Sir John Constantine Part 38

"I was thinking only that you must feel it a punishment to be left alone with me. I had forgot--"

"It is hard," he interrupted, "to bear everything in mind when one is young." His tone was quiet, decisive, as of one stating a fact of common knowledge; but the reproof cut me like a knife.

"The Princess has gone too?" I asked.

"She has gone. They are all gone. That is why it would have been better for her too that you had escaped."

I pondered this for a minute. "You mean," said I, "that--always supposing the Prince had not killed you in his rage--you would now be at her side?"

He nodded. "Still, she has Stephanu. Stephanu will do his best," I suggested.

"Against what, eh?" He put his poser to me, turning with angry eyes, but ended on a short laugh of contempt. "Do not try make-believe with me, O Englishman."

"There is one thing I know," said I, doggedly, "that the Princess is in trouble or danger. And a second thing I know, that you and Stephanu are her champions. But a third thing, which I do not know, is why you and Stephanu hate one another."

"And yet that should have been the easiest guess of the three," said he, rising abruptly and taking first a dozen paces toward the hut, then a dozen back to the shadow of the chestnut tree against the bole of which my head rested as he had laid me, having borne me thither from the sty.

"_Campioni?_ That is a good word, and I thank you for it, Englishman. Yet you wonder why I hate Stephanu? Listen. Were you ever in Florence, in the Boboli gardens?"

"Never. But why?"

"Mbe! I have travelled, for my part." Marc'antonio now and always mentioned his travels with an innocent boastfulness. "Well, in the gardens there you will find a fountain, and on either side of it a statue--the statues of two old kings. They sit there, those two, carved in stone, face to face across the fountain; and with faces so full of hate that I declare it gives you a shiver down the spine--all the worse, if you will understand, because their eyes have no sight in them. Now the story goes that these two kings in life were friends of a princess of Tuscany far younger than themselves, and championed her, and established her house while she was weak and her enemies were strong; and that afterwards in grat.i.tude she caused these statues to be set up beside the fountain. Another story (to me it sounds like a child's tale) says that at first there was no fountain, and that the princess knew nothing of the hatred between these old men; but the sculptor knew. Having left the order with him, she married a husband of her own age and lived for years at a foreign court. At length she returned to Florence and led her husband one day out through the garden to show him the statues, when for the first time she saw what the sculptor had done and knew for the first time that these dead men had hated one another for her sake; whereupon she let fall one tear which became the source of the fountain. To me all this part of the story is foolishness: but that I and Stephanu hate one another not otherwise than those two old kings, and for no very different cause, is G.o.d's truth, cavalier."

"You are devoted to her, you two?" I asked, tempting him to continue.

He gazed down on me for a moment with immeasurable contempt.

"I give you a figure, and you would put it into words! Words!"

He spat. "And yet it is the truth, Englishman, that once she called me her second father. 'Her second father'--I have repeated that to Stephanu once or twice when I have lost my temper (a rare thing with me). You should see him turn blue!"

I could get no more out of Marc'antonio that day, nor indeed did the pain I suffered allow me to continue the catechism. A little before night fell he lifted me again and carried me to a bed of clean-smelling heather and fern he had prepared within the hut; and, all the night through, the slightest moan from me found him alert to give me drink or shift me to an easier posture. Our total solitude seemed from the first to breed a certain good-fellowship between us: neither next day nor for many days did he remit or falter in his care for me. But his manner, though not ungentle, was taciturn.

He seemed to carry about a weight on his mind; his brow wore a constant frown, vexed and unhappy. Once or twice I caught him talking to himself.

"To be sure it was enough to madden all the saints: and the Prince is not one of them. . . ."

"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?" I asked from my bed.

Already he had turned in some confusion, surprised by the sound of his own voice. He was down on hands and knees, and had been blowing upon the embers of a wood fire, kindled under a pan of goat's milk.

The goat herself browsed in the sunlight beyond the doorway, in the circuit allowed by a twenty-foot tether.

"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?"

"Why," said he, savagely, "your standing up to him and denying his birth and his sister's before all the crowd. I did not think that anything could have saved you."

"If I remember, I added that the Queen Emilia's bare word would be enough for me."

"So. But you denied it on his father's, and that is what his enemies, the Paolists all, would give their ears to hear--yes, and Pasquale Paoli himself, though he pa.s.ses for a just man."

"Marc'antonio," said I, seriously, "are the Prince and Princess in truth the children of King Theodore?"

"As G.o.d hears me, cavalier, they are his twin children, born in the convent of Santa Maria di Fosciandora, in the valley of the Serchio, some leagues to the north of Florence; and on the feast-day of Saint Mark these sixteen years ago."

"Then King Theodore either knew nothing of it, or he was a liar."

"He was a liar, cavalier."

"Stay a moment. I have a mind to tell you the whole story as it came to me, and as I should have told it to the Prince Camillo, had he treated me with decent courtesy."

Marc'antonio ceased blowing the fire and sitting back on his heels disposed himself to listen. Very briefly I told him of my journey to London, my visit to the Fleet, and how I received the crown with Theodore's blessing.

"That he denied having children I will not say: but (I remember well) my father took it for granted that he had no children, and he said nothing to the contrary. Indeed on any other a.s.sumption his gift of the crown to me would have been meaningless."

Marc'antonio nodded, following my argument. "But there is another difficulty," I went on. "My father, who does not lie, told me once that King Theodore returned to the island in the year 'thirty-nine, where he stayed but for a week; and that not until a year later did his queen escape across to Tuscany."

But here Marc'antonio shook his head vigorously. "Whoever told your father that, told him an untruth. The Queen fled from Porto Vecchio in that same winter of 'thirty-nine, a few days before Christmas.

I myself steered the boat that carried her."

"To be sure," said I, "my father may have had his information from King Theodore."

"The good sisters of the convent," continued Marc'antonio, "received the Queen and did all that was necessary for her. But among them must have been one who loved the Genoese or their gold: for when the children were but ten days old they vanished, having been stolen and handed secretly to the Genoese--yes, cavalier, out of the Queen's own sleeping-chamber. Little doubt had we they were dead--for why should their enemies spare them? And never should we have recovered trace of them but for the Father Domenico, who knew what had become of them (having learnt it, no doubt, among the sisters' confessions, to receive which he visited the convent) and that they were alive and unharmed; but he kept the secret, for his oath's sake, or else waiting for the time to ripen."

"Then King Theodore may also have believed them dead," I suggested.

"Let us do him that justice. Or he may never have known that they existed."

Marc'antonio brushed this aside with a wave of his hand.

"The cavalier," he answered with dignity, "may have heard me allude to my travels?"

"Once or twice."

"The first time that I crossed the Alps"--great Hannibal might have envied the roll in Marc'antonio's voice--"I bore the King tidings of his good fortune. It was Stephanu who followed, a week later, with the tale that the children were stolen."

"Then Theodore _did_ believe them dead."

"At the time, cavalier; at the time, no doubt. But more than twelve years later, being in Brussels--" Here Marc'antonio pulled himself up, with a sudden dark flush and a look of confusion.

"Go on, my friend. You were saying that twelve years later, happening to be in Brussels--"

"By the merest chance, cavalier. Before retiring to England King Theodore spent the most of his exile in Flanders and the Low Countries: and in Brussels, as it happened, I had word of him and learned--but without making myself known to him--that he was seeking his two children."

"Seeking them in Brussels?"

"At a venture, no doubt, cavalier. Put the case that you were seeking two children, of whom you knew only that they were alive and somewhere in Europe--like two fleas, as you might say, in a bundle of straw--"

I looked at Marc'antonio and saw that he was lying, but politely forbore to tell him so.

"Then Theodore knew that his children were alive?" said I musing.

"Yet he gave my father to understand that he had no children."