Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

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"Brother, I am sorry to have disturbed you: but here is a business in
which I may need your counsel. Will it please you to step this way?
These guests of ours, I should first explain, have arrived from over
seas."

My uncle came forward, still like a man in a dream, mounted the dais
on my father's left, and, turning, surveyed the visitors in front.

"Eh? To be sure, to be sure," he murmured. "Broomsticks!"

"Their spokesman here, who gives his name as the Brother Basilio,
bears a message for me; and since he presents it in form with a whole
legation at his back, I think it due to treat him with equal
ceremony. Do you agree?"

"If you ask me," my uncle answered, after a pause full of thought,
"they would prefer to start, maybe, with a wash and a breakfast.
By good luck, Billy tells me, the trammel has made a good haul.
As for basins, brother, our stock will not serve all these gentlemen;
but if the rest will take the will for the deed and use the pump,
I'll go round meanwhile and see how the hens have been laying."

"You are the most practical of men, brother: but my offer of
breakfast has already been declined. Shall we hear what Dom Basilio
has to say?"

"I have nothing to say, Sir John," put in Brother Basilio, advancing,
"but to give you this letter and await your answer."

He drew a folded paper from his tunic and handed it to my father, who
rose to receive it, turned it over, and glanced at the
superscription. I saw a red flush creep slowly up to his temples and
fade, leaving his face extraordinarily pale. A moment later, in face
of his audience, he lifted the paper to his lips, kissed it
reverently, and broke the seal.

Again I saw the flush mount to his temples as he read the letter
through slowly and in silence. Then after a long pause he handed it
to me; and I took it wondering, for his eyes were dim and yet bright
with a noble joy.

The letter (turned into English) ran thus--

"_To Sir John Constantine, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the
Star, at his house of Constantine in Cornwall, England_.

"MY FRIEND,

"The bearer of this and his company have been driven by the
Genoese from their monastery of San Giorgio on my estate of
Casalabriva above the Taravo valley, the same where you will
remember our treading the vintage together to the freedom of
Corsica. But the Genoese have cut down my vines long since,
and now they have fired the roof over these my tenants and
driven them into the _macchia_, whence they send message to me
to deliver them. Indeed, friend, I have much ado to protect
myself in these days: but by good fortune I have heard of an
English vessel homeward bound which will serve them if they can
reach the coast, whence numbers of the faithful will send them
off with good provision. Afterwards, what will happen?
To England the ship is bound, and in England I know you only.
Remembering your great heart, I call on it for what help you
can render to these holy men. _Addio_, friend. You are
remembered in my constant prayers to Christ, the Virgin, and
all the Saints.

"EMILIA."

At a sign from my father--who had sunk back in his chair and sat
gripping its arms--I passed on this epistle to my uncle Gervase, who
read it and ran his hand through his hair.

"Dear me!" said he, running his eye over the attentive monks, "this
lady, whoever she may be--"

"She is a crowned queen, brother Gervase," my father interrupted;
"and moreover she is the noblest woman in the world."

"As to that, brother," returned my uncle, "I am saying nothing.
But speaking of what I know, I say she can be but poorly conversant
with your worldly affairs."

My father half-lifted himself from his seat. "And is that how you
take it?" he demanded sharply. "Is that all you read in the letter?
Brother, I tell you again, this lady is a queen. What should a queen
know of my degree of poverty?"

"Nevertheless--" began my uncle.

But my father cut him short again. "I had hoped," said he,
reproachfully, "you would have been prompt to recognize her noble
confidence. Mark you how, no question put, she honours me.
'Do this, for my sake'--Who but the greatest in the world can appeal
thus simply?"

"None, maybe," my uncle replied; "as none but the well-to-do can
answer with a like ease."

"You come near to anger me, brother; but I remember that you never
knew her. Is not this house large? Are not four-fifths of my rooms
lying at this moment un-tenanted? Very well; for so long as it
pleases them, since she claims it, these holy men shall be our
guests. No more of this," my father commanded peremptorily, and
added, with all the gravity in the world, "You should thank her
consideration rather, that she sends us visitors so frugal, since
poverty degrades us to these economies. But there is one thing
puzzles me." He took the letter again from my uncle and fastened his
gaze on the Brother Basilio. "She says she has much ado to protect
herself."

"Indeed, Sir John," answered Brother Basilio, "I fear the queen, our
late liege-lady, speaks somewhat less than the truth. She wrote to
you from a poor lodging hard by Bastia, having ventured back to
Corsica out of Tuscany on business of her own; and on the eve of
sailing we heard that she had been taken prisoner by the Genoese."

"What!" My father rose, clutching the arms of his chair. Of stone
they were, like the chair itself, and well mortised: but his great
grip wrenched them out of their mortises and they crashed on the
dais. "What! You left her a prisoner of the Genoese!" He gazed
around them in a wrath that slowly grew cold, freezing into contempt.
"Go, sirs; since she commands it, room shall be found for you all.
My house for the while is yours. But go from me now."

[1] Tilled, planted.

CHAPTER VI.

HOW MY FATHER OUT OF NOTHING BUILT AN ARMY, AND IN FIVE MINUTES
PLANNED AN INVASION.

Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of
Horse, Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery, and
the like: All this is but a Sheep in a Lion's Skin, except the
Breed and disposition be stout and warlike. Nay, Number it
selfe in Armies importeth not much where the People is of weake
courage: For (as _Virgil_ saith) It never troubles a Wolfe, how
many the sheepe be."--BACON.

For the rest of the day my father shut himself in his room, while my
uncle spent the most of it seated on the brewhouse steps in a shaded
corner of the back court, through which the monks brought in their
furniture and returned to the ship for more. The bundles they
carried were prodigious, and all the morning they worked without halt
or rest, ascending and descending the hill in single file and always
at equal distances one behind another. Watching from the terrace
down the slope of the park as they came and went, you might have
taken them for a company of ants moving camp. But my uncle never
wholly recovered from the shock of their first freight, to see man by
man cross the court with a stout coffin on his back and above each
coffin a pack of straw: nor was he content with Fra Basilio's
explanation that the brethren slept in these coffins by rule and
saved the expense of beds.

"For my part," said my uncle, "considering the numbers that manage
it, I should have thought death no such dexterity as to need
practice."

"Yet bethink you, sir, of St. Paul's words. 'I protest,' said he,
'I die daily.'"

"Why, yes, sir, and so do we all," agreed my uncle, and fell silent,
though on the very point, as it seemed, of continuing the argument.
"I did not choose to be discourteous, lad," he explained to me later:
"but I had a mind to tell him that we do daily a score of things we
don't brag about--of which I might have added that washing is one:
and I believe 'twould have been news to him."

I had never known my uncle in so rough a temper. Poor man!
I believe that all the time he sat there on the brewhouse steps, he
was calculating woefully the cost of these visitors; and it hurt him
the worse because he had a native disposition to be hospitable.

"But who is this lady that signs herself Emilia?" I asked.

"A crowned queen, lad, and the noblest lady in the world--you heard
your father say it. This evening he may choose to tell us some
further particulars."

"Why this evening?" I asked, and then suddenly remembered that to-day
was the 15th of July and St. Swithun's feast; that my father would
not fail to drink wine after dinner in the little temple below the
deer-park; and that he had promised to admit me to-night to make the
fourth in St. Swithun's brotherhood.

He appeared at dinner-time, punctual and dressed with more than his
usual care (I noted that he wore his finest lace ruffles); and before
going in to dinner we were joined by the Vicar, much perturbed--as
his manner showed--by the news of a sudden descent of papists upon
his parish. Indeed the good man so bubbled with it that we had
scarcely taken our seats before the stream of questions overflowed.
"Who were these men?" "How many!" "Whence had they come, and why?"
etc.

I glanced at my father in some anxiety for his temper. But he
laughed and carved the salmon composedly. He had a deep and tolerant
affection for Mr. Grylls.

"Where shall I begin!" said he. "They are, I believe, between twenty
and thirty in number, though I took no care to count; and they belong
to the Trappistine Order, to which I have ever been attracted; first,
because I count it admirable to renounce all for a faith, however
frantic, and secondly for the memory of Bouthillier de Rance, who a
hundred years ago revived the order after five hundred years of
desuetude."

"And who was he?" inquired the Vicar.

"He was a young rake in Paris, tonsured for the sake of the family
benefices, who had for mistress no less a lady than the Duchess de
Rohan-Montbazon. One day, returning from the country after a week's
absence and letting himself into the house by a private key, he
rushed upstairs in a lover's haste, burst open the door, and found
himself in a chamber hung with black and lit with many candles.
His mistress had died, the day before, of a putrid fever.
But--worse than this and most horrible--the servants had ordered the
coffin in haste; and, when delivered, it was found to be too short.
Upon which, to have done with her, in their terror of infection, they
had lopped off the head, which lay pitiably dissevered from the
trunk. For three years after the young man travelled as one mad, but
at length found solace in his neglected abbacy of Soligny-la-Trappe,
and in reviving its extreme Cistercian rigours."

"I had supposed the Trappists to be a French order in origin, and
confined to France," said the Vicar.

"They have offshoots: of which I knew but one in Italy, that settled
some fifty years back in a monastery they call Buon-Solazzo, outside
Florence, at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. But I have
been making question of our guests through Dom Basilio, their
guest-master and abbot _de facto_ (since their late abbot, an old man
whom he calls Dom Polifilo, died of exposure on the mountains some
three days before they embarked); and it appears that they belong to
a second colony, which has made its home for these ten years at
Casalabriva in Corsica, having arrived by invitation of the Queen
Emilia of that island, and there abiding until the Genoese burned the
roof over their heads."

The Vicar sipped his wine.

"You have considered," he asked, "the peril of introducing so many
papists into our quiet parish?"

"I have not considered it for a moment," answered my father,
cheerfully. "Nor have I introduced them. But if you fear they'll
convert--pervert--subvert--invert your parishioners and turn 'em into
papists, I can reassure you. For in the first place thirty men, or
thirty thousand, of whom only one can open his mouth, are, for
proselytizing, equal to one man and no more."

"They can teach by their example if not by their precept," urged the
Vicar.

"Their example is to sleep in their coffins. My good sir, if you
will not trust your English doctrine to its own truth, you might at
least rely on the persuasiveness of its comforts. Nay, pardon me, my
friend," he went on, as the Vicar's either cheekbone showed a red
flush, "I did not mean to speak offensively; but, Englishman though I
am, in matters of religion my countrymen are ever a puzzle to me.
At a great price you won your freedom from the Bishop of Rome and his
dictation. I admire the price and I love liberty; yet liberty has
its drawbacks, as you have for a long while been discovering; of
which the first is that every man with a maggot in his head can claim
a like liberty with yourselves, quoting your own words in support of
it. Let me remind you of that passage in which Rabelais--borrowing,
I believe, from Lucian--brings the good Pantagruel and his
fellow-voyagers to a port which he calls the Port of Lanterns.
'There (says he) upon a tall tower Pantagruel recognized the Lantern
of La Rochelle, which gave us an excellent clear light. Also we saw
the Lanterns of Pharos, of Nauplia, and of the Acropolis of Athens,
sacred to Pallas,' and so on; whence I draw the moral that
coast-lights are good, yet, multiplied, they complicate navigation."

"And apply your moral by erecting yet another!"

"Fairly retorted. Yet how can you object without turning the sword
of Liberty against herself? Have you never heard tell, by the way,
of Captain Byng's midshipman?"

"Who was he?"

"I forget his name, but he started his first night aboard ship by
kneeling down and saying his prayers, as his mother had taught him."

"I commend the boy," said my uncle.

"I also commend him: but the crowd of his fellow-midshipmen found it
against the custom of the service and gave him the strap for it.
This, however, raised him up a champion in one of the taller lads,
who protested that their conduct was tyrannous: 'and,' said he, very
generously, 'to-morrow night I too propose to say my prayers.
If any one object, he may fight me." Thus, being a handy lad with
his fists, he established the right of religious liberty on board.
By-and-by one or two of the better disposed midshipmen followed his
example: by degrees the custom spread along the lower deck, where the
dispute had happened in full view of the whole ship's company, seamen
and marines; and by the time she reached her port of Halifax she
hadn't a man on board (outside the ward-room) but said his prayers
regularly."

"A notable Christian triumph," was the Vicar's comment.

"Quite so. At Halifax," pursued my father, "Captain Byng took aboard
out of hospital another small midshipman, who on his first night no
sooner climbed into his hammock than the entire mess bundled him out
of it. 'We would have you to know, young man,' said they, 'that
private devotion is the rule on board our ship. It's down on your
knees this minute or you get the strap.'

"I leave you," my father concluded, "to draw the moral. For my part
the tale teaches me that in any struggle for freedom the real danger
begins with the moment of victory."

Said my uncle Gervase after a pause, "Then these Corsicans of yours,
brother, stand as yet in no real danger, since the Genoese are yet
harrying their island with fire and sword."

"In no danger at all as regards their liberty," answered my father,
poising his knife for a first cut into the saddle of mutton, "though
in some danger, I fear me, as regards their queen. They have,
however, taken the first and most important step by getting the news
carried to me. The next is to raise an army; and the next after
that, to suit the plan of invasion to our forces. Indeed," wound up
my father with another flourish of his carving-knife, "I am in
considerable doubt where to make a start."

"I hold," said my uncle, eyeing the saddle of mutton, "that you save
the gravy by beginning close alongside the chine."

"I was thinking for my part that either Porto or Sagone would serve
us best," said my father, meditatively.

Dinner over, the four of us strolled out abreast into the cool
evening and down through the deer-park to the small Ionic temple,
where Billy Priske had laid out fruit, wine, and glasses; and there,
with no more ceremony than standing to drink my health, the three
initiated me into the brotherhood of St. Swithun. It gave me a
sudden sense of being grown a man, and this sense my father very
promptly proceeded to strengthen.

"I had hoped," said he, putting down his glass and seating himself,
"to delay Prosper's novitiate. I had designed, indeed, that after
staying his full time at Oxford he should make the Grand Tour with me
and prepare himself for his destiny by a leisured study of cities and
men. But this morning's news has forced me to reshape my plans.
Listen--

"In the early autumn of 1735, being then at the Court of Tuscany, I
received sudden and secret orders to repair to Corte, the capital of
Corsica, an island of which I knew nothing beyond what I had learnt
in casual talk from the Count Domenico Rivarola, who then acted as
its plenipotentiary at Florence. He was a man with whom I would
willingly have taken counsel, but my orders from England expressly
forbade it. Rivarola in fact was suspected--and justly as my story
will show--of designs of his own for the future of the island; and
although, as it will also show, we had done better to consult him,
Walpole's injunctions were precise that I should by every means keep
him in the dark.

"The situation--to put it as briefly as I can--was this. For two
hundred years or so the island had been ruled by the Republic of
Genoa; and, by common consent, atrociously. For generations the
islanders had lived in chronic revolt, under chiefs against whom the
Genoese--or, to speak more correctly, the Bank of Genoa--had not
scrupled to apply every device, down to secret assassination.
_Uno avolso non deficit alter_: the Corsicans never lacked a leader
to replace the fallen: and in 1735 the succession was shared by two
noble patriots, Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli.

"Under their attacks the Genoese were slowly but none the less
certainly losing their hold on the island. Their plight was such
that, although no one knew precisely what they would do, every one
foresaw that, failing some heroic remedy, they must be driven into
the sea, garrison after garrison, and lose Corsica altogether; and of
all speculations the most probable seemed that they would sell the
island, with all its troubles, to France. Now, for France to acquire
so capital a _point d'appui_ in the Mediterranean would obviously be
no small inconvenience to England: and therefore our Ministers--who
had hitherto regarded the struggles of the islanders with
indifference--woke up to a sudden interest in Corsican affairs.

"They had no pretext for interfering openly. But if the Corsicans
would but take heart and choose themselves a king, that king could at
a ripe moment be diplomatically acknowledged; and any interference by
France would at once become an act of violent usurpation. (For let
me tell you, my friends--the sufferings of a people count as nothing
in diplomacy against the least trivial act against a crown.)
The nuisance was, the two Paolis, Giafferi and Hyacinth, had no
notion whatever of making themselves kings; nor would their devoted
followers have tolerated it. Yet--as sometimes happens--there was a
third man, of greater descent than they, to whom at a pinch the crown
might be offered, and with a far more likely chance of the Corsicans'
acquiescence. This was a Count Ugo Colonna, a middle-aged man,
descended from the oldest nobility of the island, and head of his
family, which might more properly be called a clan; a patriot, in his
way, too, though lacking the fire of the Paolis, to whom he had
surrendered the leadership while remaining something of a
figure-head. In short my business was to confer with him at Corte,
persuade the Corsican chiefs to offer him the crown, and persuade him
to accept it.

"I arrived then at the capital and found Count Ugo willing enough,
though by no means eager, for the honour. He was, in fact, a
mild-mannered gentleman of no great force of character, and
frequently interrupted our conference to talk of a bowel-complaint
which obviously meant more to him than all the internal complications
of Europe: and next to his bowel-complaint--but some way after--he
prized his popularity, which ever seemed more important than his
country's welfare: or belike he confused the two. He was at great
pains to impress me with the sacrifices he had made for Corsica--
which in the past had been real enough: but he had come to regard
them chiefly as matter for public speaking, or excuse for public
bowing and lifting of the hat. You know the sort of man, I dare say.
To pass that view of life, at his age, is the last test of greatness.

"Still, the notion of being crowned King of Corsica tickled his
vanity, and would have tickled it more had he begotten a son to
succeed him. It opened new prospects of driving through crowds and
bowing and lifting his hat: and he turned pardonably sulky when the
two Paolis treated my proposals with suspicion. They had an immense
respect for England as the leader of the free peoples: but they
wanted to know why in Tuscany I had not taken their Count Rivarola
into my confidence. In fact they were in communication with their
plenipotentiary already, and half way towards another plan, of which
very excusably they allowed me to guess nothing.

"The upshot was that my interference threw Count Ugo into a pet with
them. He only wanted them to press him; was angry at not being
pressed; yet believed that they would repent in time. Meanwhile he
persuaded me to ride back with him to one of his estates, a palace
above the valley of the Taravo.

"I know not why, but ever the vow of Jephthah comes to my mind as I
remember how we rode up the valley to Count Ugo's house in the hour
before sunset. 'And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with
timbrels and with dances, and she was his only child.' He had made
no vow and was incapable, poor man, of keeping any so heroic; and she
came out with no timbrel or dance, but soberly enough in her
sad-coloured dress of the people. Yet she came out while we rode a
good mile off, and waited for us as we climbed the last slope, and
she was his only child.

"How shall I tell you of her? She helped my purpose nothing, for at
first she was vehemently opposed to her father's consenting to be
king. Her politics she derived in part from the reading of
Plutarch's Lives and in part from her own simplicity. They were
childish, utterly: yet they put me to shame, for they glowed with the
purest love of her country. She has walked on fiery ploughshares
since then; she has trodden the furnace, and her beautiful bare feet
are seared since they trod the cool vintage with me on the slopes
above the Taravo. . . . Priske, open the first of those bottles,
yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.
Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine
such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of
all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it
lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting
mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.
Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the
blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down
below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in
hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a
state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos;
dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone
jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left
to stand for the space of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until
the water scarcely cover the mass. Let stand again for two days, and
then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new
moon. Ah, and yet you may miss! For your maidens must be clean, and
yet fierce as though they trod out the hearts of men, as indeed they
do. A king's daughter should lead them, and they must trample with
innocence, and yet with such fury as the prophet's who said 'their
blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my
raiment: for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come.' . . ."

My father lifted his glass. "To thee, Emilia, child and queen!"

He drank, and, setting down his glass, rested silent for a while, his
eyes full of a solemn rapture.

"My friends," he went on at length, with lowered voice, "know you
that old song?

"'Methought I walked still to and fro,
And from her company could not go--
But when I waked it was not so:
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.'

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