Sir John Constantine Part 50

I turned and led the way up the path between the bushes: and she followed my stride almost at a run. On the bare mountain-spur above the high-road she overtook and fell into pace with me: and so, skirting Nonza, we breasted the long slope of the range.

CHAPTER XXV.

MY WEDDING DAY.

Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see whether the vine hath budded and the tender grape appear.-- _The Song of Songs_.

Ahead of us, high on our right, rose the mountain ridges, scarp upon scarp, to the snowy peak of Monte Stella; low on our left lay Nonza, and beyond it a sea blue as a sapphire, scarcely rippled, void save for one white sail far away on the south-west horizon--not the _Gauntlet_; for, distant though she was, I could make out the shape of her canvas, and it was square cut.

Nonza itself lay in the shadow of the sh.o.r.e with the early light shimmering upon its citadel and upper works--a fortress to all appearance asleep: but the Genoese pickets would be awake and guarding the northward road for at least a league beyond, and to avoid them we must cross the high mountain spurs, using where we could their patches of forest and our best speed where these left the ridges bare.

The way was hard--harder by far than I had deemed possible--and kept us too busy for talk. Our silence was not otherwise constrained at all. Pa.s.sion fell away from us as we climbed; fell away with its strife, its confusion, its distempered memories of the night now past; and was left with the vapours of the coast where the malaria brooded. Through the upper, clearer atmosphere we walked as G.o.ds on the roof of the world, saw with clear eyes, knew with mind and spirit untroubled by self-sickness. We were silent, having fallen into an accord which made all speech idle. Arduous as the road soon became, and, while unknown to both of us, more arduous to me because of my inexperience, we chose without hesitating, almost without consulting.

Each difficulty brought decision, and with decision, its own help.

Now it was I who steadied her leap across a chasm; now came her turn to underprop my foothold till I clambered to a ledge whence I could reach down a hand and drag her up to me. As a rule I may call myself a blundering climber, my build being too heavy; but I made no mistake that day.

In the course of a three hours' scramble she spoke to me (as I remember) once only, and then as a comrade, in quiet approval of my mountaineering. We had come to a crag over which--with no word said--I had lowered her by help of my bandolier. She had waited at the foot while I followed her down without a.s.sistance, traversing on the way an outward-sloping ledge of smooth rock which overhung a precipice and a sheer fall of at least three hundred feet. The ledge had nowhere a notch in it to grip the boot-sole, and was moreover slippery with the green ooze of a mountain spring. It has haunted my dreams since then; I would not essay it again for my weight in money; but I crossed it that day, so to speak, with my hands in my pockets.

The most curious (you might call it the most uncanny) part of the whole adventure, was that from time to time we came out of these breathless scrambles plump upon a patch of cultivated ground and a hill-farm with its steading; the explanation being that these farms stand each at the head of its own ravine, and, inaccessible one to another, have communication with the world only by the tracks which lead down their ravines. Here, three thousand feet and more above the sea--upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of fishing-villages on the edge of the blue--lived slow, sedate folks, who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave us goat's-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered.

The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we should say) without patriotism. We came to them as G.o.ds from the heights, and they received and sped us as G.o.ds. They were too slow of speech to question us, or even to express their astonishment.

There was one farm with a stream plunging past it, and, by the house wall, a locked mill-wheel (G.o.d knows what it had ever ground), and by the door below it a woman, seated on a flight of steps, with her bosom half-covered and a sucking-child laid asleep in her lap.

She blinked in the sunshine as we came across the yard to her, and said she--

"Salutation, O strangers, and pardon that I cannot rise: but the little one is sick of a fever and I fear to stir him, for he makes as if he would sleep. Nor is there any one else to entertain you, since my husband has gone down to the _marina_ to fetch the wise woman who lives there."

The Princess stepped close and stood over her. "_O paesana_," said she, "do you and your man live here alone, so far up the mountain?"

"There is the _bambino_," said the mother, simply. "He is my first-- and a boy, by the gift of the Holy Virgin. Already he takes notice, and soon he will be learning to talk: but since we both talk to him and about him, you may say that already there are three of us, and anon the good Lord may send us others. It is hard work, _O bella donna_, on such a farm as ours, and doubly hard on my husband now for these months that I have been able to help him but little. But with a good man and his child--if G.o.d spare the child--I shall want no happiness."

"Give me the child," said the Princess, taking a seat on the stone slab beside her. "He shall not hurt with me while you fetch us a draught of milk."

The woman stared at her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief and a growing hope.

"Even when you came," she said hoa.r.s.ely after a while, "I was praying for an angel to help my child. . . . O blind, O hard of faith that I am! And when I lifted my eyes and saw you, I bethought me not that none walk this mountain by the path you have come, nor has this land any like you twain for beauty and stature. . . . O lady--whether from heaven or earth--you will not take my child but to cure it? He is my only one."

"Give him to me."

The woman laid her child in the Princess's arms and ran into the house, throwing one look of terror back at us from the doorstep.

The Princess sat motionless, gazing down on the closed lids, frowning, deep in thoughts I could not follow.

"You will not," said I, "leave this good foolish soul in her error?"

"I have heard," she answered quietly, without lifting her eyes, "that a royal touch has virtue to heal sometimes--and there was a time when you claimed to be King of Corsica. Nay, forgive me," she took herself up quickly, "there is bitterness yet left in me, but that speech shall be the last of it. . . . O husband, O my friend, I was thinking that this child will grow into a man; and of what his mother said, that there is such a thing as a good man: and I am trying to believe her. . . . _Eccu!_ he sleeps, poor mite! Listen to his breathing."

The farm-wife came out with a full bowl of milk. Her hands shook and spilled some as she handed it to me, so eager were they to hold her infant again. Taking it and feeling the damp sweat as she pa.s.sed a hand over its brow, she broke forth into blessings.

We told her of her mistake: but I doubt if she heard.

"I have dwelt here these three years," she persisted, "and none ever walked the mountain by the path you have come." She watched us as I held the bowl for the Princess to drink, and asked quaintly, "But is there truly no marrying in heaven? I have thought upon that many times, and always it puzzles me."

We said farewell to her, and took her blessings with us as she watched us across the head of the ravine. Then followed another half-hour of silence and sharp climbing: but the worst was over, and by-and-by the range tailed off into a chain of lessening hills over which in the purple distance rose a solitary sharp cone with a ruinous castle upon it, which (said the Princess) was Seneca's Tower at the head of the Vale of Luri.

We were now beyond the danger of the Genoese, and therefore turned aside to the left and descended the slopes to the high-road, along which we made good speed until, having pa.s.sed the tower and the mouth of the gorge which leads up to it from the westward, we came, almost at nightfall, within sight of Pino by the sea.

Here I proposed that I should go forward to the village and find a night's lodging for her, pointing out that, the night being warm and dry, I could make my couch comfortably enough in one of the citron orchards that here lined the road on the landward side. To this at first she a.s.sented--it seemed to me, even eagerly. But I had scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice calling me back, and back I went obediently.

"O husband," she said, "the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of. Nay"--she put out a hand--"you must not forbid me. You must not even delay me now."

"What is it, that I should forbid you?"

"It is--about Brussels."

I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.

"I have a right. . . . Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you cannot go on refusing, because--see you--your goodness makes my right the stronger. This morning I could have told you, but you refused me. All this day I have known that refusal unjust."

"All this day? Then--pardon, Princess--but why should I hear you now, at this moment?"

"The daylight is past," she said. "You can listen now and not see my face."

On the hedge of the ditch beside the high-road lay a rough fragment of granite, a stone cracked and discarded, once the base of an olive-mill. She found a seat upon it and motioned to me to come close, and I stood close, staring down on her while she stared down at her feet, grey with dust almost as the road itself.

"We were children, Camillo and I," she said at length, "in keep of an ill woman we called Maman Trebuchet, and in a house near the entrance of a court leading off the Rue de la Madeleine and close beside the Market. How we had come there we never inquired. . . . I suppose all children take such things as they find them. The house was of five storys, all let out in tenements, and we inhabited two rooms on the fourth floor to the left as you went up the staircase. . . . Some of the men quarrelled with their wives and beat them. There was always a noise of quarrelling in the house: but outside, before the front door, the men who were not beating their women would sit for hours together and smoke and spit and tell one another stories against the Church and against women. The pavement where they sat and the street before it were strewn always with rotting odds and ends of vegetables, for almost every one in that quarter earned his living by the Market, and Maman Trebuchet among the rest. She divided her time between walking the streets with a basket and drinking the profits away in the cabarets, and in the intervals she cursed and beat us.

We lived for the most part on the refuse she brought home at night-- on so much of her stock as had found no purchaser--and we played about the gutters and alleys of the Market. So far as I remember we were neither very happy nor yet very miserable. We knew that we were brother and sister, and that Maman Trebuchet was not our real mother.

Beyond this we were not inquisitive, but took life as we found it.

"Nevertheless, I know now that we were not altogether lost, but that eyes in Brussels were watching us; though how far they were friendly I cannot tell you. I think sometimes that the agents of the Genoese, who had hidden us there, must have been playing their own game as well as their masters'. There was, for example, a dark man who often visited the Market: he called himself a lay-brother, and seemed to be busy with religious work among the poor of the quarter. We knew him as Maitre Antoine at first, and so he was generally called: but he told us that his real name was Antonio--or Antoniu, as he spoke it--and that he came from Italy. He took a great fancy to us and obtained leave of Maman Trebuchet to teach us the Scriptures: but what he really taught us was to speak with him in Italian. We did not know at the time that, though he called it Tuscan, he was all the while teaching us our own Corsican. Nor, I believe, did our guardian know this; but one day, finding out by chance that we knew Italian (for we had begun to talk it together, that she might not understand what we said) and discovering how we had picked it up, she flew into a dreadful rage, lay in wait next day to catch Maitre Antoine as he came up the stairs, and fell upon him with such fury that the poor man fled out of the house and we never saw him again.

"After this--I believe about a year later--there came a day when she bought a new cap and shawl for herself and new clothes for us, and, having seen that we were thoroughly washed, took us up the hill to a fine street near the palace, and to a hotel which was almost the grandest house in the street. We entered, and were led into the presence of a very n.o.ble-looking gentleman in a long yellow dressing-gown, who blessed us and gave us a kiss apiece, and some gold money, and afterwards poured out wine for Maman Trebuchet and thanked her for taking such good care of us."

"That was your father, Princess."

"I have often thought so. But I remember nothing of his face except that he had tears in his eyes when we said good-bye to him; at which I wondered a great deal, for I had never seen a man crying. When we were outside again in the street Maman Trebuchet took the gold away from us. I think she too must have received money: for from that day she neglected her marketing and drank more heavily than before.

About a month later she was dead.

"On the day of the funeral there came to our house a man dressed like a gentleman--yet I believe rather that he must have been some kind of courier or valet. He spoke to us very kindly, and said that we had friends, who had sent him to us; that when we grew up we should not want for money; but that just now it was most important we should be put to school and made fit for our proper position in life. We must make up our minds to be separated, he said--and at this we both wept--but we should see one another often. For Camillo he had found lodgings with an excellent tutor, in whose care, after a year's study, he was to travel abroad and see the world: while for me he had chosen a home with some discreet ladies who would attend to my schooling."

"The house was in the Rue de Luxembourg--a corner house, where the street is joined by a lane running from the Place du Parvis. He led me to it that same evening, and Camillo came too, to make sure that I was comfortable. It was a strange house and full of ladies, the most of them young and all very handsomely dressed. But for their dresses I could almost have fancied it some kind of convent. At all events, they received me kindly, and many of them wept when they saw my parting with Camillo."

Here the Princess paused, and sat silent for so long that I bent forward in the dusk to read her face. She drew away, shivering, and put up both hands as if to cover it.

"Well, Princess?"

"That house, Cavalier! . . . that horrible house! . . . Ah, remember that I was a child, scarcely twelve years old--I had heard vile words among the market folk, but they were words and meant nothing to me: and now I saw things which I did not understand and--and I became used to them before ever guessing that these were the things those vile words had meant. The women were pretty, you see . . . and merry, and kind to me at first. Before G.o.d I never dreamed that I was looking on harm--not at first--but afterwards, when it was too late. The people who had put me there ceased to send money, and being a strong child and willing to work, at first I was put to make the women their chocolate, and carry it up to them of a morning, and so, little by little, I came to be their house-drudge. I had lost all news of Camillo. For hours I have hunted through the streets of Brussels, if by chance I might get sight of him . . . but he was lost. And I--O Cavalier, have pity on me!"