Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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"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 noble 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, passing 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,
astonishingly 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 passionately, "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.

"Damn 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 passably 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,
slushing 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 passionate 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 pass 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, snatched 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
fashion, 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
ship, '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 assented, with equal gravity.

At the shut of night he left me and went his way up the mountain
path, and an hour later, having attended to Nat's wants, tired as in
all my life I had never been, I stretched myself on the turf and
slept under the stars.

The grunting of the hogs awakened me, a little before dawn. I went
to the pen, and as soon as I opened the hatch they rushed out in a
crowd, all but upsetting me as they jostled against my legs.
Then, after listening for a while after they had vanished into the
undergrowth and darkness, I crept back to my couch and slept.

That day, though the sun was rising before I awoke again and broke
fast, I caught up with it before noon: that is to say, with the work
I had promised myself to accomplish. Before sunset I had scraped
over and cleaned the entire area of the sty. Also I had fetched fern
in handfuls and strewn the floor of the hut, which was now dry and
clean to the smell.

In the evening I blew my horn for the hogs, and they returned to
their pen obediently as the Princess had promised. I had scarcely
finished numbering them when Marc'antonio came down the track, this
time haling a recalcitrant she-goat by a halter.

He tethered the goat and instructed me how to milk her.

The next evening he brought, at my request, a saw. I had cleaned out
the sty thoroughly, and turned-to at once to enlarge the
window-openings to admit more light and air into the hut.

Still, as I worked, my spirits rose. Nat was bettering fast.
In a few more days, I promised myself, he would be out of danger.
To be sure he shook his head when I spoke of this hope, and in the
intervals of sleep--of sleep in which I rejoiced as the sweet
restorer--lay watching me, with a trouble in his eyes.

He no longer disobeyed my orders, but lay still and watched. My last
rag of shirt was gone now, torn up for bandages. Marc'antonio had
promised to bring fresh linen to-morrow. By night I slept with my
jacket about me. By day I worked naked to the waist, yet always with
a growing cheerfulness.

It was on the fourth afternoon, and while yet the sun stood a good
way above the pines, that the Princess Camilla deigned to revisit us.
I had carried Nat forth into the glade before the hut, where the sun
might fall on him temperately, after a torrid day--torrid, that is to
say, on the heights, but in our hollow, pight about with the trees,
the air had clung heavily.

Marc'antonio, an hour earlier than usual, came down the track with a
bundle of linen under his left arm. I did not see that any one
followed him until Nat pulled himself up, clutching at my elbow.

"Princess! Princess!" he cried, and his voice rang shrill towards her
under the boughs. "Help her . . . I cannot--"

His voice choked on that last word as she came forward and stood
regarding him carelessly, coldly, while I wiped the blood and then
the bloody froth from his lips.

"Your friend looks to be in an ill case," she said.

"You have killed him," said I, and looked up at her stonily, as Nat's
head fell back, with a weight I could not mistake, on my arms.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE.

"The remedye agayns Ire is a vertu that men clepen Mansuetude,
that is Debonairetee; and eek another vertu, that men callen
Patience or Suffrance. . . . This vertu disconfiteth thyn
enemy. And therefore seith the wyse man, `If thou wolt
venquisse thyn enemy, lerne to suffre.'"--
CHAUCER, _Parson's Tale_.

"You have killed him." I lowered Nat's head, stood up and accused her
fiercely.

She confronted me, contemptuous yet pale. Even in my wrath I could
see that her pallor had nothing to do with fear.

"Say that I have, what then?" She very deliberately unhitched the
gun from her bandolier, and, after examining the lock, laid it on the
turf midway between us. "As my hostage you may claim vendetta; take
your shot then, and afterwards Marc'antonio shall take his."

"No, no, Englishman!" Marc'antonio ran between us while yet I stared
at her without comprehending, and there was anguish in his cry.
"The Princess lies to you. It was I that fired the shot--I that
killed your friend!"

The girl shrugged her shoulders indifferently. "Ah, well then,
Marc'antonio, since you will have it so, give me my gun again and
hand yours to the cavalier. Do as I tell you, please," she
commanded, as the man turned to her with a dropping jaw.

"Princess, I implore you--"

"You are a coward, Marc'antonio."

"Have it so," he answered sullenly. "It is God's truth, at all
events, that I am afraid."

"For me? But I have this." She tapped the barrel of her gun as she
took it from him. "And afterwards--if that is in your mind--
afterwards I shall still have Stephanu."

She said it lightly, but it brought all the blood back to his brow
and cheek with a rush. Not for many days did I learn the full
meaning of the look he turned on her, but for dumb reproach I never
saw the like of it on man's face.

Her foot tapped the ground. "Give him the gun," she commanded; and
Marc'antonio thrust it into my hands. "Now turn your back and walk
to that first tree yonder, very slowly, pace by pace, as you hear me
count."

Her face was set like a flint, her tone relentless. Marc'antonio
half raised his two fists, clenching them for a moment, but dropped
them by his side, turned his back, and began to walk obediently
towards the tree.

"One--two--three--four--five," she counted, and paused. "Englishman,
this fellow has killed your friend, and you claim yourself worthy to
be King of Corsica. Prove it."

"Excuse me, Princess," said I, "but before that I have some other
things to prove, of which some are easy and others may be hard and
tedious."

"Seven--eight--nine." With no answer, but a curl of the lip, she
resumed her counting.

"Marc'antonio!" I called--he had almost reached the tree.
"Come here!"

He faced about, his eyes starting, his cheeks blanched. As he drew
nearer I saw that his forehead shone with sweat.

"I have a word for you," I said slowly. "In the first place an
Englishman does not shoot his game sitting; it is against the rules.
Secondly, he is by no means necessarily a fool, but, if it came to
shooting against two, he might have sense enough to get his first
shot upon the one who held the musket--a point which your mistress
overlooked perhaps." I bowed to her gravely. "And thirdly," I went
on, hardening my voice, "I have to tell you, Ser Marc'antonio, that
this friend of mine, whom you have killed, was not trying to escape
you, but running to seek help for the Princess."

Marc'antonio checked an exclamation. He glanced at the girl, and she
at him suspiciously, with a deepening frown.

"Help?" she echoed, turning the frown upon me, "What help, sir,
should I need?"

It was my turn now to shrug the shoulders. "Nay," I answered,
"I tell you but what he told me. He divined, or at least he was
persuaded, that you stood in need of help."

She threw a puzzled, questioning look at the poor corpse, but lifted
her eyes to find mine fixed upon them, and shrank a little as I
stepped close. Her two hands went behind her, swiftly. I may have
made a motion to grip her by the wrists; I cannot tell. My next
words surprised myself, and the tone of my voice speaking and the
passion in it.

"You have killed my friend," said I, "who desired only your good.
You have chosen to humiliate me, who willed you no harm. And now you
say 'it shall be vendetta.' Very well, it shall be vendetta, but as
_I_ choose it. Keep your foolish weapons; I can do without them.
Heap what insults you will upon me; I am a man and will bear them.
But you are a woman, and therefore to be mastered. For my friend's
sake I choose to hate you and to be patient. For my friend's sake,
who discovered your need, I too will discover it and help it; and
again, not as you will, but as I determine. For my friend's sake,
mistress, and if I choose, I will even love you and you shall come to
my hand. Bethink you now what pains you can put on me; but at the
last you shall come and place your neck under my foot, humbly, not
choosing to be loved or hated, only beseeching your master!"

I broke off, half in wonder at my own words and the flame in my
blood, half in dismay to see her, who at first had fronted me
bravely, wince and put up both hands to her face, yet not so as to
cover a tide of shame flushing her from throat to brow.

"Give me leave to shoot him, Princess," said Marc'antonio. But she
shook her head. "He has been talking with some one. . . .
With Stephanu?" His gaze questioned me gloomily. "No, I will do the
dog justice; Stephanu would not talk."

"Lead her away," said I, "and leave me now to mourn my friend."

He touched her by the arm, at the same time promising me with a look
that he would return for an explanation. The Princess shivered, but,
as he stood aside to let her pass, recollected herself and went
before him up the path beneath the pines.

I stepped to where Nat lay and bent over him. I had never till now
been alone with death, and it should have found me terribly alone.
. . . I closed his eyes. . . . And this had been my friend, my
schoolfellow, cleverer than I and infinitely more thoughtful, lacking
no grace but good fortune, and lacking that only by strength of a
spirit too gallant for its fate. In all our friendship it was I that
had taken, he that had given; in the strange path we had entered and
travelled thus far together, it was he that had supplied the courage,
the loyalty, the blithe confidence that life held a prize to be won
with noble weapons; he who had set his face towards the heights and
pinned his faith to the stars; he, the victim of a senseless bullet;
he, stretched here as he had fallen, all thoughts, all activities
quenched, gone out into that night of which the darkness gathering in
this forsaken glade was but a phantom, to be chased away by
to-morrow's sun. To-morrow . . . to-morrow I should go on living and
begin forgetting him. To-morrow? God forgive me for an ingrate, I
had begun already. . . . Even as I bent over him, my uppermost
thought had not been of my friend. I had made, in the moment almost
of his death and across his body, my first acquaintance with passion.
My blood tingled yet with the strange fire; my mind ran in a tumult
of high resolves of which I understood neither the end nor the
present meaning, but only that the world had on a sudden become my
battlefield, that the fight was mine, and at all cost the victory
must be mine. It was, if I may say it without blasphemy, as if my
friend's blood had baptized me into his faith; and I saw life and
death with new eyes.

Yet, for the moment, in finding passion I had also found self; and
shame of this self dragged down my elation. I had sprung to my feet
in wild rage against Nat's murder; I had spoken words--fierce,
unpremeditated words--which, beginning in a boyish defiance, had
ended on a note which, though my own lips uttered it, I heard as from
a trumpet sounding close and yet calling afar. In a minute or so it
had happened, and behold! I that, sitting beside Nat, should have
been terribly alone, was not alone, for my new-found self sat between
us, intruding on my sorrow.

I declare now with shame, as it abased me then, that for hours, while
the darkness fell and the stars began their march over the tree-tops,
the ghostly intruder kept watch with me as a bodily presence mocking
us both, benumbing my efforts to sorrow. . . . Nor did it fade until
calm came to me, recalled by the murmur of unseen waters.
Listening to them I let my thoughts travel up to the ridges and forth
into that unconfined world of which Nat's spirit had been made free.
. . . I went to the hut for a pail, groped my way to the stream, and
fetched water to prepare his body for burial. When I returned the
hateful presence had vanished. My eyes went up to a star--love's
planet--poised over the dark boughs. Thither and beyond it Nat had
travelled. Through those windows he would henceforth look back and
down on me; never again through the eyes I had loved as a friend and
lived to close. I could weep now, and I wept; not passionately, not
selfishly, but in grief that seemed to rise about me like a tide and
bear me and all fate of man together upon its deep, strong
flood. . . .

At daybreak Marc'antonio and Stephanu came down the pass and found me
digging the grave. I thought at first that they intended me some
harm, for their faces were ill-humoured enough in all conscience; but
they carried each a spade, and after growling a salutation, set down
their guns and struck in to help me with my work.

We had been digging, maybe, for twenty minutes, and in silence, when
my ear caught the sound of furious grunting from the sty, where I had
penned the hogs overnight, a little before sundown. Nat had watched
me as I numbered them, and it seemed now so long ago that I glanced
up with a start almost guilty, as though in my grief I had neglected
the poor brutes for days. In fact I had kept them in prison for a
short hour beyond their usual time, and some one even now was
liberating them.

It was the Princess, of whose presence I had not been aware.
She stood by the gate of the pen, her head and shoulders in sunlight,
while the hogs raced in shadow past her feet.

Marc'antonio glanced at her across his shoulder and growled angrily.

"Your pardon, Princess," said I, slowly, as she closed the gate after
the last of the hogs and came forward. "I have been remiss, but I
need no help either for this or for any of my work."

She halted a few paces from the grave. "You would rather be alone?"
she asked simply.

"I wish you to understand," said I, "that for the present I have no
choice at all but your will."

She frowned. "I thought to lighten your work, cavalier."

I was about to thank her ironically when the sound of a horn broke
the silence about us, its notes falling through the clear morning air
from the heights across the valley. The Corsicans dropped their
spades.

"Ajo, listen! Listen!" cried Marc'antonio, excitedly. "That will be
the Prince--listen again! Yes, and they are answering from the
mountain. It can be no other than the Prince, returning this way!"

While we stood with our faces upturned to the granite crags, I caught
the Princess regarding me doubtfully. Her gaze passed on as if to
interrogate Marc'antonio and Stephanu, who, however, paid no heed,
being preoccupied.

Again the horn sounded; not clear as before, although close at hand,
for the thick woods muffled it. For another three minutes we
waited--the Princess silent, standing a little apart, with thoughtful
brow, the two men conversing in rapid guttural undertones; then far
up the track beneath the boughs a musket-barrel glinted, and another
and another, glint following glint, as a file of men came swinging
down between the pines, disappeared for a moment, and rounding a
thicket of the undergrowth emerged upon the level clearing. In dress
and bearing they were not to be distinguished from Marc'antonio,
Stephanu, or any of the bandits on the mountain. Each man carried a
musket and each wore the jacket and breeches of sad-coloured velvet,
the small cap and leathern leggings, which I afterwards learnt to be
the uniform of patriotic Corsica. But as they deployed upon the
glade--some forty men in all--and halted at sight of us, my eyes fell
upon a priest, who in order of marching had been midmost, or nearly
midmost, of the file, and upon a young man beside him, toward whom
the Princess sprang with a light step and a cry of salutation.

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