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.
"The blessing of God be upon you, O brother!"
"And upon you, O sister!" He took her kiss and returned it, yet
(as I thought) with less fervour. Across her shoulder his gaze fell
on me, with a kind of peevish wonder, and he drew back a little as if
in the act to question her. But she was beforehand with him for the
moment.
"And how hast thou fared, O Camillo?" she asked, leaning back, with a
hand upon his either shoulder, to look into his eyes.
He disengaged himself sullenly, avoiding her gaze. There could be no
doubt that the two faces thus confronting one another belonged to
brother and sister, yet of the two his was the more effeminate, and
its very beauty (he was an excessively handsome lad, albeit
diminutively built) seemed to oppose itself to hers and caricature
it, being so like yet so infinitely less noble.
"We have fared ill," he answered, turning his head aside, and added
with sudden petulance, "God's curse upon Pasquale Paoli, and all his
house!"
"He would not receive you?"
"On the contrary, he made us welcome and listened to all we had to
say. When I had done, Father Domenico took up the tale."
"But surely, brother, when you had given him the proofs--when he
heard all--"
"The mischief, sister," he interrupted, stabbing at the ground with
his heel and stealing a sidelong glance at the priest, "the mischief
was, he had already heard too much."
She drew back, white in the face. She, too, flung a look at the
priest, but a more honest one, although in flinging it she shrank
away from him. The priest, a sensual, loose-lipped man, whose mere
aspect invited one to kick him, smiled sideways and downwards with a
deprecating air, and spread out his hands as who should say that here
was no place for a domestic discussion.
I could make no guess at what the youth had meant; but the girl's
face told me that the stroke was cruel, and (as often happens with
the weak) his own cruelty worked him into a passion.
"But who is this man with you?" he demanded, the blood rushing to his
face. "And how came you alone with him, and Stephanu, and
Marc'antonio? You don't tell me that the others have deserted!"
"No one has deserted, brother. You will find them all upon the
mountain."
"And the recruits? Is this a recruit?"
"There are no recruits."
"No recruits? By God, sister, this is too bad! Has this cursed
rumour spread, then, all over the countryside that honest men avoid
us like a plague--us, the Colonne!" He checked his tongue as she
drew herself up and turned from him, before the staring soldiery,
with drawn mouth and stony eyes; but stepped a pace after her on a
fresh tack of rage.
"But you have not answered me. Who is this man, I repeat? And eh?--
but what in God's name have we here?" He halted, staring at the
half-digged grave and Nat's body laid beside it.
Marc'antonio stepped forward. "These are two prisoners, O Prince,
of whom, as you see, we are burying one."
"Prisoners? But whence?"
"From England, as they tell us, O Prince."