Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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"I remember, Princess: but even yet I do not understand. Why, and
for what, should you beseech me?"

"In the first place for death. I am your wife . . ." She broke off
with a shiver. "There is something in the name, _messere_--is there
not?--that should move you to kindness, as a sportsman takes his game
not unkindly to break its neck. That is all I ask of you--"

"Princess!"

She lifted a hand. "--except that you will let me say what I have to
say. You shall think hard thoughts of me, and I am going to make
them harder; but for your own sake you shall put away vile ones-if
you can."

I stared at her stupidly dizzied a little with the words _I am your
wife_, humming in my brain. Or say that I am naturally not
quick-witted, and I will plead that for once my dullness did me no
discredit.

At all events it saved me for the moment: for while I stared at her,
utterly at a loss, a crackle of twigs warned us, and we turned
together as, by the pathway leading from the high-road, the bushes
parted and the face of Marc'antonio peered through upon the clearing.

"Salutation, O Princess!" said he gravely, and stepped out of cover
attended by Stephanu, who likewise saluted.

The Princess drew herself up imperiously. "I thought, O Stephanu,
that I had made plain my orders, that you two were neither to follow
nor to watch me?"

"Nevertheless," Marc'antonio made answer, "when one misses a comrade
and hears, at a little distance, the firing of a volley . . . not to
mention that some one has been burning gunpowder hereabouts," he
wound up, sniffing the air with an expression that absurdly reminded
me of our Vicar, at home, tasting wine.

"I warn you, O Marc'antonio," said the Princess, "to be wise and ask
no more questions."

"I have asked none, O Princess," he answered again, still very
gravely, and after a glance at me turned to Stephanu. "But it runs
in my head, comrade, that the time has come to consider other things
than wisdom."

"For example?" I challenged him sharply.

"For example, cavalier, that I cannot reconcile this smell with any
Corsican gunpowder."

"And you are right," said I. "Nay, Princess, you have sworn not long
since to obey me, and I choose that they shall know. That salvo,
sirs, was fired, five minutes ago, by the Genoese."

"A 'salvo' did you say, cavalier?"

"For our wedding, Marc'antonio." I took the Princess's hand--which
neither yielded nor resisted--and lifting it a little way, released
it to fall again limply. So for a while there was silence between us
four.

"Marc'antonio," said I, "and you, Stephanu--it is I now who speak for
the Princess and decide for her; and I decide that you, who have
served her faithfully, deserve to be told all the truth. It is
truth, then, that we are married. The priest who married us was
Fra Domenico, and with assent of his master the Prince Camillo.
I can give you, moreover, the name of the chief witness: he is a
certain Signor or General Andrea Fornari, and commands the Genoese
garrison in Nonza."

"Princess!" Marc'antonio implored her.

"It is true," said she. "This gentleman has done me much honour,
having heard what my brother chose to say."

"But I do not comprehend!" The honest fellow cast a wild look around
the clearing. "Ah, yes-the volley! They have taken the Prince, and
shot him . . . But his body--they would not take his body--and you
standing here and allowing it--"

"My friends," I interrupted, "they have certainly taken his body, and
his soul too, for that matter; and I doubt if you can overtake either
on this side of Nonza. But with him you will find the crown of
Corsica, and the priest who helped him to sell it. I tell you this,
who are clansmen of the Colonne. Your mistress, who discovered the
plot and was here to hinder it, will confirm me."

Their eyes questioned her; not for long. In the droop of her bowed
head was confirmation.

"And therefore," I went on, "you two can have no better business than
to help me convey the Princess northward and bring her to her mother,
whom in this futile following after a wretched boy you have all so
strangely forgotten. By God!" said I, "there is but one man in
Corsica who has hunted, this while, on a true scent and held to it;
and he is an Englishman, solitary and faithful at this moment upon
Cape Corso!"

"Your pardon, cavalier," answered Marc'antonio after a slow pause.
"What you say is just, in part, and I am not denying it. But so we
saw not our duty, since the Queen Emilia bade us follow her son.
With him we have hunted (as you tell us) too long and upon a false
scent. Be it so: but, since this has befallen, we must follow on the
chase a little farther. For you, you have now the right to protect
our well-beloved; not only to the end of Cape Corso, but to the end
of the world. But for us, who are two men used to obey, the Princess
your wife must suffer us to disobey her now for the first time.
The road to the Cape, avoiding Nonza, is rough and steep and must be
travelled afoot; yet I think you twain can accomplish it. At the
Cape, if God will, we will meet you and stand again at your service.
But we travel by another road--the road which does not avoid Nonza."

He glanced at Stephanu, who nodded.

"Farewell then, O Princess; and if this be the end of our service,
forgive what in the past has been done amiss. Farewell, O cavalier,
and be happy to protect her in perils wherein we were powerless."

The Princess stretched out both hands.

"Nay, mistress," said Marc'antonio, with another glance at Stephanu;
"but first cross them, that there be no telling the right from the
left: for we are two jealous men."

She crossed them obediently, and the two took each a hand and kissed
it.

Now all this while I could see that she was struggling for speech,
and as they released her hands she found it.

"But wherefore must you go by Nonza, O Marc'antonio? And how many
will you take with you?"

Marc'antonio put the first question aside. "We go alone, Princess.
You may call it a reconnaissance, on which the fewer taken the
better."

"You will not kill him! Nay, then, O Marc'antonio, at least--at
least you will not hurt him!"

"We hope, Princess, that there will be no need," he answered
seriously, and, saluting once more, turned on his heel. Stephanu
also saluted and turned, and the pair, falling into step, went from
us across the clearing.

I watched them till their forms disappeared in the undergrowth, and
turned to my bride.

"And now, Princess, I believe you have something to say to me.
Shall it be here? I will not suggest the cottage, which is overfull
maybe of unpleasant reminders; but here is a tree-trunk, if you will
be seated."

"That shall be as my lord chooses."

I laughed. "Your lord chooses, then, that you take a seat. It seems
(I take your word for it) that there must be hard thoughts between
us. Well, a straight quarrel is soonest ended, they say: let us have
them out and get them over."

"Ah, you hurt! Is it necessary that you hurt so?" Her eyes no less
than her voice sobered me at once, shuddering together as though my
laugh had driven home a sword and it grated on the bone.
I remembered that she always winced at laughter, but this evident
anguish puzzled me.

"God knows," said I, "how I am hurting you. But pardon me.
Speak what you have to speak; and I will be patient while I learn."

"'A lifetime of dishonour,' you said, and yet you laugh . . .
A lifetime of dishonour, and you were blithe to be shot and escape
it; yet now you laugh. Ah, I cannot understand!"

"Princess!" I protested, although not even now did I grasp what
meaning she had misread into my words.

"But you said rightly. It is a lifetime of dishonour you have
suffered them to put on you: and I--I have taken more than life from
you, cavalier--yet I cannot grieve for you while you laugh.
O sir, do not take from me my last help, which is to honour you!"

"Listen to me, Princess," said I, stepping close and standing over
her. "What do you suppose that I meant by using those words?
They were your own words, remember."

"That is better. It will help us both if we are frank--only do not
treat me as a child. You heard what my brother said. Yes, and
doubtless you have heard other things to my shame? Answer me."

"If your brother chose to utter slanders--"

"Yes, yes; it was easy to catch him by the throat. That is how one
man treats another who calls a woman vile in her presence. It does
not mean that he disbelieves, and therefore it is worthless; but a
gallant man will act so, almost without a second thought, and because
it is _dans les formes_." She paused. "I learned that phrase in
Brussels, cavalier."

I made no answer.

"In Brussels, cavalier," she repeated, "where it was often in the
mouths of very vile persons. You have heard, perhaps, that we--that
my brother and I--lived our childhood in Brussels?"

I bent my head, without answering; but still she persisted.

"I was brought to Corsica from Brussels, cavalier. Marc'antonio and
Stephanu fetched us thence, being guided by that priest who is now my
brother's confessor."

"I have been told so, Princess. Marc'antonio told me."

"Did he also tell you where he found me?"

"No, Princess."

"Did he tell you that, being fetched hither, I was offered by my
brother in marriage to a young Count Odo of the Rocca Serra, and that
the poor boy slew himself with his own gun?"

I stuffed my hands deep in my pockets, and said I, standing over
her--

"All this has been told me, Princess, though not the precise reason
for it: and since you desire me to be frank I will tell you that I
have given some thought to that dead lad--that rival of mine (if you
will permit the word) whom I never knew. The mystery of his death is
a mystery to me still; but in all my blind guesses this somehow
remained clear to me, that he had loved you, Princess; and this
(again I ask your leave to say it), because I could understand it so
well, forbade me to think unkindly of him."

"He loved his honour better, sir." Her face had flushed darkly.

"I am sorry, then, if I must suffer by comparison."

"No, no," she protested. "Oh, why will you twist my words and force
me to seem ungrateful? He died rather than have me to wife: you took
me on the terms that within a few minutes you must die. For both of
you the remedy was at hand, only _you_ chose to save me before taking
it. On my knees, sir, I could thank you for that. The crueller were
they that, when you stood up claiming your right to die, they broke
the bargain and cheated you."

"Princess," I said, after musing a moment, "if my surviving seemed to
you so pitiable, there was another way." I pointed to her musket.

"Yes, cavalier, and I will confess to you that when, having fired
wide, they turned to go and the cheat was evident, twice before you
pulled the bandage away I had lifted my gun. But I could not fire
it, cavalier. To make me your executioner! Me, your wife--and while
you thought so vilely of me!"

"Faith," said I grimly, "it was asking too much, even for a Genoese!
Yet again I think you overrate their little trick, since, after
all"--I touched my own gunstock--"there remains a third way--the way
chosen by young Odo of Rocca Serra."

She put out a hand. "Sir, that way you need not take--if you will be
patient and hear me!"

"Lady," said I, "you may hastily despise me; but I am neither going
to take that way, nor to be patient, nor to hear you. But I am, as
you invited me, going to be very frank and confess to you, risking
your contempt, that I am extremely thankful the Genoese did not shoot
me, a while ago. Indeed, I do not remember in all my life to have
felt so glad, as I feel just now, to be alive. Give me your gun, if
you please."

"I do not understand."

"No, you do not understand. . . . Your gun, please . . . nay, you can
lay it on the turf between us. The phial, too, that you offered your
brother. . . . Thank you. And now, my wife, let us talk of your
country and mine; two islands which appear to differ more than I had
guessed. In Corsica it would seem that, let a vile thing be spoken
against a woman, it suffices. Belief in it does not count: it
suffices that a shadow has touched her, and rather than share that
shadow, men will kill themselves--so tender a plant is their honour.
Now, in England, O Princess, men are perhaps even more irrational.
They, no more than your Corsicans, listen to the evidence and ask
themselves, 'Is this good evidence or bad? Do I believe it or
disbelieve?' They begin father back, Princess--Shall I tell you how?
They look in the face of their beloved, and they say, 'Slander this,
not as you wish for belief, but only as you dare; for here my faith
is fixed beforehand.'

"And therefore, O Princess," I went on, after a pause in which we
eyed one another slowly, "therefore, I disbelieve any slander
concerning you; not merely because your brother's confessor was its
author--though that, to any rational man, should be enough--but
because I have looked in your face. Therefore also I, your husband,
forbid you to speak what would dishonour us both."

"But, cavalier--if--if it were true?"

"True?"--I let out a harsh laugh. "Take up that phial. Hold it in
your hand, so. Now look me in the face and drink--if you dare!
Look me in the face, read how I trust you, and so, if you can say the
lie to me say it--and drink!"

She lifted the phial steadily, almost to her lips, keeping her eyes
on mine--but of a sudden faltered and let it fall upon the turf:
where I, whose heart had all but stood still, crushed my heel upon it
savagely.

"I cannot. You have conquered," she gasped.

"Conquered?" I swore a bitter oath. "O Princess, think you _this_
is the way I promised to conquer you? Take up your gun again and
follow me. . . . Eh? You do not ask where I lead?"

"It is enough that I follow you, my husband," she said humbly.

"It is something, indeed; but before God it is not enough, nor half
enough. I see now that 'enough' may never come: almost I doubt if I,
who swore to you it should come, and since have desired it madly,
desire it any longer; and until it comes you are still the winner.
'Enough' shall be said, Princess--for my price rises--not when (as I
promised) you come to me without choosing to be loved or hated, only
beseeching your master, but when you shall come to me having made
your choice. . . . But so far, so good," said I, cheerfully, changing
my tone. "You do not ask where I lead. I am leading you, if I can
to Cape Corso, to my father; and by his help, if it shall serve, to
your mother."

"I thank you, cavalier," she said, still in her restrained voice.
"You are a good man; and for that reason I am sorry you will not
hearken to me."

"The mountains are before us," said I, shouldering my gun.
"Listen, Princess: let us be good comrades, us two. Let us forget
what lies at the end of the journey--the convent for you, may be, and
for me at least the parting. My life has been spared to-day, and I
tell you frankly that I am glad of the respite. For you, the
mountains hold no slanders, and shall hold no evil. Put your hand in
mine on the compact, and we will both step it bravely. Forget that
you were ever a Princess or I a promised king of this Corsica!
O beloved, travel this land, which can never be yours or mine, and
let it be ours only for a while as we journey."

I turned and led the way up the path between the bushes: and she
followed my stride almost at a run. On the bare mountain-spur above
the high-road she overtook and fell into pace with me: and so,
skirting Nonza, we breasted the long slope of the range.

CHAPTER XXV.

MY WEDDING DAY.

Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge
in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us
see whether the vine hath budded and the tender grape appear.--
_The Song of Songs_.

Ahead of us, high on our right, rose the mountain ridges, scarp upon
scarp, to the snowy peak of Monte Stella; low on our left lay Nonza,
and beyond it a sea blue as a sapphire, scarcely rippled, void save
for one white sail far away on the south-west horizon--not the
_Gauntlet_; for, distant though she was, I could make out the shape
of her canvas, and it was square cut.

Nonza itself lay in the shadow of the shore with the early light
shimmering upon its citadel and upper works--a fortress to all
appearance asleep: but the Genoese pickets would be awake and
guarding the northward road for at least a league beyond, and to
avoid them we must cross the high mountain spurs, using where we
could their patches of forest and our best speed where these left the
ridges bare.

The way was hard--harder by far than I had deemed possible--and kept
us too busy for talk. Our silence was not otherwise constrained at
all. Passion fell away from us as we climbed; fell away with its
strife, its confusion, its distempered memories of the night now
past; and was left with the vapours of the coast where the malaria
brooded. Through the upper, clearer atmosphere we walked as gods on
the roof of the world, saw with clear eyes, knew with mind and spirit
untroubled by self-sickness. We were silent, having fallen into an
accord which made all speech idle. Arduous as the road soon became,
and, while unknown to both of us, more arduous to me because of my
inexperience, we chose without hesitating, almost without consulting.
Each difficulty brought decision, and with decision, its own help.
Now it was I who steadied her leap across a chasm; now came her turn
to underprop my foothold till I clambered to a ledge whence I could
reach down a hand and drag her up to me. As a rule I may call myself
a blundering climber, my build being too heavy; but I made no mistake
that day.

In the course of a three hours' scramble she spoke to me (as I
remember) once only, and then as a comrade, in quiet approval of my
mountaineering. We had come to a crag over which--with no word
said--I had lowered her by help of my bandolier. She had waited at
the foot while I followed her down without assistance, traversing on
the way an outward-sloping ledge of smooth rock which overhung a
precipice and a sheer fall of at least three hundred feet. The ledge
had nowhere a notch in it to grip the boot-sole, and was moreover
slippery with the green ooze of a mountain spring. It has haunted my
dreams since then; I would not essay it again for my weight in money;
but I crossed it that day, so to speak, with my hands in my pockets.

The most curious (you might call it the most uncanny) part of the
whole adventure, was that from time to time we came out of these
breathless scrambles plump upon a patch of cultivated ground and a
hill-farm with its steading; the explanation being that these farms
stand each at the head of its own ravine, and, inaccessible one to
another, have communication with the world only by the tracks which
lead down their ravines. Here, three thousand feet and more above
the sea--upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as
through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of
fishing-villages on the edge of the blue--lived slow, sedate folks,
who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave
us goat's-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered.
The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart
in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we
should say) without patriotism. We came to them as gods from the
heights, and they received and sped us as gods. They were too slow
of speech to question us, or even to express their astonishment.

There was one farm with a stream plunging past it, and, by the house
wall, a locked mill-wheel (God knows what it had ever ground), and by
the door below it a woman, seated on a flight of steps, with her
bosom half-covered and a sucking-child laid asleep in her lap.
She blinked in the sunshine as we came across the yard to her, and
said she--

"Salutation, O strangers, and pardon that I cannot rise: but the
little one is sick of a fever and I fear to stir him, for he makes as
if he would sleep. Nor is there any one else to entertain you, since
my husband has gone down to the _marina_ to fetch the wise woman who
lives there."

The Princess stepped close and stood over her. "_O paesana_," said
she, "do you and your man live here alone, so far up the mountain?"

"There is the _bambino_," said the mother, simply. "He is my first--
and a boy, by the gift of the Holy Virgin. Already he takes notice,
and soon he will be learning to talk: but since we both talk to him
and about him, you may say that already there are three of us, and
anon the good Lord may send us others. It is hard work, _O bella
donna_, on such a farm as ours, and doubly hard on my husband now for
these months that I have been able to help him but little. But with
a good man and his child--if God spare the child--I shall want no
happiness."

"Give me the child," said the Princess, taking a seat on the stone
slab beside her. "He shall not hurt with me while you fetch us a
draught of milk."

The woman stared at her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a
strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief and a growing
hope.

"Even when you came," she said hoarsely after a while, "I was praying
for an angel to help my child. . . . O blind, O hard of faith that I
am! And when I lifted my eyes and saw you, I bethought me not that
none walk this mountain by the path you have come, nor has this land
any like you twain for beauty and stature. . . . O lady--whether from
heaven or earth--you will not take my child but to cure it? He is my
only one."

"Give him to me."

The woman laid her child in the Princess's arms and ran into the
house, throwing one look of terror back at us from the doorstep.
The Princess sat motionless, gazing down on the closed lids,
frowning, deep in thoughts I could not follow.

"You will not," said I, "leave this good foolish soul in her error?"

"I have heard," she answered quietly, without lifting her eyes, "that
a royal touch has virtue to heal sometimes--and there was a time when
you claimed to be King of Corsica. Nay, forgive me," she took
herself up quickly, "there is bitterness yet left in me, but that
speech shall be the last of it. . . . O husband, O my friend, I was
thinking that this child will grow into a man; and of what his mother
said, that there is such a thing as a good man: and I am trying to
believe her. . . . _Eccu!_ he sleeps, poor mite! Listen to his
breathing."

The farm-wife came out with a full bowl of milk. Her hands shook and
spilled some as she handed it to me, so eager were they to hold her
infant again. Taking it and feeling the damp sweat as she passed a
hand over its brow, she broke forth into blessings.

We told her of her mistake: but I doubt if she heard.

"I have dwelt here these three years," she persisted, "and none ever
walked the mountain by the path you have come." She watched us as I
held the bowl for the Princess to drink, and asked quaintly, "But is
there truly no marrying in heaven? I have thought upon that many
times, and always it puzzles me."

We said farewell to her, and took her blessings with us as she
watched us across the head of the ravine. Then followed another
half-hour of silence and sharp climbing: but the worst was over, and
by-and-by the range tailed off into a chain of lessening hills over
which in the purple distance rose a solitary sharp cone with a
ruinous castle upon it, which (said the Princess) was Seneca's Tower
at the head of the Vale of Luri.

We were now beyond the danger of the Genoese, and therefore turned
aside to the left and descended the slopes to the high-road, along
which we made good speed until, having passed the tower and the mouth
of the gorge which leads up to it from the westward, we came, almost
at nightfall, within sight of Pino by the sea.

Here I proposed that I should go forward to the village and find a
night's lodging for her, pointing out that, the night being warm and
dry, I could make my couch comfortably enough in one of the citron
orchards that here lined the road on the landward side. To this at
first she assented--it seemed to me, even eagerly. But I had
scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice
calling me back, and back I went obediently.

"O husband," she said, "the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I
can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of. Nay"--she
put out a hand--"you must not forbid me. You must not even delay me
now."

"What is it, that I should forbid you?"

"It is--about Brussels."

I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched
my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.

"I have a right. . . . Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you
cannot go on refusing, because--see you--your goodness makes my right
the stronger. This morning I could have told you, but you refused
me. All this day I have known that refusal unjust."

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