Sir John Constantine Part 40

What she did she did for her brother, far from home: yet he--he has no thanks, no bowels of pity, and here at home it is killing her!

There was a young man, a n.o.ble, head of the family of Rocca Serra by Sartene--" Marc'antonio broke off, trembling.

"You must finish," said I, in a voice cold and slow as the chilled blood about my heart.

"There was no harm in her. By her brother's will they were betrothed. She hated the youth, and he--he was eager--until the day before the marriage--"

"What happened, Marc'antonio?"

"He slew himself, cavalier. Some story reached him, and he slew himself with his own gun. O cavalier, if you can help us, take her away from Corsica!"

He cast up both hands and ran from me.

CHAPTER XX.

I LEARN OF LIBERTY, AND AM RESTORED TO IT.

"A! Fredome is a n.o.ble thing: Fredome mayse man to haif liking."

BARBOUR, _The Bruce_.

"Non enim propter gloriam divitas aut honores pugna.n.u.s, sed propter libertatem solummodo, quam nemo bonus nisi c.u.m vita amitt.i.t.--"

_Lit. Comit. et Baron_. Scotoe ad Pap. A.D. 1320 (quoted by BOSWELL).

"When corn ripeth in every steade Mury it is in feld and hyde; Sinne hit is and shame to chyde.

Knyghtis wolleth on huntyng ride, The deor galopith by wodis side, He that can his tyme abyde, At his wille him schal betyde."

_Alisaunder_.

More than this Marc'antonio would not tell me, though I laid many traps for more during the long weeks my bones were healing.

But although he denied me his confidence in this matter, he told me much of this Corsica I had so childishly invaded, and a great deal to make me blush for my random ignorance; of the people, their untiring feud with Genoa, their insufferable wrongs, their succession of heroic leaders. He did not speak of their pa.s.sion for liberty, as a man will not of what is holiest in his love. He had no need.

It spoke for itself in the ring of his voice, in the glooms and lights of his eyes, as we lay on either side of our wood fire; and I listened, till the embers died down, to the deeds of Jean Paul de Leca, of Giudice della Rocca, of Bel Messer, of Sampiero di Ornano, of the great Gaffori and other chiefs, all famous in their day, each in his turn a.s.sa.s.sinated by Genoese gold. I heard of Venaco, where the ghost of Bel Messer yet wanders, with the ghosts of his wife and seven children drowned by the Genoese in the little lake of the Seven Bowls. I heard of the twenty-one shepherds of Bastelica who marched down from their mountains, and routed eight hundred Greeks and Genoese of the garrison of Ajaccio; how at length they were intercepted and slain between the river and the marshes--all but one youth, who, stretched among his comrades and feigning death, was taken and led to execution through the streets of the town, carrying six heads, and each a kinsman's. I heard how Gaffori besieged his own house; how the Genoese, having stolen his infant son, exposed the child in the breach to stop the firing; and how Gaffori called to them "I was a Corsican before I was a father," and the cannonade went on, yet the child miraculously escaped unhurt. I heard of Sampiero's last fight with his murderers, in the torrent bed under the castle of Giglio; of Maria Gentili of Oletta, who died to save her brother from death. . . . And until now these had not even been names to me!

I had adventured to win this kingdom as a man goes out with a gun to shoot partridges. I could not hide my shame of it.

"You have taught me much in these evenings, O Marc'antonio," said I.

"And you, cavalier, have taught me much."

"In what way, my friend?"

Marc'antonio looked across the fire with a smile, and held up a carved piece of wood he had been sharpening to a point. In shape it resembled an elephant's tusk, and it formed part of an apparatus to keep a pig from straying, two of these tusks being so fastened above the beast's neck that they caught and hampered him in the undergrowth.

"Eccu!" said Marc'antonio. "You have taught me to be a swinekeeper, for instance. There is no shame in any calling but what a man brings to it. You have taught me to endure lesser things for the sake of greater, and that is a hard lesson at my age."

From Marc'antonio I learned not only that this Corsica was a land with its own ambitions, which no stranger might share--a nation small but earnest, in which my presence was merely impertinent and laughable withal--but that the Prince Camillo's chances of becoming its king were only a trifle less derisory than my own. Marc'antonio would not admit this in so many words; but he gave me to understand that Pasquale Paoli had by this time cleared the interior of the Genoese, and was thrusting them little by little from their last grip on the extremities of the island--Calvi and some smaller strongholds in the north, Bonifacio in the south, and a few isolated forts along the littoral; that the people looked up to him and to him only; that the const.i.tution he had invented was working and working well; that his writ ran throughout Corsica, and his laws were enforced, even those which he had aimed at vendetta and cross-vendetta; and that the militia was faithful to him, almost to a man. "Nor will I deny, cavalier," he added, "that he seems to me an honest patriot and a wise one. They say he seeks the Crown, however."

"Well, and why not?" I demanded. "If he can unite Corsica and win her freedom, does he not deserve to be her king?"

Marc'antonio shook his head.

"Would your Prince Camillo make a better one?" I urged.

"It is a question of right, cavalier. I love this Paoli for trouncing the Genoese; but for denying the Prince his rights I must hate him, and especially for the grounds of his denial."

"Tell me those grounds precisely, Marc'antonio."

But he would not; and somehow I knew that they concerned the Princess.

"Paoli is generous in that he leaves us in peace," he answered, evading the question; "and I must hate him all the more for this, because he spares us out of contempt."

"Yet," said I, musing, "that priest must have a card up his sleeve.

Rat that he looked, I cannot fancy him sticking to a s.h.i.+p until she foundered."

Certainly we were left in peace. For any sign that reached to us there, in our cup of he hills, the whole island might have been desolate. The forest and the beasts in it, tame and wild, belonged--so Marc'antonio informed me--to the Colonne; the slopes between us and the sea to the lost great colony of Paomia.

No one disturbed us. Week followed week, yet since the Prince had pa.s.sed with his men no traveller came down the path which ran between our hut and Nat's grave, over which the undergrowth already was pus.h.i.+ng its autumn shoots. Indeed, the path led no whither but to the sea and the forsaken village. Twice a week Marc'antonio would leave me for five or six hours and return with bread, and at whiles with a bag of dried figs or a basket of cheeses and olives for supplement. I learned that he purchased them in a _paese_ to the southward, beyond the forest and beyond the ridge of the hills; but he made a mystery of this, and I had to be content with his word that in Corsica folk in the bush need never starve. Also, sometimes I would hear his gun, and he would bring me home five or six brace of blackbirds strung on a wand of osier; and these birds grew plumper and made the better eating as autumn painted the arbutus with scarlet berries.

To me, so long held a prisoner within the hut, this change of season came with a shock upon the never-to-be-sufficiently-blessed day when Marc'antonio, having examined and felt my bones and p.r.o.nounced them healed, lifted and bore me, as you might carry a child, up the path to the old camp on the ridge. He was proud (good man) as he had a right to be. Surgeons in Corsica there might be none, as he a.s.sured me, or none capable of probing an ordinary bullet wound. But in youth he had learnt the art of bone-setting, and practised it upon the sheep which slipped and broke themselves in the gorge of the Taravo; and his care of me was a masterpiece, to be boasted over to his dying day. "The smallest limp, at the outside!" he promised me; he would not answer entirely for the left leg, that thrice-teasing, thrice-accursed fracture. Another ten days, and we might be sure; he could not allow me to set foot to ground under ten days. But while he carried me he whistled a lively air, and broke off to promise me good shooting before a month was out--shooting of blackbirds, of deer perhaps, perhaps even of a _mufro_. Here the whistling grew _largo espressivo_.

And I? I drew the upland air into my lungs, and the scent of the recovered _macchia_ through my nostrils, and inhaled it as a man inhales tobacco-smoke, and could have whooped for joy. Not by one-fifth was the scent so intense as I have since smelt it in spring, when all Corsica breaks into flower; yet intense enough and exhilarating after the dank odours of the valley. But the colours!

On a sudden the _macchia_ had burst into fruit--carmine berries of the sarsaparilla, upon which a few late flowerets yet drooped, duller berries of the lentisk, olive-like berries of the phillyria, velvet purple berries of the myrtle, and (putting all to shade) yellow and scarlet fruit of the arbutus, cl.u.s.tering like fairy oranges, here and there so thickly that the whole thicket was afire and aflame, enough to have deceived Moses! G.o.d, how good to see it and be alive!

Marc'antonio bore me up through the swimming air and laid me in the shadow of the cave--_her_ cave. It was empty as she had left it, and my back pressed the very bed of fern on which she had lain. The fern was dry now, after long winnowing by the wind that found its way into every crevice of this mountain summit.

How could I choose but think of her? Thinking of her, how could I choose but weary myself in vain speculation, by a hundred guesses attempting to force my way past the edge of the mystery, the sinister shadow which wrapped her round, and penetrate to the heart of it?

I recalled her beauty, childlike yet sullen; her eyes, so forthright at times and transparently innocent, yet at times so swiftly clouded with suspicion, not merely shy, but shy with terror, like the eyes of a wild creature entrapped; her bearing, by turns disdainful and defiant with a guarded shame. This turf, these boulders, had made her bower, these matted creepers her curtain. Here she had lived secure among savage men, each one of them ready to die--so Marc'antonio a.s.sured me, and all that I had seen confirmed it--rather than injure a hair of her head or suffer it to be injured. She was a king's daughter. Yet this lad of the Rocca Serras, n.o.ble, of the best blood of the island, had turned his own gun upon himself rather than wed with her.

I thought much upon this lad Rocca Serra. Why had he died?

Was it for loathing her? But men do not easily loathe such beauty.

Was it for love of her? But men do not slay themselves for fortunate love. Had _her_ loathing been in some way the secret of his despair?

I recalled my words to her, and how she had answered them, turning in the steep track among the pines "I am your hostage. Do with me as you will." "_If I could! Ah, if I could!_" I liked to think that the lad had loved her and been disdained; yet I pitied him for being disdained, and half hated him for having dared to love her.

Yes, for certain he had loved her. But, if so, her secret had need be as strange almost as that of Sara, the daughter of Raguel, whom seven husbands married, to perish on the marriage eve--"_for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth n.o.body but those which come unto her_."

In dreams I found myself travelling beyond the grave in search of this dead lad, to question him; and not seldom would awake with these lines running in my head, remembered as old perplexing favourites with my father, though G.o.d knows how I took a fancy that they held the clue--

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who dy'd before the G.o.d of Love was born.

I cannot think that he, who then loved most, Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.

But since this G.o.d produc'd a Destiny, And that Vice-Nature Custom lets it be, I must love her that loves not me.

"O, were we waken'd by this tyranny T'unG.o.d this child again, it could not be I should love her who loves not me.

"Rebel and Atheist too, why murmur I As though I felt the worst that love could do?

Love may make me leave loving, or might try A deeper plague--to make her love me too; Which, since she loves before, I'm loth to see: Falsehood is worse than hate: and that must be If she whom I love should love me."

Many wild conjectures I made and patiently built upon, which, if I were to write them down here, would merely bemuse the reader or drive him to think me crazy. There on my enchanted mountain summit, ringed about day after day by the silent land, removed from all human company but Marc'antonio's, with no clock but the sun and no calendar but the creeping change of the season upon the _macchia_, what wonder if I forgot human probabilities at times in piecing and unpiecing solutions of a riddle which itself cried out against nature?

Marc'antonio was all the while as matter-of-fact as a good nurse ought to be. He had fas.h.i.+oned me a capital pair of crutches out of boxwood, and no sooner could I creep about on them than he began to discourse, over the camp-fire, on the hunting excursions we were soon to make together.