Sir John Constantine Part 51

"Wife," said I, standing before her, "why have you told me this?

Did I not say to you that I have seen your face and believe, and no story shall shake my belief? . . . Nay, then, I am glad--yes, glad.

Dear enough, G.o.d knows, you would have been to me had I met you, a child among these hills and ignorant of evil as a child.

How much dearer you, who have trodden the hot plough-shares and come to me through the fires! . . . See now, I could kneel to you, O queen, for shame at the little I have deserved."

But she put out a hand to check me. "O friend," she said sadly, "will you never understand? For the great faith you pay me I shall go thankfully all my days: but the faith that should answer it I cannot give you. . . . Ah, there lies the cruelty! You are able to trust, and I can never trust in return. You can believe, but I cannot believe. I have seen all men so vile that the root of faith is withered in me. . . . Sir, believe, that though everything that makes me will to thank you must make me seem the more ungrateful, yet I honour you too much to give you less than an equal faith.

I am your slave, if you command. But if you ask what only can honour us two as man and wife, you lose all, and I am for ever degraded."

I stepped back a pace. "O Princess," I said slowly, "I shall never claim your faith until you bring it to me. . . . And now, let all this rest for a while. Take up your story again and tell me the story to the end."

So in the darkness, seated there upon the millstone with her gun across her knees, she told me all the story, very quietly:--How at the last she had been found in the house in Brussels by Marc'antonio and Stephanu and fetched home to the island; how she had found there her brother Camillo in charge of Fra Domenico, his tutor and confessor; with what kindness the priest had received her, how he had confessed her and a.s.sured her that the book of those horrible years was closed; and how, nevertheless, the story had crept out, poisoning the people's loyalty and her brother's chances.

I heard her to the end, or almost to the end: for while she drew near to conclude, and while I stood grinding my teeth upon the certainty that the whole plot--from the kidnapping to the spreading of the slanders--had been Master Domenico's work, and his only, the air thudded with a distant dull concussion: whereat she broke off, lifting her head to listen.

"It is the sound of guns," said I, listening too, while half a dozen similar concussions followed. "Heavy artillery, too, and from the southward."

"Nay; but what light is yonder, to the north?"

She pointed into the night behind me, and I turned to see a faint glow spreading along the northern horizon, and mounting, and reddening as it mounted, until the black hills between us and Cape Corso stood up against it in sharp outline.

"O wife," said I, "since you must be weary, sleep for a while, and I will keep watch: but wake soon, for yonder is something worth your seeing."

"Whose work is it, think you?"

"The work," said I, "of a man who would set the whole world on fire, and only for love."

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE FLAME AND THE ALTAR.

"And when he saw the statly towre s.h.i.+ning baith clere and bricht, Whilk stood abune the jawing wave, Built on a rock of height,

"'Says, Row the boat, my mariners, And bring me to the land, For yonder I see my love's castle Close by the saut sea strand."

_Rough Royal_.

"As 'twixt two equal armies Fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls--which to advance our state Were gone out--hung 'twixt her and me:

"And whilst our souls negotiate there, We like sepulchral statues lay; All day the same our postures were, And we said nothing, all the day."

DONNE, _The Ecstasie_.

She rose from the stone, but swayed a little, finding her feet.

The dim light, as she turned her face to it, showed me that she was weary almost to fainting. She had come to a pa.s.s where the more haste would certainly make the worse speed.

"It is not spirit you lack, but sleep," said I; and she confessed that it was so. An hour's rest would recover her, she said, and obediently lay down where I found a couch for her on a bank of sweet-smelling heath above the road. I too wanted rest, and settled myself down with my back against a citron tree, some twenty paces distant.

Chaucer says somewhere (and it is true), that women take less sleep and take it more lightly than men. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes before I opened them again at a touch on my shoulder. The night was yet dark around us, save for the glow to the northward, and at first I would hardly believe when the Princess told me that I had been sleeping near upon three hours. Then it occurred to me that for a long while the sky overhead had been shaking and repeating the boom of cannon.

"There is firing to the south of us," she said; "and heavier firing than where the light is. It comes from Nonza or thereabouts."

"Then it is no affair of ours, even if we could reach it. But the flame yonder will lead us to my father."

So we took the white glimmering high-road again and stepped out briskly, refreshed by sleep and the cool night air that went with us, blowing softly across the ridges on our right. We found a track that skirted the village of Pino, leading us wide among orchards of citron and olive, and had scarcely regained the road before the guns to the south ceased firing. Also the red glow, though it still suffused the north, began to fade as we neared it and climbed the last of steep hills that run out to the extremity of the cape. There, upon the summit, we came to a stand and caught our breath.

The sea lay at our feet, and down across its black floor to the base of the cliff on which we stood there ran a broad ribbon of light.

It shone from a rock less than half a league distant: and on that rock stood a castle which was a furnace--its walls black as the bars of a grate, its windows aglow with contained fire. For the moment it seemed that this fire filled the whole pile of masonry: but presently, while we stood and stared, a sudden flame, shooting high from the walls, lit up the front of a tall tower above them, with a line of battlements at its base and on the battlements a range of roofs yet intact. As though a slide had been opened and as rapidly shut again, this vision of tower, roofs, battlements, gleamed for a second and vanished as the flame sank and a cloud of smoke and sparks rolled up in its place and drifted heavily to leeward.

With a light touch on the Princess's arm I bade her follow me, and we raced together down the slope. At the foot of it we plunged into a grove of olives and through it, as through a screen, into the street of a little _marina_--two dozen fisher-huts, huddled close above the foresh.o.r.e, and tenantless; for their inhabitants were gathered all on the beach and staring at the blaze.

I have said that the folk at Cape Corso are a race apart: and surely there never was a stranger crowd than that in which, two minutes later, we found ourselves mingling unchallenged. They accepted us, may be, as a minor miracle of the night. They gazed at us curiously there in the light of the conflagration, and from us away to the burning island, and talked together in whispers, in a patois of which I caught but one word in three. They asked us no questions.

Their voices filled the beach with a kind of subdued murmuring, all alike gentle and patiently explanatory.

"It is the island of Giraglia," said one to me. "Yes, yes; this will be the work of the patriots--a brave feat too, there's no denying."

I pointed to a line of fis.h.i.+ng-boats moored in the shoal water a short furlong off the sh.o.r.e.

"If you own one," said I, "give me leave to hire her from you, and name your price."

"_Perche, perche?_"

"I wish to sail her to the island."

"_O galant'uomo_, but why should any one desire to sail to the island to-night of all nights, seeing that to-night they have set it on fire?"

I stared at his simplicity. "You are not patriots, it seems, at this end of the Cape?"

He shook his head gravely. "The Genoese on the island are our customers, and buy our fish. Why should men quarrel?"

"If it come to commerce, then, will you sell me your boat? The price of her should be worth many a day's barter of fish."

He shook his head again, but called his neighbours to him, men and women, and they began to discuss my offer, all muttering together, their voices mingling confusedly as in a dream.

By-and-by the man turned to me. "The price is thirty-five livres, signore, on deposit, for which you may choose any boat you will.

We are peaceable folk and care not to meddle; but the half shall be refunded if you bring her back safe and sound."

"Fetch me a sh.o.r.e-boat, then," said I, while they counted my money, having fetched a lantern for the purpose.

But it appeared that sh.o.r.e-boat there was none. I learned later that my father and Captain Pomery, acting on his behalf, had hired all the sh.o.r.e-boats at these _marinas_ (of which there are three hard by the extremity of the Cape) for use in the night attack upon the island.

"Hold you my gun, then, Princess," said I, "while I swim out to the nearest:" and wading out till the dark water reached to my breast, I chose out my boat, swam to her--it was but a few strokes--clambered on board, caught up a sweep, and worked her back to the beach.

The Princess, holding our two guns high, waded out to me, and I lifted her on board.

We heard the voices of the villagers murmuring behind us while I hoisted the little sail and drew the sheet home. The night-breeze, fluking among the gullies, filled the sail at once, fell light again and left it flapping, then drew a steady breath aft, and the voices were lost in the hiss of water under the boat's stern.

But not until we had pa.s.sed the extreme point of land did we find the true breeze, which there headed us lightly, blowing (as nearly as I can guess) from N.N.E., yet allowed us a fair course, so that by hauling the sheet close I could point well to windward of the fiery reflection on the water and fetch the island on a single tack.