CHRISTINE AWAKES
“There was but one little window in the hut of Orio, and so well did
this lie in the shadow of the trees that the sun’s rays hardly searched
the room in which Christine slept. Yet so old was the habit of the
child that she waked with the first glimmerings of dawn, and sprang up
from her bed, thinking that she was in her own home and that the waves
of the Adriatic were lapping before her door. It was only when she
stood upright, to see all things swim before her eyes and to feel her
limbs tremble beneath her, that some consciousness of change came upon
her, and she sank back with a little cry of surprise upon her lips.
Then for the first time she became aware that she had not slept in her
own bed. She saw the remains of the supper which Orio had spread, the
fruit in the basket, the baked meats, the half-drunk bottle of wine.
She looked at the rough bed upon which she had slept and observed
the skins which covered it--skins both of bear and of wolf. Minute
by minute her awakening mind built up for her the picture of the
yesterday. She remembered that she had left her own home and had come
to a city where the multitudes of men and women and the great shapes of
the buildings had frightened her. She recalled the words of the priest
upon the island named Incoronata, how that he had spoken gravely of the
love and the service which the Sacrament demanded. She fell to thinking
of the kisses which her lover had pressed upon her, of his passionate
devotion when they had come to the shelter of the hut, of her own
coldness and repugnance at his touch. Nor did she forget that she had
gone to sleep with her hand in his, that he had promised to watch until
she should wake again.
“Remembrances such as these are formed slowly, excellency. The whole
of the yesterday was lived again by little Christine, before she
realised that the man should have been with her at that moment in the
hut. It was plain to her now that she had been ill; that the dreaded
fever of the marshes by the sea had scourged her limbs and dried her
mouth, and breathed its hot breath upon her parched skin. Yet Ugo had
left her--without word or message. Though she cried to him again and
again as she dragged herself to the door, and stood shivering in the
cool wind of morning, there was no answering voice from the thicket
of the forest. The very grandeur of the scene around her, the distant
snow mountains, the amphitheatre of the hills, the gloom of the woods,
terrified her. She could see the valley lying far below, with its stony
road winding sinuously about the heights; but neither man nor beast
trod it. No living thing stood out to dispute the lonely glory of the
pass; there was no sound--not so much as of a bird’s note or the splash
of waters. To her untrained fancy it seemed as though they had set
her down in some pit of the world, wherein she was doomed to unending
captivity. She brought herself to believe that she had lived the night
of death, and was now awake in a kingdom cut off from her God and
from humanity. She looked to see the gorge below peopled with ghostly
figures of men and beasts; she waited to hear the dirges of damned
souls and the cries of the imprisoned spirits.
“Let not this be any matter of wonder to us, signor. Here was one whose
only schooling for years past had been the schooling of the hills and
the sea. Always a child of a wondrous imagination--a child who saw
visions in the glades of her island, and whose quick brain peopled
the very shore and sky with phantoms--the weakness of fever had now
compelled her mind to conjure up these pictures and these fears. She
has told me often that when she awoke in the hut and found that Ugo was
not at her side she believed indeed that the shadow of death was upon
her. All her old life was left behind for ever, she said. Never again
would she hear the sound of human voice, or know anything of the human
affections. The ramparts of the hills looked like so many gates of her
prison. She thought that she was doomed for unnumbered years to wander
through the silent valleys of the pass. Never might she come to the
great city for which her ambition hungered, and wherein the triumph of
which she had dreamt vaguely awaited her. Yesterday these things might
have been; to-day they were for ever done with.
“These, excellency, were the thoughts of her waking moments. They
passed away anon as the sun rose and the strength of the fever began to
abate. Always the possessor of unsurpassable health, sturdy of limb and
body, fortified by plain living, Christine was no subject for malaria.
The mountain air and the sweet sleep she had enjoyed brought her
speedily to a greater tranquillity and to a clearer understanding. She
began to say that Ugo had gone down to one of the villages to get bread
for breakfast; or that he was tending the horses in a clearing of the
thicket. She expected momentarily to hear his voice or his step. Weak
as she was, she ran a little way into the wood and called his name. She
stood again to scan the road below her, and observed now that there was
a waggon upon it. But there was no answer to her cry; no sign of him
she sought. Even his horse and her pony were gone; and not so much as
a word to tell her for what cause or at what hour they went. She could
make nothing of the enigma, had no clear reasoning powers; and faint
and weary she returned to the hut and moistened her lips with the wine
which Orio had left. Then she lay upon her bed again, and slept until
the hills were red with the dying light of the sun and all the western
sky was ablaze with flame.
“When she awoke for the second time the fever had left her, and she was
conscious no longer of that devouring weakness which had consumed her
energies at dawn. She was hungry too, and she ate with relish of the
food which remained and drank from the flask which was to serve for her
bridal supper. She could think now--think well with that clever little
brain of hers; and she began to tell herself that Ugo had left her not
because he had wished, but because he must. She recalled his fear that
they would make a hussar of him, and remembered his aversion to linger
in Sebenico. Possibly, she said, this fear had carried him from her
side to some more remote place in the hills, and he would come again
when the night fell. That he had been hunted down by the soldiers she
did not think; for her sleep had been unbroken, and she knew that he
would not have left her without word. And while she in her friendship
uttered many a devout prayer for him, she could not think of his return
without some displeasure, nor forget that there had been a shudder
upon her lips when he had held her with his kisses.
“Upon that night and during the week which followed Christine slept in
the hut of Orio. Her food was maize bread; her drink was the shepherd’s
wine. Yet when the hours passed and no man came to her, when the bread
failed and she began to want even water to drink, reason told her that
if she would see her lover again she must seek him in the hills. She
had suffered bitterly--suffered from weakness and from solitude, from
the regret of home and the loneliness of the hills. She had looked out
across the mountains, and in her fancy had seen the cities and the men
of her dreams lying beyond the ramparts and the eternal snows. That
strange and haunting voice which often had bidden her in her childhood
to rise up and look upon these things with her own eyes now returned
and whispered to her that fortune lay beyond the heights. She had
memories still of those early years when love and affection had been
hers in a home beyond the seas. It seemed to her that she would find
across the mountains a link which would bind her to this unforgotten
past, and fulfil that destiny which instinct told her was rightly
hers. The day upon which she had given herself to Ugo Klun was already
being forgotten. The fact that she was the man’s wife was one she ever
failed to realise. She cared only to know that she had cut herself
adrift from the unchanging years of captivity--that a new world and a
new home were hers to seek and hers to make.
“Excellency, it was upon the seventh night after her coming to the hut
of Orio that she quitted the thicket of the woods and descended the
bridle-path to the high-road of the pass. Three days later, at the full
heat of the day, she was picked up insensible upon the road to Jajce by
Count Paul Zaloski, who was riding to his home from the mountain town
of Livno.”