Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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"I give you a figure, and you would put it into words! Words!"
He spat. "And yet it is the truth, Englishman, that once she called
me her second father. 'Her second father'--I have repeated that to
Stephanu once or twice when I have lost my temper (a rare thing with
me). You should see him turn blue!"

I could get no more out of Marc'antonio that day, nor indeed did the
pain I suffered allow me to continue the catechism. A little before
night fell he lifted me again and carried me to a bed of
clean-smelling heather and fern he had prepared within the hut; and,
all the night through, the slightest moan from me found him alert to
give me drink or shift me to an easier posture. Our total solitude
seemed from the first to breed a certain good-fellowship between us:
neither next day nor for many days did he remit or falter in his care
for me. But his manner, though not ungentle, was taciturn.
He seemed to carry about a weight on his mind; his brow wore a
constant frown, vexed and unhappy. Once or twice I caught him
talking to himself.

"To be sure it was enough to madden all the saints: and the Prince is
not one of them. . . ."

"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?" I asked
from my bed.

Already he had turned in some confusion, surprised by the sound of
his own voice. He was down on hands and knees, and had been blowing
upon the embers of a wood fire, kindled under a pan of goat's milk.
The goat herself browsed in the sunlight beyond the doorway, in the
circuit allowed by a twenty-foot tether.

"What was enough to madden all the saints, O Marc'antonio?"

"Why," said he, savagely, "your standing up to him and denying his
birth and his sister's before all the crowd. I did not think that
anything could have saved you."

"If I remember, I added that the Queen Emilia's bare word would be
enough for me."

"So. But you denied it on his father's, and that is what his
enemies, the Paolists all, would give their ears to hear--yes, and
Pasquale Paoli himself, though he passes for a just man."

"Marc'antonio," said I, seriously, "are the Prince and Princess in
truth the children of King Theodore?"

"As God hears me, cavalier, they are his twin children, born in the
convent of Santa Maria di Fosciandora, in the valley of the Serchio,
some leagues to the north of Florence; and on the feast-day of Saint
Mark these sixteen years ago."

"Then King Theodore either knew nothing of it, or he was a liar."

"He was a liar, cavalier."

"Stay a moment. I have a mind to tell you the whole story as it came
to me, and as I should have told it to the Prince Camillo, had he
treated me with decent courtesy."

Marc'antonio ceased blowing the fire and sitting back on his heels
disposed himself to listen. Very briefly I told him of my journey to
London, my visit to the Fleet, and how I received the crown with
Theodore's blessing.

"That he denied having children I will not say: but (I remember well)
my father took it for granted that he had no children, and he said
nothing to the contrary. Indeed on any other assumption his gift of
the crown to me would have been meaningless."

Marc'antonio nodded, following my argument. "But there is another
difficulty," I went on. "My father, who does not lie, told me once
that King Theodore returned to the island in the year 'thirty-nine,
where he stayed but for a week; and that not until a year later did
his queen escape across to Tuscany."

But here Marc'antonio shook his head vigorously. "Whoever told your
father that, told him an untruth. The Queen fled from Porto Vecchio
in that same winter of 'thirty-nine, a few days before Christmas.
I myself steered the boat that carried her."

"To be sure," said I, "my father may have had his information from
King Theodore."

"The good sisters of the convent," continued Marc'antonio, "received
the Queen and did all that was necessary for her. But among them
must have been one who loved the Genoese or their gold: for when the
children were but ten days old they vanished, having been stolen and
handed secretly to the Genoese--yes, cavalier, out of the Queen's own
sleeping-chamber. Little doubt had we they were dead--for why should
their enemies spare them? And never should we have recovered trace
of them but for the Father Domenico, who knew what had become of them
(having learnt it, no doubt, among the sisters' confessions, to
receive which he visited the convent) and that they were alive and
unharmed; but he kept the secret, for his oath's sake, or else
waiting for the time to ripen."

"Then King Theodore may also have believed them dead," I suggested.
"Let us do him that justice. Or he may never have known that they
existed."

Marc'antonio brushed this aside with a wave of his hand.

"The cavalier," he answered with dignity, "may have heard me allude
to my travels?"

"Once or twice."

"The first time that I crossed the Alps"--great Hannibal might have
envied the roll in Marc'antonio's voice--"I bore the King tidings of
his good fortune. It was Stephanu who followed, a week later, with
the tale that the children were stolen."

"Then Theodore _did_ believe them dead."

"At the time, cavalier; at the time, no doubt. But more than twelve
years later, being in Brussels--" Here Marc'antonio pulled himself
up, with a sudden dark flush and a look of confusion.

"Go on, my friend. You were saying that twelve years later,
happening to be in Brussels--"

"By the merest chance, cavalier. Before retiring to England King
Theodore spent the most of his exile in Flanders and the Low
Countries: and in Brussels, as it happened, I had word of him and
learned--but without making myself known to him--that he was seeking
his two children."

"Seeking them in Brussels?"

"At a venture, no doubt, cavalier. Put the case that you were
seeking two children, of whom you knew only that they were alive and
somewhere in Europe--like two fleas, as you might say, in a bundle of
straw--"

I looked at Marc'antonio and saw that he was lying, but politely
forbore to tell him so.

"Then Theodore knew that his children were alive?" said I musing.
"Yet he gave my father to understand that he had no children."

"Mbe, but he was a great liar, that Theodore? Always when it
profited, and sometimes for the pleasure of it."

"Nevertheless, to disinherit his own son!"

Marc'antonio's shoulders went up to his ears. "He knew well enough
what comedy he was playing. Disinherit his own son? We Corsicans,
he might be sure, would never permit that: and meanwhile your
father's money bought him out of prison. Ajo, it is simple as
milking the she-goat yonder!"

"If you knew my father better, Marc'antonio, you would find it not
altogether so simple as you suppose. King Theodore might have told
my father that these children lived, and my father would yet have
bought his freedom for their sake; yes, and helped him to the last
shilling and the last drop of blood to restore them to the Queen
their mother."

"Verily, cavalier, I knew your father to be a madman," said
Marc'antonio, gravely, after considering my words for awhile.
"But such madness as you speak of, who could take into account?"

"Eh, Marc'antonio? What acquaintance have you with my father, that
you should call him mad?"

"I remember him well, cavalier, and his long sojourning with my late
master the Count Ugo at his palace of Casalabriva above the Taravo,
and the love there was between him and my young mistress that is now
the Queen Emilia. Lovers they were for all eyes to see but the old
Count's. Mbe! we all gossiped of it, we servants and clansmen of the
Colonne--even I, that kept the goats over Bicchivano, on the road
leading up to the palace, and watched the two as they walked
together, and was of an age to think of these things. A handsomer
couple none could wish to see, and we watched them with good will;
for the Englishman touched her hand with a kind of worship as a
devout man touches his beads, and they told me that in his own
country he owned great estates--greater even than the Count's.
Indeed, cavalier, had your father thought less of love and more of
ambition there is no saying but he might have reached out for the
crown, and his love would have come to him afterwards. But, as the
saying goes, while Peter stalked the mufro Paul stole the mountain:
and again says the proverb, 'Bury not your treasure in another's
orchard.' Along came this Theodore, and with a few lies took the
crown and the jewel with it. So your father went away, and has come
again after many years; and at the first I did not recognize him, for
time has dealt heavily with us all. But afterwards, and before he
spoke his name, I knew him--partly by his great stature, partly by
his carriage, and partly, cavalier, by the likeness your youth bears
to his as I remember it. So you have the tale."

"And in the telling, Marc'antonio," said I, "it appears that you, who
champion his children, bear Theodore's memory no good will."

"Theodore!" Marc'antonio spat again. "If he were alive here and
before me, I would shoot him where he stood."

"For what cause?" I asked, surprised by the shake in his voice.

But Marc'antonio turned to the fire again, and would not answer.

As I remember, some three or four days passed before I contrived to
draw him into further talk; and, curiously enough, after trying him a
dozen times _per ambages_ (as old Mr. Grylls would have said) and in
vain, on the point of despair I succeeded with a few straight words.

"Marc'antonio," said I, "I have a notion about King Theodore."

"I am listening, cavalier."

"A suspicion only, and horribly to his discredit."

"It is the likelier to be near the truth."

"Could he--think you--have _sold_ his children to the Genoese?"

Marc'antonio cast a quick glance at me. "I have thought of that," he
said quietly. "He was capable of it."

"It would explain why they were allowed to live. A father, however
deep his treachery, would make that a part of the bargain."

Marc'antonio nodded.

"I would give something," I went on, "to know how Father Domenico
came by the secret. By confession of one of the sisters, you
suggest. Well, it may be so. But there might be another way--only
take warning that I do not like this Father Domenico--"

"I am listening."

"Is it not possible that he himself contrived the kidnapping--always
with King Theodore's consent?"

"Not possible," decided Marc'antonio, after a moment's thought.
"No more than you do I like the man: but consider. It was he who
sent us to find and bring them back to Corsica. At this moment, when
(as I will confess to you) all odds are against it, he holds to their
cause; he, a comfortable priest and a loose liver, has taken to the
bush and fares hardly for his zeal."

"My good friend," said I, "you reason as though a traitor must needs
work always in a straight line and never quarrel with his paymaster;
whereas by the very nature of treachery these are two of the
unlikeliest things in the world. Now, putting this aside, tell me if
you think your Prince Camillo the better for Father Domenico's
company? . . . You do not, I see."

"I will not say that," answered Marc'antonio, slowly. "The Prince
has good qualities. He will make a Corsican in time. But, I own to
you, he has been ill brought up, and before ever he met with Father
Domenico. As yet he thinks only of his own will, like a spoilt
child; and of his pleasures, which are not those of a king such as he
desires to be."

Said I at a guess, "But the pleasures--eh, Marc'antonio?--such as a
forward boy learns on the pavements; of Brussels, for example?"

I thought for the moment he would have knifed me, so fiercely he
started back and then craned forward at me, showing his white teeth.
I saw that my luck with him hung on this moment.

"Tell me," I said, facing him and dragging hard on the hurry in my
voice, "and remember that I owe no love to this cub. You may be
loyal to him as you will, but I am the Princess's man, I! You heard
me promise her. Tell me, why has she no recruits?"

He drew back yet farther, still with his teeth bared. "Am _I_ not
her man?" he almost hissed.

"So you tell me," I answered, with a scornful laugh, brazening it
out. "You are her man, and Stephanu is her man, and the Prince too,
and the Father Domenico, no doubt. Yes, you are all her men, you
four: but why can she collect no others?" I paused a moment and,
holding up a hand, checked them off contemptuously upon my fingers.
"Four of you! and among you at least one traitor! Stop!" said I, as
he made a motion to protest. "You four--you and Stephanu and the
Prince and Fra Domenico--know something which it concerns her fame to
keep hidden; you four, and no other that I wot of. You are all her
men, her champions: and yet this secret leaks out and poisons all
minds against the cause. Because of it, Paoli will have no dealing
with you. Because of it, though you raise your standard on the
mountains, no Corsicans flock to it. Pah!" I went on, my scorn
confounding him, "I called you her champion, the other day! Be so
good as consider that I spoke derisively. Four pretty champions she
has, indeed; of whom one is a traitor, and the other three have not
the spirit to track him down and kill him!"

Marc'antonio stood close by me now. To my amazement he was shaking
like a man with the ague.

"Cavalier, you do not understand!" he protested hoarsely: but his
eyes were wistful, as though he hoped for something which yet he
dared not hear.

"Eh? I do not understand? Well, now, listen to me. I am her man,
too, but in a different fashion. You heard what I swore to her, that
day, beside my friend's body; that whether in hate or love, and be
her need what it might, I would help her. Hear me repeat it, lying
here with my both legs broken, helpless as a log. Let strength
return to me and I will help her yet, and in spite of all her
champions."

"In hate or in love, cavalier?" Marc'antonio's voice shook with his
whole body.

"That shall be my secret," answered I. (Yet well I knew what the
answer was, and had known it since the moment she had bent over me in
the sty, filing at my chain.) "It had better be hate--eh,
Marc'antonio?--seeing that for some reason she hates all men, except
you, perhaps, and Stephanu, and her brother."

"We do not count, I and Stephanu. Her brother she adores. But the
rest of men she hates, cavalier, and with good cause."

"Then it had better be hate?"

"Yes, yes"--and there was appeal in his voice--"it had a thousand
times better be hate, could such a miracle happen." He peered into
my eyes for a moment, and shook his head. "But it is not hate,
cavalier; you do not deceive me. And since it is not--"

"Well?"

"It were better for you--far better--that Giuse had died of the wound
you gave him."

"Why, what on earth has Giuse to do with this matter?" I demanded.
Indeed I had all but forgotten Giuse's existence.

"Only this; that had Giuse died, they would have killed you out of
hand in _vendetta_."

"You are an amiable race, you Corsicans!"

"And you came, cavalier, meaning to reign over us! Now, I have taken
a liking to you and will give you a warning. Be like your father,
and give up all for love."

"Suppose," said I, after a pause, "that for love I choose rather to
dare all?"

"Signore"--he stepped back and, raising himself erect, flung out both
hands passionately--"Take her, if you must take her, away from
Corsica! She is innocent, but here they will never understand.
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 noble, 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 noble thing:
Fredome mayse man to haif liking."
BARBOUR, _The Bruce_.

"Non enim propter gloriam divitas aut honores pugnanus,
sed propter libertatem solummodo, quam nemo bonus nisi cum vita
amittit.--"
_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 passion 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 assassinated 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 constitution 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 ship 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
passed with his men no traveller came down the path which ran between
our hut and Nat's grave, over which the undergrowth already was
pushing 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 pronounced 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 assured
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, clustering like fairy oranges, here and
there so thickly that the whole thicket was afire and aflame, enough
to have deceived Moses! God, how good to see it and be alive!

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