Sir John Constantine Part 33

"I am breaking no faith, Englishman."

"As to that, please observe that I am not accusing you. I but note that, having the power, you use it. But two things puzzle me: of which the first is, where shall I find my charges?"

"Marc'antonio shall fetch them down to you from the other side of the mountain."

"And next, how shall I learn to tend them?" I asked, still keeping my matter-of-fact tone.

"They will give you no trouble. You have but to pen them at night and number them, and again at daybreak turn them loose. They know this forest and prefer it to the other side: you will not find that they wander. At night you have only to blow a horn which Marc'antonio will bring you, and the sound of it will fetch them home."

"A light job," said Stephanu, with a grin, "when a man can bring his stomach to it."

"Not so light as you suppose, my friend," I answered. "The sty, here, will need some cleansing; since if these are to be my subjects, I must do my best for them. It may not amount to much, but at least my hogs shall keep themselves cleaner than some Corsicans, even than some Corsican cooks."

"Stephanu," said Marc'antonio, gravely, "the Englishman meant that for you: and I tell you what I have told you before, that yours are no fitly kept hands for a cook. I have travelled abroad and seen the ways of other nations."

"The sty will need mending too, Princess," said I: "but before nightfall I will try to have it ready."

"You will find tools in the hut," she answered, with a glance at Marc'antonio, who nodded. "For food, you shall be kept supplied.

Stephanu has brought, in his suck yonder, flesh, cheese, and wine sufficient for three days, with milk for your friend: and day by day fresh milk shall be sent down to you."

Her words were commonplace, yet her cheeks wore an angry flush beneath their sun-burn; and I knew why. Her insult had miscarried.

In accepting this humiliation I had somehow mastered her: even the tone she used, level and matter-of-fact, she used perforce, in place of the high scorn with which she had started to sentence me.

My spirits rose. If I could not understand this girl, neither could she understand me. She only felt defeat, and it puzzled and angered her.

"You have no complaint to make?" she asked, hesitating in spite of herself as she turned to go.

I laughed, having discovered that my laugh perplexed her.

"None whatever, Princess. Am I not your hostage?"

When they were gone I laughed again, with a glance at Nat who lay with closed eyes and white still face where Marc'antonio and Stephanu had made a couch of fern and some heather for him under the chestnut boughs. The sight of the heather gave me an idea, and I walked back to where, at the end of the chestnut wood, a n.o.ble clump of it grew, under a scarp of rock where the pines broke off. With my knife I cut an armful of it and returned to the hut, pausing on my way to gather some strings of a creeper which looked to be a clematis and sufficiently tough for my purpose. My next step was to choose and cut a tolerably straight staff of ilex, about five feet in length and close upon two inches thick. While I trimmed it, a blackbird began to sing in the undergrowth behind the hut, and, listening, my ears seemed to catch in the pauses of his song a sound of running water, less loud but nearer and more distinct than the murmur of the many rock-streams that tinkled into the valley. I dropped my work for a while and, pa.s.sing to the back of the hut, found and followed through the bushes a foot-track--overgrown and tangled with briers, but still a track--which led me to the water. It ran, with a murmur almost subterranean, beneath bushes so closely over-arched that my feet were on the brink before I guessed, and I came close upon taking a bath at unawares. Now this stream, so handy within reach, was just what I wanted, and among the bushes by the verge grew a plant--much like our English osier, but dwarfer--extremely pliant and tougher than the tendrils of the clematis; so, that, having stripped it of half a dozen twigs, I went back to work more blithely than ever.

But for fear of disturbing Nat I could have whistled. It may even be that, intent on my task, I did unwittingly whistle a few bars of a tune: or perhaps the blackbird woke him. At any rate, after half an hour's labour I looked up from my handiwork and met his eyes, open, intent on me and with a question in them.

"What am I doing, eh? I am making a broom, lad," I held it up for him to admire.

"Where is she?" he asked feebly.

"She?" I set down my broom, fetched him a pannikin-ful of milk, and knelt beside him while he drank it. "If you mean the Princess Camilla, she has gone back to her mountain, leaving us in peace."

"Camilla?" he murmured the word.

"And a very suitable name, it seems to me. There was, if you remember, a young lady in the Aeneid of pretty much the same disposition."

"Camilla," he repeated, and again but a little above his breath.

"Your father . . . he is helping her?"

"Helping her?" I echoed. "My dear lad, if ever a young woman could take care of herself it is the Princess. . . . And as for my father helping her, she has packed him off northwards across the mountains with a flea in his ear. And, talking of fleas--" I went on with a glance at the hut.

He brought me to a full stop with a sudden grip on my arm, astonis.h.i.+ngly strong for a wounded man.

"Nay, lad--nay!" I coaxed him, but slipped a hand under him as he insisted and sat upright.

"She needs help, I tell you," he gasped. "Needs help . . . it was for help I ran when--when--"

"But what dreaming is this? My dear fellow, she makes prisoners of us, shoots you down when you try to escape, treats me worse than a dog, banishes us to this hut which--not to put too fine a point on it--is a pigs'-sty, and particularly filthy at that. I don't blame her, though some little explanation might not come amiss: but if she has any need of help, you must admit that she dissembles it pretty thoroughly."

Nat would not listen. "You did not see? You did not see?--And yet you know her language and have talked with her! Whereas I--O blind!"

he broke out pa.s.sionately, "blind that you could not see!"

A fit of coughing seized and shook him, and as I eased him back upon his fern pillow, blood came away upon the handkerchief I held to his lips.

"d.a.m.n her!" I swore viciously. "Let her need help if she will, and let her ask me for it! She has tried her best to kill you; and what's more, she'll succeed if you don't lie still as I order.

Help? Oh yes, I'll help her--when I have helped _you!_"

He moved his head feebly, as if to shake it: but lay quiet, panting, with closed eyes: and so, the effusion of blood having ceased, I left him and fell to work like a negro slave.

By the angle of the hut there stood a pigs' trough of granite, roughly hewn and hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the stream, I contrived to make pa.s.sably watertight. A score of times I must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within, slus.h.i.+ng and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and slime and worse filth together. And still as I toiled a song kept liddening (as we say in Cornwall) through my head: a song with two refrains, whereof the first was the old nursery jingle--"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, that you could not see!"

How should she need help? Little cared I though she needed it, and sorely! But how had the notion taken hold of Nat?

Weakness? Delirium? No: he had been running to get help for her when they shot him down. I had his word for that. . . . But she had pursued with the others. For aught I knew, she herself had fired the shot.

If she needed help, why was she treating us despitefully--putting this insult upon me, for example? Why had she used those words of hate? They had been pa.s.sionate words, too; spoken from the heart in an instant of surprise. Then, again, to suppose her a friend of the Genoese was impossible. But why, if not a friend of the Genoese, was she a foe of their foes? Why had she taken to the _macchia_ with these men? Why were they keeping watch on the coast while careless that their watchfire showed inland for leagues? Why, if she were a patriot, had the sight of King Theodore's crown awakened such scorn and yet rage against me, its bearer? Why again, at the mere word that my father sought the Queen Emilia, had she let him pa.s.s on, while redoubling her despite against me?

On top of these puzzles Nat must needs propound another, that this girl stood in need of help! Help? From whom?

As my mind ran over these questions, still at every pause the old rigmarole kept dinning--"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone . . ." on and on without ceasing, and still I toiled and sweated.

By noon the hut was clean, at any rate tolerably clean; but its soaked floor would certainly take many hours in drying, and Nat must spend another night under the open sky. I left the hut, s.n.a.t.c.hed a meal of bread and cheese, and, after a pull at the wine flask, turned my attention to the sty. To cleanse it before nightfall was out of the question. I examined it and saw three good days' labour ahead of me. But the palisading could be repaired and made secure after a fas.h.i.+on, and I started upon it at once, sharpening the rotten posts with my axe, driving, fixing, nailing, binding them firmly with osier-twists, of which I had fetched a fresh supply from the stream-side. I had rolled my jacket into a pillow for Nat, that he might lie easily and watch me.

The sun was sinking beyond the mountain, staining with deep rose the pinnacles of granite that soared eastward above the pines, when a horn sounded on the slope and Marc'antonio came down the track driving the hogs before him. He instructed me good-naturedly enough in the art of penning the brutes, breaking off from time to time to compliment me on my labours, the sum of which appeared to affect him with a degree of wonder not far short of awe. "But why are you doing it? Perche? perche?" he broke off once or twice to ask, eyeing me askance with a look rather fearful than unfriendly.

"The Princess laid this task upon me," I answered cheerfully, indeed with elation, feeling that so long as I could keep my tyrants puzzled I still kept, somehow, the upper hand.

"I have travelled, in my time," said Marc'antonio with a touch of vainglorious pride. "I have made the acquaintance of many continentals, even with some that were extremely rich. But I never crossed over to England."

"You would have found it full of eccentrics," said I.

"I dare say," said he. "For myself, I said to myself when I took s.h.i.+p, 'Marc'antonio,' said I, 'you must make it a rule to be surprised at nothing.' But do Englishmen clean hogs'-sties for pleasure?"

"And the Princess? She has also travelled?" I asked, meeting his question with another.

For the moment my question appeared to disturb him. Recovering himself, he answered gravely--

"She has travelled, but not very far. You must not do her an injustice. . . . We form our opinions on what we see."

"It is admittedly the best way," I a.s.sented, with equal gravity.