning air from the heights across the valley. The Corsicans dropped their spades.

"Ajo, listen! Listen!" cried Marc'antonio, excitedly. "That will be the Prince--listen again! Yes, and they are answering from the mountain. It can be no other than the Prince, returning this way!"

While we stood with our faces upturned to the granite crags, I caught the Princess regarding me doubtfully. Her gaze pa.s.sed on as if to interrogate Marc'antonio and Stephanu, who, however, paid no heed, being preoccupied.

Again the horn sounded; not clear as before, although close at hand, for the thick woods m.u.f.fled it. For another three minutes we waited--the Princess silent, standing a little apart, with thoughtful brow, the two men conversing in rapid guttural undertones; then far up the track beneath the boughs a musket-barrel glinted, and another and another, glint following glint, as a file of men came swinging down between the pines, disappeared for a moment, and rounding a thicket of the undergrowth emerged upon the level clearing. In dress and bearing they were not to be distinguished from Marc'antonio, Stephanu, or any of the bandits on the mountain. Each man carried a musket and each wore the jacket and breeches of sad-coloured velvet, the small cap and leathern leggings, which I afterwards learnt to be the uniform of patriotic Corsica. But as they deployed upon the glade--some forty men in all--and halted at sight of us, my eyes fell upon a priest, who in order of marching had been midmost, or nearly midmost, of the file, and upon a young man beside him, toward whom the Princess sprang with a light step and a cry of salutation.

"The blessing of G.o.d be upon you, O brother!"

"And upon you, O sister!" He took her kiss and returned it, yet (as I thought) with less fervour. Across her shoulder his gaze fell on me, with a kind of peevish wonder, and he drew back a little as if in the act to question her. But she was beforehand with him for the moment.

"And how hast thou fared, O Camillo?" she asked, leaning back, with a hand upon his either shoulder, to look into his eyes.

He disengaged himself sullenly, avoiding her gaze. There could be no doubt that the two faces thus confronting one another belonged to brother and sister, yet of the two his was the more effeminate, and its very beauty (he was an excessively handsome lad, albeit diminutively built) seemed to oppose itself to hers and caricature it, being so like yet so infinitely less n.o.ble.

"We have fared ill," he answered, turning his head aside, and added with sudden petulance, "G.o.d's curse upon Pasquale Paoli, and all his house!"

"He would not receive you?"

"On the contrary, he made us welcome and listened to all we had to say. When I had done, Father Domenico took up the tale."

"But surely, brother, when you had given him the proofs--when he heard all--"

"The mischief, sister," he interrupted, stabbing at the ground with his heel and stealing a sidelong glance at the priest, "the mischief was, he had already heard too much."

She drew back, white in the face. She, too, flung a look at the priest, but a more honest one, although in flinging it she shrank away from him. The priest, a sensual, loose-lipped man, whose mere aspect invited one to kick him, smiled sideways and downwards with a deprecating air, and spread out his hands as who should say that here was no place for a domestic discussion.

I could make no guess at what the youth had meant; but the girl's face told me that the stroke was cruel, and (as often happens with the weak) his own cruelty worked him into a pa.s.sion.

"But who is this man with you?" he demanded, the blood rushing to his face. "And how came you alone with him, and Stephanu, and Marc'antonio? You don't tell me that the others have deserted!"

"No one has deserted, brother. You will find them all upon the mountain."

"And the recruits? Is this a recruit?"

"There are no recruits."

"No recruits? By G.o.d, sister, this is too bad! Has this cursed rumour spread, then, all over the countryside that honest men avoid us like a plague--us, the Colonne!" He checked his tongue as she drew herself up and turned from him, before the staring soldiery, with drawn mouth and stony eyes; but stepped a pace after her on a fresh tack of rage.

"But you have not answered me. Who is this man, I repeat? And eh?-- but what in G.o.d's name have we here?" He halted, staring at the half-digged grave and Nat's body laid beside it.

Marc'antonio stepped forward. "These are two prisoners, O Prince, of whom, as you see, we are burying one."

"Prisoners? But whence?"

"From England, as they tell us, O Prince."

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE TENDER MERCIES OF PRINCE CAMILLO.

"Tyranny is the wish to have in one way what can only be had in another."--_Blaise Pascal_.

The young man eyed me insolently for a moment and turned again to his sister.

"Camilla! will you have the goodness to explain?" he demanded.

But here, while she hesitated, searching her brother's face proudly yet pitifully, as though unable quite to believe in the continued brutality of his tone, I struck in.

"Pardon me, Signore," said I, "but an explanation from me may be shorter."

"Eh? so you are English, and speak Corsican?"