Sir John Constantine Part 9

At a great price you won your freedom from the Bishop of Rome and his dictation. I admire the price and I love liberty; yet liberty has its drawbacks, as you have for a long while been discovering; of which the first is that every man with a maggot in his head can claim a like liberty with yourselves, quoting your own words in support of it. Let me remind you of that pa.s.sage in which Rabelais--borrowing, I believe, from Lucian--brings the good Pantagruel and his fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns.

'There (says he) upon a tall tower Pantagruel recognized the Lantern of La Roch.e.l.le, which gave us an excellent clear light. Also we saw the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens, sacred to Pallas,' and so on; whence I draw the moral that coast-lights are good, yet, multiplied, they complicate navigation."

"And apply your moral by erecting yet another!"

"Fairly retorted. Yet how can you object without turning the sword of Liberty against herself? Have you never heard tell, by the way, of Captain Byng's midshipman?"

"Who was he?"

"I forget his name, but he started his first night aboard ship by kneeling down and saying his prayers, as his mother had taught him."

"I commend the boy," said my uncle.

"I also commend him: but the crowd of his fellow-midshipmen found it against the custom of the service and gave him the strap for it.

This, however, raised him up a champion in one of the taller lads, who protested that their conduct was tyrannous: 'and,' said he, very generously, 'to-morrow night I too propose to say my prayers.

If any one object, he may fight me." Thus, being a handy lad with his fists, he established the right of religious liberty on board.

By-and-by one or two of the better disposed midshipmen followed his example: by degrees the custom spread along the lower deck, where the dispute had happened in full view of the whole ship's company, seamen and marines; and by the time she reached her port of Halifax she hadn't a man on board (outside the ward-room) but said his prayers regularly."

"A notable Christian triumph," was the Vicar's comment.

"Quite so. At Halifax," pursued my father, "Captain Byng took aboard out of hospital another small midshipman, who on his first night no sooner climbed into his hammock than the entire mess bundled him out of it. 'We would have you to know, young man,' said they, 'that private devotion is the rule on board our ship. It's down on your knees this minute or you get the strap.'

"I leave you," my father concluded, "to draw the moral. For my part the tale teaches me that in any struggle for freedom the real danger begins with the moment of victory."

Said my uncle Gervase after a pause, "Then these Corsicans of yours, brother, stand as yet in no real danger, since the Genoese are yet harrying their island with fire and sword."

"In no danger at all as regards their liberty," answered my father, poising his knife for a first cut into the saddle of mutton, "though in some danger, I fear me, as regards their queen. They have, however, taken the first and most important step by getting the news carried to me. The next is to raise an army; and the next after that, to suit the plan of invasion to our forces. Indeed," wound up my father with another flourish of his carving-knife, "I am in considerable doubt where to make a start."

"I hold," said my uncle, eyeing the saddle of mutton, "that you save the gravy by beginning close alongside the chine."

"I was thinking for my part that either Porto or Sagone would serve us best," said my father, meditatively.

Dinner over, the four of us strolled out abreast into the cool evening and down through the deer-park to the small Ionic temple, where Billy Priske had laid out fruit, wine, and gla.s.ses; and there, with no more ceremony than standing to drink my health, the three initiated me into the brotherhood of St. Swithun. It gave me a sudden sense of being grown a man, and this sense my father very promptly proceeded to strengthen.

"I had hoped," said he, putting down his gla.s.s and seating himself, "to delay Prosper's novitiate. I had designed, indeed, that after staying his full time at Oxford he should make the Grand Tour with me and prepare himself for his destiny by a leisured study of cities and men. But this morning's news has forced me to reshape my plans.

Listen--

"In the early autumn of 1735, being then at the Court of Tuscany, I received sudden and secret orders to repair to Corte, the capital of Corsica, an island of which I knew nothing beyond what I had learnt in casual talk from the Count Domenico Rivarola, who then acted as its plenipotentiary at Florence. He was a man with whom I would willingly have taken counsel, but my orders from England expressly forbade it. Rivarola in fact was suspected--and justly as my story will show--of designs of his own for the future of the island; and although, as it will also show, we had done better to consult him, Walpole's injunctions were precise that I should by every means keep him in the dark.

"The situation--to put it as briefly as I can--was this. For two hundred years or so the island had been ruled by the Republic of Genoa; and, by common consent, atrociously. For generations the islanders had lived in chronic revolt, under chiefs against whom the Genoese--or, to speak more correctly, the Bank of Genoa--had not scrupled to apply every device, down to secret a.s.sa.s.sination.

_Uno avolso non deficit alter_: the Corsicans never lacked a leader to replace the fallen: and in 1735 the succession was shared by two n.o.ble patriots, Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli.

"Under their attacks the Genoese were slowly but none the less certainly losing their hold on the island. Their plight was such that, although no one knew precisely what they would do, every one foresaw that, failing some heroic remedy, they must be driven into the sea, garrison after garrison, and lose Corsica altogether; and of all speculations the most probable seemed that they would sell the island, with all its troubles, to France. Now, for France to acquire so capital a _point d'appui_ in the Mediterranean would obviously be no small inconvenience to England: and therefore our Ministers--who had hitherto regarded the struggles of the islanders with indifference--woke up to a sudden interest in Corsican affairs.

"They had no pretext for interfering openly. But if the Corsicans would but take heart and choose themselves a king, that king could at a ripe moment be diplomatically acknowledged; and any interference by France would at once become an act of violent usurpation. (For let me tell you, my friends--the sufferings of a people count as nothing in diplomacy against the least trivial act against a crown.) The nuisance was, the two Paolis, Giafferi and Hyacinth, had no notion whatever of making themselves kings; nor would their devoted followers have tolerated it. Yet--as sometimes happens--there was a third man, of greater descent than they, to whom at a pinch the crown might be offered, and with a far more likely chance of the Corsicans'

acquiescence. This was a Count Ugo Colonna, a middle-aged man, descended from the oldest n.o.bility of the island, and head of his family, which might more properly be called a clan; a patriot, in his way, too, though lacking the fire of the Paolis, to whom he had surrendered the leadership while remaining something of a figure-head. In short my business was to confer with him at Corte, persuade the Corsican chiefs to offer him the crown, and persuade him to accept it.

"I arrived then at the capital and found Count Ugo willing enough, though by no means eager, for the honour. He was, in fact, a mild-mannered gentleman of no great force of character, and frequently interrupted our conference to talk of a bowel-complaint which obviously meant more to him than all the internal complications of Europe: and next to his bowel-complaint--but some way after--he prized his popularity, which ever seemed more important than his country's welfare: or belike he confused the two. He was at great pains to impress me with the sacrifices he had made for Corsica-- which in the past had been real enough: but he had come to regard them chiefly as matter for public speaking, or excuse for public bowing and lifting of the hat. You know the sort of man, I dare say.

To pa.s.s that view of life, at his age, is the last test of greatness.

"Still, the notion of being crowned King of Corsica tickled his vanity, and would have tickled it more had he begotten a son to succeed him. It opened new prospects of driving through crowds and bowing and lifting his hat: and he turned pardonably sulky when the two Paolis treated my proposals with suspicion. They had an immense respect for England as the leader of the free peoples: but they wanted to know why in Tuscany I had not taken their Count Rivarola into my confidence. In fact they were in communication with their plenipotentiary already, and half way towards another plan, of which very excusably they allowed me to guess nothing.

"The upshot was that my interference threw Count Ugo into a pet with them. He only wanted them to press him; was angry at not being pressed; yet believed that they would repent in time. Meanwhile he persuaded me to ride back with him to one of his estates, a palace above the valley of the Taravo.

"I know not why, but ever the vow of Jephthah comes to my mind as I remember how we rode up the valley to Count Ugo's house in the hour before sunset. 'And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances, and she was his only child.' He had made no vow and was incapable, poor man, of keeping any so heroic; and she came out with no timbrel or dance, but soberly enough in her sad-coloured dress of the people. Yet she came out while we rode a good mile off, and waited for us as we climbed the last slope, and she was his only child.

"How shall I tell you of her? She helped my purpose nothing, for at first she was vehemently opposed to her father's consenting to be king. Her politics she derived in part from the reading of Plutarch's Lives and in part from her own simplicity. They were childish, utterly: yet they put me to shame, for they glowed with the purest love of her country. She has walked on fiery ploughshares since then; she has trodden the furnace, and her beautiful bare feet are seared since they trod the cool vintage with me on the slopes above the Taravo. . . . Priske, open the first of those bottles, yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.

Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.

Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos; dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left to stand for the s.p.a.ce of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until the water scarcely cover the ma.s.s. Let stand again for two days, and then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new moon. Ah, and yet you may miss! For your maidens must be clean, and yet fierce as though they trod out the hearts of men, as indeed they do. A king's daughter should lead them, and they must trample with innocence, and yet with such fury as the prophet's who said 'their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment: for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.' . . ."

My father lifted his gla.s.s. "To thee, Emilia, child and queen!"

He drank, and, setting down his gla.s.s, rested silent for a while, his eyes full of a solemn rapture.

"My friends," he went on at length, with lowered voice, "know you that old song?

"'Methought I walked still to and fro, And from her company could not go-- But when I waked it was not so: In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.'

"All that autumn I spent under her father's roof, and--my leave having been extended--all the winter following. The old Count had convinced himself by this time that by accepting the crown he would confer a signal service on Corsica, and had opened a lengthy correspondence with the two Paolis, whose hesitation to accept this view at once puzzled and annoyed him. For me, I wished the correspondence might be prolonged for ever, for meanwhile I lived my days in company with Emilia, and we loved.

"I was a fool. Yet I cannot tax myself that I played false to duty, though by helping to crown her father I was destroying my own hopes, since as heiress to his throne Emilia must be far removed from me.

We scarcely thought of this, but lived in our love, we two.

So the winter pa.s.sed and the spring came and the _macchia_ burst into flower.

"Prosper, you have never set eyes on the _macchia_, the glory of your kingdom. But you shall behold it soon, lad, and smell it--for its fragrance spreads around the island and far out to sea. It belts Corsica with verdure and a million million flowers--cistus and myrtle and broom and juniper; clematis and vetch and wild roses run mad.

Deeper than the tall forests behind it the _macchia_ will hide two lovers, and under the open sky hedge off all the world but their pa.s.sion . . . In the _macchia_ we roamed together, day after day, and forgot the world; forgot all but honour; for she, my lady, was a child of sixteen, and as her knight I worshipped her. Ah, those days! those scented days!

"But while we loved and Count Ugo wrote letters, the two Paolis were doing; and by-and-by they played the strangest stroke in all Corsica's history. That spring, at Aleria on the east coast, there landed a man of whom the Corsican's had never heard. He came out of nowhere with a single ship and less than a score of attendants--to be precise, two officers, a priest, a secretary, a major-domo, an under-steward, a cook, three Tunisian slaves, and six lackeys.

He had sailed from Algiers, with a brief rest in the port of Leghorn, and he stepped ash.o.r.e in Turkish dress, with scarlet-lined cloak, turban, and scimetar. He called himself Theodore, a baron of Westphalia, and he brought with him a ship-load of arms and ammunition, a thousand zechins of Tunis, and letters from half a dozen of the Great Powers promising a.s.sistance. Whether these were genuine or not, I cannot tell you.

"Led by the two Paolis--this is no fairy tale, my friends--the Corsicans welcomed and proclaimed him king, without even waiting for despatches from Count Rivarola (who had negotiated) to inform them of the terms agreed upon. They led him in triumph to Corte, and there, in their ancient capital, crowned and anointed him. He gave laws, issued edicts, struck money, distributed rewards. He put himself in person at the head of the militia, and blocked up the Genoese in their fortified towns. For a few months he swept the island like a conqueror.

"All this, as you may suppose, utterly disconcerted the Count Ugo Colonna, who saw his dreams topple at one stroke into the dust.

But the chiefs found a way to reconcile him. Their new King Theodore must marry and found a dynasty. Let a bride be found for him in Colonna's daughter, and let children be born to him of the best blood in Corsica.

"The Count recovered his good temper: his spirits rose at a bound: he embraced the offer. His grandsons should be kings of Corsica.

And she--my Emilia--

"We met once only after her father had broken the news to her.

He had not asked her consent; he had told her, in a flutter of pride, that this thing must be, and for her country's sake. She came to me, in the short dusk, upon the terrace overlooking the Taravo.

She was of heart too heroic to linger out our agony. In the dusk she stretched out both hands--ah, G.o.d, the child she looked! so helpless, so brave!--and I caught them and kissed them. Then she was gone.

"A week later they married her to King Theodore in the Cathedral of Corte, and crowned her beside him. Before the winter he left the island and sailed to Holland to raise moneys! for the promises of the Great Powers had come to nothing, even if they were genuinely given.

For myself, I had bidden good-bye to Corsica and sailed for Tuscany on the same day that Emilia was married.

"Now I must tell you that on the eve of sailing I wrote a letter to the queen--as queen she would be by the time it reached her--wishing her all happiness, and adding that if, in the time to come, fate should bring her into poverty or danger, my estate and my life would ever be at her service. To this I received, as I had expected, no answer: nor did she, if ever she received it, impart its contents to her husband. He--the rascal--had a genius for borrowing, and yet 'twas I that had to begin by seeking him out to feed him with money.

"News came to me that he was in straits in Holland, and had for a year been drumming the banks in vain: also that the Genoese, whom his incursion had merely confounded, were beginning to lift their heads and take the offensive again. At first he had terrified them like a mad dog; the one expedient they could hit on was to set a price upon his head. Certainly he had gifts. He contrived--and by sheer audacity, mark you, backed by a fine presence--to drive them into such a panic that, months after he had sailed, they were pet.i.tioning France to send over troops to help them. The Corsicans sent a counter-emba.s.sy. 'If,' said they to King Louis, 'your Majesty force us to yield to Genoa, then let us drink this bitter cup to the health of the Most Christian King, and die.' King Louis admired the speech but nibbled at the opportunity. Our own Government meanwhile had either lost heart or suffered itself to be persuaded by the Genoese Minister in London. In the July after my Emilia's marriage, our late Queen Caroline, as regent for the time of Great Britain, issued a proclamation forbidding any subject of King George to furnish arms or provisions to the Corsican malcontents.