Sir John Constantine Part 43

"But the devil of it is," said I, "how you contrived to enlist 'em?"

My uncle stood still and rubbed the back of his head. "I don't know, Prosper, that I used any arguments. I just put the case to them; through Dom Basilio, you understand."

"In other words, you made them an eloquent speech."

"I did nothing of the sort," he corrected me hastily. "In the first place because I have never made a speech and couldn't manage one if I tried; and next, because it is against their rules. I just put the case to Dom Basilio. All the credit belongs to him."

Dom Basilio--for the c.o.xswain of the boat proved to be he and no other--gave me a different account as we pulled toward the _Gauntlet_. Yet it agreed with my uncle's in the main.

"In faith," said he, "if there be any credit in what we have done or are about to do, set it down to your uncle. Against goodness so simple no man can strive, though he bind himself by vows.

Grat.i.tude may have helped a little; but you can say, and you will not be far out, that for very shame we are here."

Captain Pomery who hailed me over the ship's side, proudly invited me to row around and inspect the repairs in her--particularly her new stern-post--before climbing on board. For my part, while congratulating him upon them and upon his despatch, I admired more the faces of Mike Halliday and Roger Wearne, grinning welcome to me over the bulwarks. They, too, called my attention to the repairs; to the new rudder, fitted with chains in case of accident to the helm, to the grain of the new mizzen-mast (a beautiful spar, and without a knot), to the teak hatch-coverings which had replaced those shattered by the explosion. They desired me to marvel at everything; but that they themselves after past perils should be here again and ready, for no more than seamen's pay, to run their heads into perils yet unhandselled, was to these honest fellows no matter worth considering.

"But whither be we bound, Master Prosper?" demanded Captain Jo.

"For 'tis ill biding for orders after cracking on to be punctual; and tho' I say naught against the anchorage _as_ an anchorage, the wind, what with these hills and gullies, is like Mulligan's blanket, always coming and going; and by fits an' starts as the ague took the goose; and likewise backwards and forwards, like Boscastle fair: so that our cables be twisted worse than a pig's tail."

"As for that," said I, "your next rendezvous, I hear, is the island of Giraglia; but, for the whole plan of campaign, you must come and hear it from Billy Priske, who will tell you what my father has done and what he intends."

Accordingly, after breakfasting aboard, we were landed again and went up the mountain together--my uncle Gervase, Captain Pomery, Dom Basilio and I: and on the slope below the Princess's cave we sat and listened to Billy's story, the Trappist translating it to Marc'antonio, who sat with his gun across his knees and his eyes fastened on my uncle's gentle venerable face.

BILLY PRISKE'S STORY OF MY FATHER'S CAMPAIGN.

"As Master Prosper has told you, gentlemen all, we left him sitting alongside poor Mr. Fiennes, and took the path that leads down and across the valley yonder and out again on the north side. There were four of us--my master, myself, and the creatures Fett and Badc.o.c.k-- each man with his gun and good supply of ammunition. Besides this Sir John carried his camp-stool and spy-gla.s.s, and in his pocket a map along with his Bible and tobacco pouch; I the wine and his spare gun: Fett the bag of provisions; and Badc.o.c.k his flute and a gridiron."

"Why a gridiron?" asked my uncle.

"The reason he gave, sir, was that it's just these little things that get left behind, on a picnic; which Sir John, when I reported it, p.r.o.nounced to be a very good reason. 'And, as it happens,' said he, ''tis the very reason why Mr. Badc.o.c.k himself goes with us: for my son, when he becomes king, will need a Fool, and I have brought a couple in case of accidents.'

"We started then, as Master Prosper will remember, a little before dark; and having lanterns to light the track, and now and then the north star between the tree-tops to give us our bearings, we crossed the valley and came out through a kind of pa.s.s upon a second slope, a little nor'-west of the spot where I happened yesterday on Master Prosper. By this, Sir John's watch marked ten o'clock and finding us dead-beat by the roughness of the track, he commanded us to lie down and sleep.

"The next morning, after studying his map, he started afresh, still holding northward in the main but bearing back a little to the left-- that is, toward the sea, which before noon we brought in sight at a place he called La Piana, where, he said, was a fishing village; and so no doubt there was, for we spied a two-three boats moored a little way out from the sh.o.r.e--looking down upon them through a cleft in the rocks. The village itself we did not see, but skirted it upon high ground and came down to the foresh.o.r.e a short two miles beyond it; where we found a beach and a spit of rock, and on the spit a tumble-down tower standing, as lonely as a combed louse. Above the beach ran a tolerable coast road, which divided itself into two, after crossing a bridge behind the tower; the one following the sh.o.r.e, the other striking inland up the devil of a gorge.

This inland road we took, for two reasons; the first, that by the map it appeared to cut off a corner of our journey; the second, because the map showed a village, not three miles up the gorge, where we might get advice.

"After an hour's climbing then (for the road twisted uphill along the edge of the torrent) we came to the village, which was called Otta.

Now, the first thing to happen to us in Otta was that we found it empty--not so much as a dog in the street--but all the inhabitants on the hill above, in a crowd before a mighty great stone: and Badc.o.c.k would have it that they were gathered together in fear of us.

But the true reason turned out to be something quite different.

For this stone overhangs the village, which is built on a stiff slope; and though it has hung there for hundreds of years without moving, the villagers can never be easy that it will not tumble on top of them; and once a year regularly, and at odd times when the panic takes them, they march up and tie it with ropes. This very thing they were doing as we arrived, and all because some old woman had dreamed of an earthquake. We took notice that in the crowd and in the gang binding the stone there was no man the right side of fifty (barring a cripple or two); the reason being that all their young men had enlisted in the militia.

"These people made us welcome (and I will say, gentlemen, once for all and in spite of what has happened to Master Prosper here, that there is no such folk as the Corsicans for kindness to strangers), but they told us we were on the wrong road. By following the pa.s.s we should find ourselves in forest-tracks which indeed would lead us down to the great plain of the Niolo and across it to Corte, whence a good road ran north to Cape Corso; but our shorter way was the coast-road, which (they added) we must leave before reaching Calvi-- for fear of the Genoese--and take a southerly one which wound through the mountains to Calenzana. They explained this many times to Sir John, and Sir John explained it to us; and learning that we were English, and therefore friends of liberty, they forced us to drink wine with them--lashins of wine--until just as my head was beginning to feel muzzy, some one called out that we were heroes and must drink the wine of heroes, the pride of Otta, the Invincible St. Cyprien.

"By this time we were all as sociable together as mice in malt, except that these Corsicans never laughed at all, but stared at us awsome-like even when the creature Fett put one foot on a chair and another on the table and made 'em a long tom-fool speech in English, calling 'em friends Romans and countrymen and asking them to lend him their ears, as though his own weren't long enough. Then they brought in the Invincible St. Cyprien, and Sir John poured out a gla.s.s, and sniffed and tasted it and threw up his head, gazing round on the company and looking every man full in the eyes. I can't tell you why, gentlemen, but his bearing seemed so n.o.ble to me at that moment I felt I could follow him to the death (though of course there wasn't the leastest need for it, just then). I reached out for the bottle, filled myself a gla.s.s, drank it off, and stared around just as defiant. It gave me a very pleasant feeling in the pit of the stomach, and the taste of it didn't seem calculated to hurt a fly.

So I took two more gla.s.ses quickly, one after the other; and every one looked at me with their faces very bright all of a sudden--and the room itself grown brighter--and to my astonishment I heard them calling upon me in English for a speech. Whereby, being no public speaker, I excused myself and walked out into the village street, which was bright as day with the moon well over the cliffs on the other side of the gorge, and (to my surprise) crowded with people so that I couldn't have believed the whole City of London held half the number, let alone a G.o.d-forsaken hole like Otta. I stood for a while on the doorstep counting 'em, and the next thing I remember was crossing the street to a low wall overhanging the gorge and leaning upon it and watching the cliffs working up and down like mine-stamps.

This struck me as curious, and after thinking it over I made up my mind to climb across and discover the reason."

"I fear, Billy," said my uncle, "that you must have been intoxicated."

"But the worst, sir, was the moon; which was not like any ordinary moon, but kept swelling and bursting in showers of the most beautiful fireworks, so that I said to myself, 'O for the wings of a dove,' I said, 'so that I fetch some one to put a stop to this!' And I'd hardly said the words before it was broad day, and me lying in the street with a small crowd about me, very solemn and curious, and my head in the lap of a middle-aged woman that smelt of garlic, but without any pretensions to looks. And she was lifting up her head and singing a song, and the sound of it as melancholy as a gib-cat in a garden of cuc.u.mbers. Whereby the whole crowd stood by and stared, without offering to help. Whereby I said to myself, 'This is a pretty business, and no mistake.' Whereby I saw Sir John come forth from the house where the drinking had been, and his face was white but his step steady; and says he, 'What have you been doing to this woman?' 'Nothing at all,' said I; 'or, leastways, nothing to warrant this behaviour on her part.' 'Well,' said he, 'you may be surprised to hear it, but she maintains that you are betrothed to her.'

'A man,' said I, 'may woo where he will, but must wed where his wife is. If this woman be my fate, I'll say no more except that 'tis hard; but as for courting her, I never did so.' 'You are in a worse case than you guess,' said he; 'for, to begin with, the lady is a widow; and, secondly, she is marrying you, not for your looks, but for revenge.' 'Why, what have I done?' said I. 'Nothing at all,'

said he; 'but from what I can hear of it, five years ago a man of Evisa, up the valley, stole a goat belonging to this woman's husband; whereupon the husband took a gun and went to Evisa and shot the thief's cousin, mistaking him for the thief; whereupon the thief came down to Otta and shot the honest man one day while he was gathering olives in his orchard. He himself left neither chick nor child; but his kinsmen of the family of Paolantonuccio (I can p.r.o.nounce the name, gentlemen, if you will kindly look the other way) took up the quarrel, and with so much liveliness that to-day but three of them survive, and these are serving just now with the militia. For the while, therefore, the Widow Paolantonuccio has no one to carry on the custom of the country; nor will have, until a husband offers.'

'For pity's sake, Sir John,' said I, 'get me out of this! Tell them that if any man has been courting this woman 'tis not I, William Priske, but another in my image.' 'Why, to be sure!' cried Sir John.

'It must have been the Invincible St. Cyprien!'

"So stepping back and seating himself again upon the doorstep, he began to argue with the villagers, the woman standing sullen all the while and holding me by the arm. I could not understand a word, of course, but later on he told me the heads of his discourse.

"'I began,' he said, 'by expounding to 'em all the doctrine of cross-revenge, or _vendetta trasversa_, as they call it; and this I did for two reasons--the first because in an argument there's naught so persuasive as telling a man something he knows already--the second because it proved to them, and to me, that I wasn't drunk. For the doctrine has more twists in it than a conger.

"'Next I taught them that the doctrine was d.a.m.nable; and that it robbed Corsica of men who should be fighting the Genoese, on which errand we were bound.

"'And lastly I proved to them out of the mouths of several wise men (some of Greece, and others of my own inventing) that a man with three gla.s.ses of their wine in his belly was a man possessed, and therefore that either nothing had happened, or, if anything had happened, the fellow to blame must be that devil of a warrior the Invincible St. Cyprien.

"'Yet (as so often happens) the argument that really persuaded them, as I believe, was one I never used at all; which was, that the woman had money and a parcel of land, and albeit no man could pick up courage to marry her, they did not relish a stranger stepping in and cutting them out.'

"Be that as it may, gentlemen, in twenty minutes the crowd had come round to Sir John's way of thinking; and they not only sold us mules at thirty livres apiece--which Sir John knew to be the fair current price--but helped us to truss up Mr. Fett and Mr. Badc.o.c.k, each on his beast, and walked with us back to the cross-roads, singing hymns about Corsican liberty. Only we left the woman sadly cast down.

"From the cross-roads, where they left us and turned back, our road led through a great forest of pines. Among these pines hung thousands of what seemed to be b.a.l.l.s of white cotton, but were the nests of a curious caterpillar; which I only mention because Mr.

Fett, coming to, picked up one of these caterpillars and slipped it down the nape of Mr. Badc.o.c.k's neck, whereby the poor man was made uncomfortable all that day and the next; for the hairs of the insect turned out to be full of poison. In the end we were forced to strip him and use the gridiron upon him for a currycomb; so it came in handy, after all.

"On the second day, having crossed a river and come to a village which, if I remember, was called Manso, we bore away southward among the most horrible mountains. Among these we wandered four days, relying always on Sir John's map: but I reckon the man who made it must have drawn the track out of his own head and trusted that no person would ever be fool enough to go there. Hows'ever, the weather keeping mild, we won through the pa.s.ses with no more damage than the loss of Mr. Fett's mule (which tumbled over a precipice on the third day), and a sore on Mr. Fett's heel, brought about by his having to walk the rest of the way into Calenzana.

"Now at Calenzana, a neat town, we found ourselves nearly in sight of Calvi and plumb in sight of the Genoese outposts that were planted a bare gunshot from the house where we lodged, on the road leading northward to Calvi gate. To the south, as we heard--though we never saw them--lay a regiment of Paoli's militia; and, between the two forces Calenzana stood as a sort of no-man's-land, albeit the Genoese claimed what they called a 'supervision' over it. In fact they never entered it, mistrusting its defences, and also the temper of its inhabitants, who were likely enough to rise at their backs if the patriots gave an a.s.sault.

"They contented themselves, then, with advancing their outposts to a bend on the Calvi road not fifty yards from our lodging, which happened to be the last house in the suburbs; and from his window, during the two days we waited for Mr. Fett's sore to heal, Sir John would watch the guard being relieved, and sometimes pick up his gun and take long aim at the sentry, but lay it down with a sort of sigh: for though the sight of a Genoese was poison to him, he reckoned outpost-shooting as next door to shooting a fox.

"Our hosts, I should tell you, were an old soldier and his wife.

The man, by his own account, followed the trade of a bird-stuffer; which was just an excuse for laziness, for no soul ever entered his shop but to hear him talk of his campaigning under Gaffori and under the great Pascal Paoli's father, Hyacinth Paoli. This he would do at great length, and, for the rest, lived on his wife, who was a well-educated woman and kept a school for small children when they chose to come, which again was seldom.

"This Antonio, as we called him, owned a young ram, which was his pet and the pride of Calenzana: for, to begin with, it was a wild ram; and in addition to this it was tame; and, to cap all, it wasn't a bit like a ram. And yet it was a wild ram--a wild Corsican ram.

"Being an active sort of man in his way, though well over fifty, and given to wandering on the mountains above Calenzana, he had come one day upon a wild sheep with a lamb running at her heels. He let fly a shot (for your Corsican, Master Prosper, always carries a gun) and ran forward. The mother made off, but the lamb sat and squatted like a hare; and so Antonio took him up and carried him home.

"By the time we came to Calenzana the brute had grown to full size, with horns almost two feet long. As we should reckon, they were twisted the wrong way for a ram's, and for fleece he had a coat like a Gossmoor pony's, brown and hairy. But a ram he was; and, the first night, when Mr. Badc.o.c.k obliged us with a tune on the flute, he came forward and stared at him for a time and then b.u.t.ted him in the stomach.

"We had to carry the poor man to bed. We slept, all four of us, in a loft, which could only be reached by a ladder; and a ram, as you know, can't climb a ladder. It's out of nature. Yet the brute tried its best, having taken such a fancy to Badc.o.c.k, and wouldn't be denied till his master beat him out of doors with a fire-shovel and penned him up for the night.

"The next morning, being loosed, he came in to breakfast with the family, and b.u.t.ted a crock of milk all over the kitchen hearth, but otherwise bore himself like a repentant sinner; the only difference being that from breakfast onward he turned away from his master and took to following Mr. Fett, who didn't like the attention at all.

Badc.o.c.k kept to his bed; and Mr. Fett too, who could only manage to limp a little, climbed up to the loft soon after midday and lay down for a rest.

"Sir John and I, left alone downstairs, took what we called a siesta, each in his chair, and Sir John's chair by the shaded window.

For my part, I was glad enough for forty winks, and could have enlisted among the Seven Sleepers after those cruel four days in the mountains. So, with Sir John's permission, I dozed off; and sat up, by-and-by--awake all of a sudden at the sound of my master's stirring--to see him at the window with his gun half-lifted to his shoulder, and away up the road a squad of Genoese soldiers marching down to relieve guard.

"With that there came a yell from the loft overhead. I sprang up, rubbing my eyes, and, between rubbing 'em, saw Sir John lower his gun and stand back a pace. The next instant--_thud, thud!_--over the eaves upon the roadway dropped Fett and Badc.o.c.k and picked themselves up as if to burst in through the window. No good! A second later that ram was on top of them.

"How he had contrived to climb up the ladder and b.u.t.t the pair over the roof, there's no telling. But there he was; and gathering up his legs from the fall as quick as lightning he headed them off from the house and up the road. There was no violence. So far as one could tell from the clouds of dust, he never hurt 'em once, but through the dust we could see the Genoese staring as he nursed the pair up the road straight into their arms. The queer part of it," wound up Billy, reflectively, "was that, after the first moment, Sir John had never the chance of a shot. You may doubt me, gentlemen, but Sir John is a shot in a thousand, and, what with the dust and the confusion, there was never a chance without risk to human life.

The Genoese giving back, in less than half a minute the road was clear."

"But what happened?" asked my uncle.