"To see that my friend is tenderly handled," I answered.

"He is past helping," said she, carelessly. "He behaved foolishly. You did not stop for Giuseppe, did you?"

"I did not."

"I am not blaming you," said she, and led the way.



CHAPTER XV.

I BECOME HOSTAGE TO THE PRINCESS CAMILLA.

"Silvis te, Tyrrhene, feras agitare putasti? Advenit qui vestra dies muliebribus armis Verba redarguerit." VIRGIL, Aeneid, xi.

Ahead of us, beyond the rises and hollows of the macchia, rose a bare mountain summit, not very tall, the ascent to it broken by granite ledges, so that from a distance it almost appeared to be terraced. On a heathery slope at the foot of the first terrace the Corsicans set down poor Nat and spoke a word to their mistress, who presently halted and exchanged a few sentences with them in patois; whereupon they stepped back a few paces into the macchia, and, having quickly cut a couple of ilex-staves, fell to plaiting them with lentisk, to form a litter.

While this was doing I stepped back to my friend's side. His eyes were closed; but he breathed yet, and his pulse, though faint, was perceptible. A little blood—a very little—trickled from the corner of his mouth. I glanced at the girl, who had drawn near and stood close at my elbow.

"Have you a surgeon in your camp?" I asked. "I believe that a surgeon might save him yet."

She shook her head. I could detect no pity in her eyes; only a touch of curiosity, half haughty and in part sullen.

"I doubt," she answered, "if you will find a surgeon in all Corsica. I do not believe in surgeons."

"Then," said I, "you have not lived always in Corsica."

Her face flushed darkly, even while the disdain in her eyes grew colder, more guarded.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked.

"Why," said I, "you are not one, I believe, to speak so positively in mere ignorance. But see!" I went on, pointing down upon the bay over which this higher slope gave us a clear view, "there goes the ship that brought us here."

She gazed at it for a while, with bent brow, evidently puzzled.

"No," said I, watching her, "I shall not tell you yet why she goes, nor where her port lies. But I have something to propose to you."

"Say it."

"It leaves one man behind, and one only, in our camp below. He is my father, and he has some knowledge of surgery; I believe he could save my friend here."

She stood considering. "So much was known to me," she answered at length; "that, after you, there would be but one left. Three of my men have gone down to take him. He will be here before long."

"But, pardon me—for as yet I know not whether your aim is to kill us or take us alive—"

She interrupted me with a slight shrug of her shoulders. "I have no wish to kill you. But I must know what brings you here, and the rest can talk nothing but English. As for this one"—with a gesture of the hand towards Nat—"he was foolish. He tried to run away and warn you."

"Then, signorina, let me promise, who know my father, that you will not take him alive."

"I have sent three men."

"You had done better to send thirty; but even so you will not succeed."

"I have heard tell," she said, again with a little movement of her shoulders, "that all Englishmen are mad."

I laughed; and this laugh of mine had a singular effect on her. She drew back and looked at me for an instant with startled eyes, as though she had never heard laughter in her life before, or else had heard too much.

"Tell me what you propose," she said.

"I propose to send down a message to my father, and one of your men shall carry it with a white flag (for that he shall have the loan of my handkerchief). I will write in Italian, that you may read and know what I say."

"It is unnecessary."

"I thank you." I found in my pockets the stump of a pencil and a scrap of paper—an old Oxford bill—and wrote—

"DEAR FATHER,

"We are prisoners, and Nat is wounded, but whether past help or not I cannot say. I believe you might do something for him. If it suit your plans, the bearer will give you safe conduct: if not, I remain your obedient son," "PROSPER."

I translated this for her, and folded the paper.

"Marc'antonio!" she called to one of the three men, who by this time had finished plaiting the litter and were strewing it with fern.

Marc'antonio—a lean, slight fellow with an old scar on his cheek— stepped forward at once. She gave him my note and handkerchief with instructions to hurry.

"Excuse me, principessa"—he hesitated, with a glance at me and another at his comrades—"but these two, with the litter, will have their hands full; and this prisoner is a strong one and artful. Has he not already slain 'l Verru?"

"You will mind your own business, Marc'antonio, which is to run, as I tell you."

The man turned without another word, but with a last distrustful look, and plunged downhill into the scrub. The girl made a careless sign to the others to lay Nat on his litter, and, turning, led the way up the rocky front of the summit, presenting her back to me, choosing the path which offered fewest impediments to the litter-bearers in our rear.

The sun was now high overhead, and beat torridly upon the granite crags, which, as I clutched them, blistered my hands. The girl and the two men (in spite of their burden) balanced themselves and sprang from foothold to foothold with an ease which shamed me. For a while I supposed that we were making for the actual summit; but on the second terrace my captress bore away to the left and led us by a track that slanted across the northern shoulder of the ridge. A sentry started to his feet and stepped from behind a clump of arid sage-coloured bushes, stood for a moment with the sun glinting on his gun-barrel, and at a sign from the girl dropped back upon his post. Just then, or a moment later, my ears caught the jigging notes of a flute; whereby I knew Mr. Badcock to be close at hand, for it was discoursing the tune of "The Vicar of Bray"!

Sure enough, as we rounded the slope we came upon him, Mr. Fett, and Billy Priske, the trio seated within a semi-circle of admiring Corsicans, and above a scene so marvellous that I caught my breath. The slope, breaking away to north and east, descended sheer upon a vast amphitheatre filled with green acres of pine forest and pent within walls of porphyry that rose in tower upon tower, pinnacle upon pinnacle, beyond and above the tree-tops; and these pillars, as they soared out of the gulf, seemed to shake off with difficulty the forest that climbed after them, holding by every nook and ledge in their riven sides—here a dark-foliaged clump caught in a chasm, there a solitary trunk bleached and dead but still hanging by a last grip.

On the edge of this green cauldron the Corsicans and my comrades sat like so many witches, their figures magnified uncannily against the void; and far beyond, above the rose-coloured crags, deep-set in miles of transparent blue, shone the snow-covered central peaks of the island.

As I rounded the corner, Mr. Fett hailed me with a shout and a vocal imitation of a post-horn.

"Another," he cried, and slapped his thigh triumphantly. "Another blossom added to the posy! Badcock, my flosculet, you owe me five shillings. Permit me to explain, sir"—he turned to me—"that Mr. Badcock has been staking upon an anthology, I upon the full basket and the whole hog. It is cut and come again with these Corsicans; and, talking of hogs—"

His chatter tailed off in a pitiful exclamation as the litter-carriers came around the angle of the ridge with Nat's body between them.

"Poor lad! Ah, poor lad!" I heard Billy say. Mr. Badcock nervously disjointed his flute. "I warned him, sir. Believe me, my last words were that, being in Rome, so to speak, he should do as the Romans did—"

"There is one more," announced the girl, to her Corsicans, "and I have sent for him. He will come under conduct; and, meanwhile, I have to say that any man who offers to harm this prisoner, here, will be shot."

"But why should we harm him, principessa?" they asked; and, indeed, I felt inclined to echo their question, seeing that she pointed at me.

"Because he has killed Giuseppe," she answered simply.

"Giuseppe? He has slain Giuseppe?" The simultaneous cry went up in a wail, and by impulse the hand of each one moved to his knife.

"Your pardon, principessa—" began one black-avised bandit, dropping the haft of his knife and feeling for the gun at his back.

She waived him aside and turned to me. "I should warn you, sir, that we are of one clan here, though I may not tell you our name; and against the slayer of one it is vendetta with us all. But I spare you until your father arrives."

"I thank you," answered I, feeling blue, but fetching up my best bow. (Here was a pleasant prospect!) "I only beg to observe that I killed this man—if I have killed him—in self-defence," I added.

"Do you wish me to repeat that as your plea?" she asked, half in scorn.

"I do not," said I, with a sudden rush of anger. "Moreover, I dare say that these savages of yours would see no distinction."

"You are right," she replied carelessly, "they would see no distinction."

"But excuse me, principessa," persisted the scowling man, "a feud is a feud, and if he has slain our Giuse—"

"Attend to me, sir," I broke in. "Your Giuseppe came at me like a hog, and I gave him his deserts. For the rest, if you move your hand another inch towards that gun I will knock your brains out." I clubbed my musket ready to strike.

"Gently, sir!" interposed the girl. "This is folly, as you must see."

I shrugged my shoulders. "You will allow me, Princess. If it come to vendetta, you have slain my friend."

She gave her back to me and faced the ring. "I tell you," she said, "that Giuseppe's death rests on the prisoner's word alone. Marc'antonio and Stephanu have gone down and will bring us the truth of it. Meanwhile I say that this one is our prisoner, like as the others. Give him room and let him wait by his friend. Does any one say 'nay' to that?" she demanded.

The scowling man, with a glance at his comrades' faces, gave way. I could not have told why, but from the start of the dispute I felt that this girl held her bandits, or whatever they were, in imperfect obedience. They obeyed her, yet with reserve. When pressed to the point between submission and mutiny, they yielded; but they yielded with a consent which I could not reconcile with submission. Even whilst answering deferentially they appeared to be looking at one another and taking a cue.

For the time, however, she had prevailed with them. They stood aside while Billy and I lifted the litter and bore it to the shade of an overhanging rock. One even fetched me a panful of water which he had collected from a trickling spring on the face of the cliffs hard by, and brought me linen, too, when he saw me preparing to tear up my own shirt to bind Nat's wound.

We could not trace the course of the bullet, and judged it best to spare meddling with a hurt we could not help. So, having bathed away the clotted blood and bandaged him, we strewed a fresh bed of fern, and watched by him, moistening his lips from time to time with water, for which he moaned. The sun began to sink on the far side of the mountain, and the shadow of the summit, falling into the deep gulf at our feet, to creep across the green tree-tops massed there. While it crept, and I watched it, Billy related in whispers how he had been sprung upon and gagged, so swiftly that he had no chance to cry alarm or to feel for the trigger of his musket. He rubbed his hands delightedly when in return I told the story of my lucky shot. In his ignorance of Italian he had caught no inkling of the peril that lucky shot had brought upon me, nor did I choose to enlighten him.

The shadow of the mountain was stretching more than halfway across the valley, and in the slanting light the rosy tinge of the crags appeared to be melting and suffusing the snow-peaks beyond, when my father walked into the camp unannounced. He carried a gun and a folding camp-stool, and was followed by Marc'antonio, who fluttered my white handkerchief from the ramrod of his musket.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen!" said my father, lifting his hat and looking about him.

I could see at a glance that his stature and bearing impressed the Corsicans. They drew back for a moment, then pressed around him like children.

"Mbe! E bellu, il Inglese," I heard one say to his fellow.

After quelling the brief tumult against me, and while I busied myself with Nat, the girl had disappeared—I could not tell whither. But now one of the band ran up the slope calling loudly to summon her. "O principessa, ajo, ajo! Veni qui, ajo!" and, gazing after him, I saw her at the entrance of a cave some fifty feet above us, erect, with either hand parting and holding back the creepers that curtained her bower.

She let the curtains fall-to behind her, and, stepping down the hillside, welcomed my father with the gravest of curtsies.

"Salutation, O stranger!"

"And to you, O lady, salutation!" my father made answer, with a bow. "Though English," he went on, slipping easily into the dialect she used with her followers, "I am Corsican enough to forbear from asking their names of gentlefolk in the macchia; but mine is John Constantine, and I am very much at your service."

"My men call me the Princess Camilla."

"A good name," said my father, and seemed to muse upon it for a moment while he eyed her paternally. "A very good name, O Princess, and beloved of old by Diana—

"'Aeternum telorum et virginitatis amorem Intemerata—'

"But I come at your bidding and must first of all apologize for some little delay; the cause being that your messenger found me busy patching up a bullet-hole in one of your men."

"Giuseppe is not dead?"

"He is not dead, and on the whole I incline to think he is not going to die, though you will allow me to say that the rogue deserved it. The other three gentlemen-at-arms despatched by you are at this moment bringing him up the hill, very carefully, following my instructions. He will need care. In fact, it will be touch-and-go with him for many days to come."

While he talked, my father, catching sight of me, had stepped to Nat's couch. Nodding to me without more ado to lift the patient and cut away his shirt, he knelt, unrolled his case of instruments, and with a "Courage, lad!" bent an ear to the faint breathing. In less than a minute, as it seemed, his hand feeling around the naked back came to a pause a little behind and under the right arm-pit.

"Courage, lad!" he repeated. "A little pain, and we'll have it, safe as a wasp in an apple."

The Corsicans under his orders had withdrawn to a little distance and stood about us in a ring. While he probed and Nat's poor body writhed feebly in my arms, I lifted my eyes once with a shudder, and met the Princess Camilla's. She was watching, and without a tremor, her face grave as a child's.

With a short grunt of triumph, my father caught away his hand, dipped it swiftly into the pan of water beside him, and held the bullet aloft between thumb and forefinger. The Corsicans broke into quick guttural cries, as men hailing a miracle. As Nat's head fell back limp against my shoulder I saw the Princess turn and walk away alone. Her followers dispersed by degrees, but not, I should say, until every man had explained to every other his own theory of the wound and the operation, and how my father had come to find the bullet so unerringly, each theorist tapping his own chest and back, or his interlocutor's, sometimes a couple tapping each other with vigour, neither listening, both jabbering at full pitch of the voice with prodigious elisions of consonants and equally prodigious drawlings of the vowels. For us, the dressing of the wound kept us busy, and we paid little attention even when a fresh jabbering announced that the litter-bearers had arrived with Giuseppe.

By-and-by, however, my father rose from his knees and, leaving me to fasten the last bandages, strolled across the slope to see how his other patient had borne the journey. Just at that moment I heard again a voice calling to the Princess Camilla: "Ajo, ajo! O principessa, veni qui!" and simultaneously the voice of Billy Priske uplifted in an incongruous British oath.

My father halted with a gesture of annoyance, checked himself, and, awaiting the Princess, pointed towards an object on the turf—an object at which Billy Priske, too, was pointing.

It appeared that while his comrades had been attending on Giuseppe, the third Corsican (whom they called Ste, or Stephanu) had filled up his time by rifling our camp; and of all our possessions he had chosen to select our half-dozen spare muskets and a burst coffer, from which he now extracted and (for his comrade's admiration) held aloft our chiefest treasure—the Iron Crown of Corsica.

"Princess," said my father, coldly, "your men have broken faith. I came to you under no compulsion, obeying your flag of truce. It was no part of the bargain that our camp should be pillaged."

For a while she did not seem to hear; but stood at gaze, her eyes round with wonder.

"Stephanu, bring it here," she commanded.

The man brought it. "O principessa," said he, with a wondering grin, "who are these that travel with royal crowns? If we were true folk of the macchia, now, we could hold them at a fine ransom."

She took the crown, examined it for a moment, and turning to my father, spoke to him swiftly in French.

"How came you by this, O Englishman?"

"That," answered my father, stiffly, "I decline to tell you. It has come to your hands, Princess, through violation of your flag of truce, and in honour you should restore it to me without question."

She waved a hand impatiently. "This is the crown of King Theodore, O Englishman. See the rim of mingled oak and laurel, made in imitation of that hasty chaplet wherewith the Corsicans first crowned him in the Convent of Alesani. Answer me, and in French, for all your lives depend on it; yet briefly, for the sound of that tongue angers my men. For your life, then, how did you come by this?"

"You must find some better argument, Princess," said my father, stiffly.

"For your son's life then."

I saw my father lift his eyes and scan her beautiful face.

"My son is not a coward, Princess; the less so that—" Here my father hesitated.

"Quickly, quickly!" she urged him.

He threw up his head. "Yes, quickly, Princess; and in no fear, nor upon any condition. You are islanders; therefore you are patriots. You are patriots; therefore you hate the Genoese and love the Queen Emilia, whose servant I am. As I was saying, then, my son has the less excuse to be a coward in that he hopes, one day, with the Queen Emilia's blessing, to wear this crown bequeathed to him by the late King Theodore."

"He?" The girl swung upon me, scornfully incredulous.

"Even he, Princess. In proof I can show you King Theodore's deed of gift, signed with his own hand and attested."

For the first time, then, I saw her smile; but the smile held no correspondence with the tone of slow, quiet contempt in which she next spoke.

"You are trustful, O sciu Johann Constantine. I have heard that all Englishmen tell the truth, and expect it, and are otherwise mad."

"I trust to nothing, Princess, until I have the Queen Emilia's word. That I would trust to my life's end."

She nodded darkly. "You shall go to her—if you can find her."

"Tell me where to seek her."

"She lies at Nonza in Capo Corse; or peradventure the Genoese, who hold her prisoner, have by this time carried her across to the Continent."

"Though she were in Genoa itself, I would deliver her or die."

"You will probably die, O Englishman, before you receive her answer; and that will be a pity—yes, a great pity. But you are free to go, you and your company—all but your son here, this King of Corsica that is to be, whom I keep as hostage, with his crown. Eh? Is this not a good bargain I offer you?"

"Be it good or bad, Princess," my father answered, "to make a bargain takes two."

"That is true," said I, stepping forward with a laugh, and thrusting myself between the Corsicans, who had begun to press around with decided menace in their looks. "And therefore the Princess will accept me as the other party to the bargain, and as her hostage."

Again at the sound of my laugh she shrunk a little; but presently frowned.

"Have you considered, cavalier," she asked coldly, "that Giuseppe is not certain of recovery?"

"Still less certain is my friend," answered I, and with a shrug of the shoulders walked away to Nat's sick-couch. There, twenty minutes later, my father took leave of me, after giving some last instructions for the care of the invalid. In one hand he carried his musket, in the other his camp-stool.

"Say the word even now, lad," he offered, "and we will abide till he recovers."

But I shook my head.

Billy Priske carried an enormous wine-skin slung across his shoulders; Mr. Fett a sack of provender. Mr. Badcock had begged or borrowed or purchased an enormous gridiron.

"But what is that for? I asked him, as we shook hands.

"For cooking the wild goose," he answered solemnly, "which in these parts, as I am given to understand, is an animal they call the mufflone. He partakes in some degree of the nature of a sheep. He will find me his match, sir."

One by one, a little before the sun sank, they bade me farewell and passed—free men—down the path that dipped into the pine forest. On the edge of the dip each man turned and waved a hand to me. The princess, with Marc'antonio beside her, stood and watched them as they passed out of sight.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE FOREST HUT.

"Then hooly, hooly rase she up, And hooly she came nigh him, And when she drew the curtain by— 'Young man, I think you're dyin'.'" Barbara Allan's Cruelty.

Evening fell, of a sudden filling the great hollow with purple shadows. As the stars came out the Corsicans on the slope to my left lit a fire of brushwood and busied themselves around it, cooking their supper. They were no ordinary bandits, then; or at least had no fear to betray their whereabouts, since on the landward side on so clear a night the glow would be visible for many miles.

I watched them at their preparations. Their dark figures moved between me and the flames as they set up a tall tripod of pine poles and hung their cauldron from the centre of it, upon a brandice. The princess had withdrawn to her cave and did not reappear until Stephanu, who seemed to be head-cook, announced that supper was ready, whereupon she came and took her seat with the rest in a ring around the fire. Marc'antonio brought me my share of seethed kid's flesh with a capful of chestnuts roasted in the embers; a flask of wine too, and a small pail of goat's milk with a pannikin, for Nat. The fare might not be palatable, but plainly they did not intend us to starve.

Marc'antonio made no answer when I thanked him, but returned to his seat in the ring, where from the beginning of the meal—as at a signal—his companions had engaged in a furious and general dispute. So at least it sounded, and so shrill at times were their contending voices, and so fierce their gesticulations, that for some minutes I fully expected to see them turn to other business the knives with which they attacked their meal.

The Princess sat listening, speaking very seldom. Once only in a general hush the firelight showed me that her lips were moving, and I caught the low tone of her voice, but not the words. Not once did she look in my direction, and yet I guessed that she was speaking of me: for the words "ostagiu," "Inglese," and the name "Giuseppe" or "Griuse"—of the man I had shot—had recurred over and over in their jabber, and recurred when she ceased and it broke forth again.

It had lasted maybe for half an hour when at a signal from Marc'antonio (whom I took to be the Princess's lieutenant or spokesman in these matters, and to whom she turned oftener than to any of the others, except perhaps Stephanu) two or three picked up their muskets, looked to their priming, and walked off into the darkness. By-and-by came in the sentinels they had relieved, and these in turn were helped by Stephanu to supper from the cauldron. I watched, half-expecting the dispute to start afresh, but the others appeared to have taken their fill of it with their food; and soon, each man, drawing his blanket over his head, lay back and stretched themselves to sleep. The newcomers, having satisfied their hunger, did likewise. Stephanu gave the great pot a stir, unhitched it from the brandice, and bore it away, leaving the Princess and Marc'antonio the only two wakeful ones beside the fire.

They sat so long without speaking, the Princess with knees drawn up, hands clasping them, and eyes bent on the embers into which (for the Corsican nights are chilly) Marc'antonio now and again cast a fresh brand—that in time my own eyes began to grow heavy. They were smarting, too, from the smoke of the burnt wood. Nat had fallen into a troubled sleep, in which now and again he moaned: and always at the sound I roused myself to ease his posture or give him to drink from the pannikin; but, for the rest, I dozed, and must have dozed for hours.

I started up wide awake at the sound of a footstep beside me, and sat erect, blinking against the rays of a lantern held close to my eyes. The Princess held it, and at Nat's head and feet stood Marc'antonio and Stephanu, in the act of lifting his litter. She motioned that I should stand up and follow. Marc'antonio and Stephanu fell into file behind us. Each carried a gun in a sling.

"I will hold the light where the path is difficult," she said quietly; "but keep a watch upon your feet. In an hour's time we shall have plenty of light."

I looked and saw the sickle of the waning moon suspended over the gulf. It shot but the feeblest glimmer along the edges of the granite pinnacles, none upon the black masses of the pine-tops. But around it the darkness held a faint violet glow, and I knew that day must be climbing close on its heels.

There was no promise of day, however, along the track into which we plunged—the track by which my comrades had descended to cross the valley. It dived down the mountain-side through a tunnel of pines, and in places the winter streams, now dry, had channelled it and broken it up with land-slides.

"You do not ask where I am leading you," she said, holding her lantern for me at one of these awkward places.

"I am your hostage, Princess," I answered, without looking at her, my eyes being busy just then in discovering good foothold. "You must do with me what you will."

"If I could! Ah, if I could!"

She said it hard and low, with clenched teeth, almost hissing the words. I stared at her, amazed. No sign of anger had she shown until this moment. What cause indeed had she to be angered? In what way had my words offended? Yet angry she was, trembling with such a gust of wrath that the lantern shook in her hand.

Before I could master my surprise, she had mastered herself: and, turning, resumed her way. For the next twenty minutes we descended in silence, while the dawn, breaking above the roofed pines, filtered down to us and filled the spaces between their trunks with a brownish haze. By-and-by, when the slope grew easier and flattened itself out to form the bottom of the basin, these pines gave place to a chestnut wood, and the carpet of slippery needles to a tangled undergrowth taller than a very tall man: and here, in a clearing beside the track, we came on a small hut with a ruinous palisade beside it, fencing off a pen or courtyard of good size—some forty feet square, maybe.

The Princess halted, and I halted a few paces from her, studying the hut. It was built of pine-logs sawn lengthwise in half and set together with their untrimmed bark turned outwards: but the most of their bark had peeled away with age. It had two square holes for windows, and a doorway, but no door. Its shingle roof had buckled this way and that with the rains, and had taken on a tinge of grey which the dawn touched to softest silver. Lines of more brilliant silver criss-crossed it, and these were the tracks of snails.

"O King of Corsica"—she turned to me—"behold your palace!"

Her eyes were watching me, but in what expectation I could not tell. I stepped carelessly to the doorway and took a glance around the interior.

"It might be worse; and I thank you, Princess."

"Ajo, Marc'antonio! Since the stranger approves of it so far, go carry his friend within."

"Your pardon, Princess," I interposed; "the place is something too dirty to house a sick man, and until it be cleaned my friend will do better in the fresh air."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Your subjects, O King, have left it in this mess, and they will help you very little to improve it."

I walked over to the palisade and looked across it upon an unsightly area foul with dried dung and the trampling of pigs. For weeks, if not months, it must have lain uninhabited, but it smelt potently even yet.

"My subjects, Princess?"

"With Giuse lying sick, the hogs roam without a keeper: and my people have chosen you in his room." She paused, and I felt, rather than saw, that both the men were eyeing me intently. I guessed then that she was putting on me a meditated insult; to the Corsican mind, doubtless a deep one.

"So I am to keep your hogs, Princess?" said I, with a deliberate air. "Well, I am your hostage."

"I am breaking no faith, Englishman."

"As to that, please observe that I am not accusing you. I but note that, having the power, you use it. But two things puzzle me: of which the first is, where shall I find my charges?"

"Marc'antonio shall fetch them down to you from the other side of the mountain."

"And next, how shall I learn to tend them?" I asked, still keeping my matter-of-fact tone.

"They will give you no trouble. You have but to pen them at night and number them, and again at daybreak turn them loose. They know this forest and prefer it to the other side: you will not find that they wander. At night you have only to blow a horn which Marc'antonio will bring you, and the sound of it will fetch them home."

"A light job," said Stephanu, with a grin, "when a man can bring his stomach to it."

"Not so light as you suppose, my friend," I answered. "The sty, here, will need some cleansing; since if these are to be my subjects, I must do my best for them. It may not amount to much, but at least my hogs shall keep themselves cleaner than some Corsicans, even than some Corsican cooks."

"Stephanu," said Marc'antonio, gravely, "the Englishman meant that for you: and I tell you what I have told you before, that yours are no fitly kept hands for a cook. I have travelled abroad and seen the ways of other nations."

"The sty will need mending too, Princess," said I: "but before nightfall I will try to have it ready."

"You will find tools in the hut," she answered, with a glance at Marc'antonio, who nodded. "For food, you shall be kept supplied. Stephanu has brought, in his suck yonder, flesh, cheese, and wine sufficient for three days, with milk for your friend: and day by day fresh milk shall be sent down to you."

Her words were commonplace, yet her cheeks wore an angry flush beneath their sun-burn; and I knew why. Her insult had miscarried. In accepting this humiliation I had somehow mastered her: even the tone she used, level and matter-of-fact, she used perforce, in place of the high scorn with which she had started to sentence me. My spirits rose. If I could not understand this girl, neither could she understand me. She only felt defeat, and it puzzled and angered her.

"You have no complaint to make?" she asked, hesitating in spite of herself as she turned to go.

I laughed, having discovered that my laugh perplexed her.

"None whatever, Princess. Am I not your hostage?"

When they were gone I laughed again, with a glance at Nat who lay with closed eyes and white still face where Marc'antonio and Stephanu had made a couch of fern and some heather for him under the chestnut boughs. The sight of the heather gave me an idea, and I walked back to where, at the end of the chestnut wood, a noble clump of it grew, under a scarp of rock where the pines broke off. With my knife I cut an armful of it and returned to the hut, pausing on my way to gather some strings of a creeper which looked to be a clematis and sufficiently tough for my purpose. My next step was to choose and cut a tolerably straight staff of ilex, about five feet in length and close upon two inches thick. While I trimmed it, a blackbird began to sing in the undergrowth behind the hut, and, listening, my ears seemed to catch in the pauses of his song a sound of running water, less loud but nearer and more distinct than the murmur of the many rock-streams that tinkled into the valley. I dropped my work for a while and, passing to the back of the hut, found and followed through the bushes a foot-track—overgrown and tangled with briers, but still a track—which led me to the water. It ran, with a murmur almost subterranean, beneath bushes so closely over-arched that my feet were on the brink before I guessed, and I came close upon taking a bath at unawares. Now this stream, so handy within reach, was just what I wanted, and among the bushes by the verge grew a plant—much like our English osier, but dwarfer—extremely pliant and tougher than the tendrils of the clematis; so, that, having stripped it of half a dozen twigs, I went back to work more blithely than ever.

But for fear of disturbing Nat I could have whistled. It may even be that, intent on my task, I did unwittingly whistle a few bars of a tune: or perhaps the blackbird woke him. At any rate, after half an hour's labour I looked up from my handiwork and met his eyes, open, intent on me and with a question in them.

"What am I doing, eh? I am making a broom, lad," I held it up for him to admire.

"Where is she?" he asked feebly.

"She?" I set down my broom, fetched him a pannikin-ful of milk, and knelt beside him while he drank it. "If you mean the Princess Camilla, she has gone back to her mountain, leaving us in peace."

"Camilla?" he murmured the word.

"And a very suitable name, it seems to me. There was, if you remember, a young lady in the Aeneid of pretty much the same disposition."

"Camilla," he repeated, and again but a little above his breath. "Your father . . . he is helping her?"

"Helping her?" I echoed. "My dear lad, if ever a young woman could take care of herself it is the Princess. . . . And as for my father helping her, she has packed him off northwards across the mountains with a flea in his ear. And, talking of fleas—" I went on with a glance at the hut.

He brought me to a full stop with a sudden grip on my arm, astonishingly strong for a wounded man.

"Nay, lad—nay!" I coaxed him, but slipped a hand under him as he insisted and sat upright.

"She needs help, I tell you," he gasped. "Needs help . . . it was for help I ran when—when—"

"But what dreaming is this? My dear fellow, she makes prisoners of us, shoots you down when you try to escape, treats me worse than a dog, banishes us to this hut which—not to put too fine a point on it—is a pigs'-sty, and particularly filthy at that. I don't blame her, though some little explanation might not come amiss: but if she has any need of help, you must admit that she dissembles it pretty thoroughly."

Nat would not listen. "You did not see? You did not see?—And yet you know her language and have talked with her! Whereas I—O blind!" he broke out passionately, "blind that you could not see!"

A fit of coughing seized and shook him, and as I eased him back upon his fern pillow, blood came away upon the handkerchief I held to his lips.

"Damn her!" I swore viciously. "Let her need help if she will, and let her ask me for it! She has tried her best to kill you; and what's more, she'll succeed if you don't lie still as I order. Help? Oh yes, I'll help her—when I have helped you!"

He moved his head feebly, as if to shake it: but lay quiet, panting, with closed eyes: and so, the effusion of blood having ceased, I left him and fell to work like a negro slave.

By the angle of the hut there stood a pigs' trough of granite, roughly hewn and hollowed, and among the tools within I found a leaky wooden bucket which, by daubing it with mud from the brink of the stream, I contrived to make passably watertight. A score of times I must have travelled to and fro between the hut and the stream before I had the cistern filled. Then I fell-to upon the foul walls within, slushing and brooming them. Bats dropped from the roof and flew blundering against me: I drove them forth from the window. The mud floor became a quag: I seized a spade and shovelled it clean, mud and slime and worse filth together. And still as I toiled a song kept liddening (as we say in Cornwall) through my head: a song with two refrains, whereof the first was the old nursery jingle—"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, that you could not see!"

How should she need help? Little cared I though she needed it, and sorely! But how had the notion taken hold of Nat?

Weakness? Delirium? No: he had been running to get help for her when they shot him down. I had his word for that. . . . But she had pursued with the others. For aught I knew, she herself had fired the shot.

If she needed help, why was she treating us despitefully—putting this insult upon me, for example? Why had she used those words of hate? They had been passionate words, too; spoken from the heart in an instant of surprise. Then, again, to suppose her a friend of the Genoese was impossible. But why, if not a friend of the Genoese, was she a foe of their foes? Why had she taken to the macchia with these men? Why were they keeping watch on the coast while careless that their watchfire showed inland for leagues? Why, if she were a patriot, had the sight of King Theodore's crown awakened such scorn and yet rage against me, its bearer? Why again, at the mere word that my father sought the Queen Emilia, had she let him pass on, while redoubling her despite against me?

On top of these puzzles Nat must needs propound another, that this girl stood in need of help! Help? From whom?

As my mind ran over these questions, still at every pause the old rigmarole kept dinning—"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone . . ." on and on without ceasing, and still I toiled and sweated.

By noon the hut was clean, at any rate tolerably clean; but its soaked floor would certainly take many hours in drying, and Nat must spend another night under the open sky. I left the hut, snatched a meal of bread and cheese, and, after a pull at the wine flask, turned my attention to the sty. To cleanse it before nightfall was out of the question. I examined it and saw three good days' labour ahead of me. But the palisading could be repaired and made secure after a fashion, and I started upon it at once, sharpening the rotten posts with my axe, driving, fixing, nailing, binding them firmly with osier-twists, of which I had fetched a fresh supply from the stream-side. I had rolled my jacket into a pillow for Nat, that he might lie easily and watch me.

The sun was sinking beyond the mountain, staining with deep rose the pinnacles of granite that soared eastward above the pines, when a horn sounded on the slope and Marc'antonio came down the track driving the hogs before him. He instructed me good-naturedly enough in the art of penning the brutes, breaking off from time to time to compliment me on my labours, the sum of which appeared to affect him with a degree of wonder not far short of awe. "But why are you doing it? Perche? perche?" he broke off once or twice to ask, eyeing me askance with a look rather fearful than unfriendly.

"The Princess laid this task upon me," I answered cheerfully, indeed with elation, feeling that so long as I could keep my tyrants puzzled I still kept, somehow, the upper hand.

"I have travelled, in my time," said Marc'antonio with a touch of vainglorious pride. "I have made the acquaintance of many continentals, even with some that were extremely rich. But I never crossed over to England."

"You would have found it full of eccentrics," said I.

"I dare say," said he. "For myself, I said to myself when I took ship, 'Marc'antonio,' said I, 'you must make it a rule to be surprised at nothing.' But do Englishmen clean hogs'-sties for pleasure?"

"And the Princess? She has also travelled?" I asked, meeting his question with another.

For the moment my question appeared to disturb him. Recovering himself, he answered gravely—

"She has travelled, but not very far. You must not do her an injustice. . . . We form our opinions on what we see."

"It is admittedly the best way," I assented, with equal gravity.

At the shut of night he left me and went his way up the mountain path, and an hour later, having attended to Nat's wants, tired as in all my life I had never been, I stretched myself on the turf and slept under the stars.

The grunting of the hogs awakened me, a little before dawn. I went to the pen, and as soon as I opened the hatch they rushed out in a crowd, all but upsetting me as they jostled against my legs. Then, after listening for a while after they had vanished into the undergrowth and darkness, I crept back to my couch and slept.

That day, though the sun was rising before I awoke again and broke fast, I caught up with it before noon: that is to say, with the work I had promised myself to accomplish. Before sunset I had scraped over and cleaned the entire area of the sty. Also I had fetched fern in handfuls and strewn the floor of the hut, which was now dry and clean to the smell.

In the evening I blew my horn for the hogs, and they returned to their pen obediently as the Princess had promised. I had scarcely finished numbering them when Marc'antonio came down the track, this time haling a recalcitrant she-goat by a halter.

He tethered the goat and instructed me how to milk her.

The next evening he brought, at my request, a saw. I had cleaned out the sty thoroughly, and turned-to at once to enlarge the window-openings to admit more light and air into the hut.

Still, as I worked, my spirits rose. Nat was bettering fast. In a few more days, I promised myself, he would be out of danger. To be sure he shook his head when I spoke of this hope, and in the intervals of sleep—of sleep in which I rejoiced as the sweet restorer—lay watching me, with a trouble in his eyes.

He no longer disobeyed my orders, but lay still and watched. My last rag of shirt was gone now, torn up for bandages. Marc'antonio had promised to bring fresh linen to-morrow. By night I slept with my jacket about me. By day I worked naked to the waist, yet always with a growing cheerfulness.

It was on the fourth afternoon, and while yet the sun stood a good way above the pines, that the Princess Camilla deigned to revisit us. I had carried Nat forth into the glade before the hut, where the sun might fall on him temperately, after a torrid day—torrid, that is to say, on the heights, but in our hollow, pight about with the trees, the air had clung heavily.

Marc'antonio, an hour earlier than usual, came down the track with a bundle of linen under his left arm. I did not see that any one followed him until Nat pulled himself up, clutching at my elbow.

"Princess! Princess!" he cried, and his voice rang shrill towards her under the boughs. "Help her . . . I cannot—"

His voice choked on that last word as she came forward and stood regarding him carelessly, coldly, while I wiped the blood and then the bloody froth from his lips.

"Your friend looks to be in an ill case," she said.

"You have killed him," said I, and looked up at her stonily, as Nat's head fell back, with a weight I could not mistake, on my arms.



CHAPTER XVII.

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."



CHAPTER XVIII.

THE TENDER MERCIES OF PRINCE CAMILLO.

"Tyranny is the wish to have in one way what can only be had in another."—Blaise Pascal.

The young man eyed me insolently for a moment and turned again to his sister.

"Camilla! will you have the goodness to explain?" he demanded.

But here, while she hesitated, searching her brother's face proudly yet pitifully, as though unable quite to believe in the continued brutality of his tone, I struck in.

"Pardon me, Signore," said I, "but an explanation from me may be shorter."

"Eh? so you are English, and speak Corsican?"

"Or such Tuscan," answered I, modestly, "as may pass or a poor attempt at it. Yes, I am English, and have come hither—as the Princess, your sister, will tell you—on a political errand which you may or may not consider important."

The Princess, who had turned and stood facing her brother again, threw me a quick look.

"I know nothing of that," she said hurriedly, "save that he came with five others in a ship from England and encamped at Paomia below; that, being taken prisoners, they professed to be seeking the Queen Emilia, to deliver her; and that thereupon of the six I let four go, keeping this one as hostage, with his friend, who has since died."

"And the crown," put in Stephanu. "The Princess has forgotten to mention the crown."

"What crown?"

"The crown, sir," said I boldly, seeing the Princess hesitate, "of the late King Theodore of Corsica, given by him into my keeping."

I saw the priest start as if flicked with a whip, and shoot me a glance of curiosity from under his loose upper lids. His pupil stepped up and thrust his face close to mine.

"Eh? So you were seeking me?" he demanded. "You are mistaken, sir," said I, "whatever your reason for such a guess. My companions—one of them my father, an Englishman and by name Sir John Constantine— are seeking the Queen Emilia, whom they understand to be held prisoner by the Genoese. Meanwhile your sister detains me as hostage, and the crown in pawn."

I had kept an eye on the priest as I pronounced my father's name: and again (or I was mistaken) the pendulous lids flickered slightly.

"You do not answer my main question," the young man persisted. "What are you doing here, in Corsica, with the crown of King Theodore?"

"I am the less likely to answer that question, sir, since you can have no right to ask it."

"No right to ask it?" he echoed, stepping back with a slow laugh. "No right to ask it—I! King Theodore's son?"

I shrugged my shoulders. I had a mind to laugh back at his impudence, and indeed nothing but the mercy of Heaven restrained me and so saved my life. As it was, I heard an ominous growl and glanced around to find the whole company of bandits regarding me with lively disfavour, whereas up to this point I had seemed to detect in their eyes some hints of leniency, even of good will. By their looks they had disapproved of their master's abuseful words to his sister, albeit with some reserve which I set down to their training. But even more evidently they believed to a man in this claim of his.

My gesture, slight as it was, gave his anger its opportunity. He drew back a pace, his handsome mouth curving into a snarl.

"You doubt my word, Englishman?"

"I have no evidence, sir, for doubting King Theodore's," I answered as carelessly as I could, hoping the while that none of them heard the beating of my heart, loud in my own ears as the throb-throb of a pump. "If you be indeed King Theodore's son, then your father—"

"Say on, sir."

"Why, then, your father, sir, practised some economy in telling me the truth. But my father and I will be content with the Queen Emilia's simple word."

As I began this answer I saw the Princess turn away, dropping her hands. At its conclusion she turned again, but yet irresolutely.

"We will find something less than the Queen Emilia's word to content you, my friend," her brother promised, eyeing me and breathing hard. "Where is the crown, Stephanu?"

"In safe keeping, O Prince. I beg leave to say, too, that it was I who found it in the Englishmen's camp and brought it to the Princess."

"You shall have your reward, my good Stephanu. You shall put the bearer, too, into safe keeping. Stand back, take your gun, and shoot me this dog, here beside his grave."

The Princess stepped forward. "Stephanu," she said quietly, "you will put down that gun."

Her brother rounded on her with a curse. For the moment she did not heed, but kept her eyes on Stephanu, who had stepped back with musket half lifted and finger already moving toward the trigger-guard.

"Stephanu," she repeated, "on my faith as a Corsican, if you raise that gun an inch—even a little inch—higher, I will never speak to you again." Then lifting a hand she swung round upon her brother, whose rage (I thank Heaven) for the moment choked him. "Is it meet, think you, O brother, for a King of Corsica to kill his hostage?"

"Is it meet, O sister," he snarled, "for you, of all women, to champion a man—and a foreigner—before my soldiers? Shoot him, Stephanu!"

Her head went up proudly. "Stephanu will not shoot. And you, my brother, that are so careful—I sometimes think, so over-careful—of my honour, for once bethink you that your own deserves attention. This Englishman placed himself in my hands freely as a hostage. From the first, since you force me to say it, I had no liking for him. Afterwards, when I knew his errand, I hated him for your sake: I hated him so that in my rage I strained all duty towards a hostage that I might insult him. Marc'antonio will bear me witness."

"The Princess is speaking the truth before God," said Marc'antonio, gravely. "She made the man a keeper of swine yonder." He waved a hand toward the sty. "And he is, as I understand, a cavalier in his own country."

"I did more than that," the Princess went on. "Having strained the compact, I tempted him to break it—to shoot me or to shoot Marc'antonio, so that one or other of us might be free to kill him."

She paused, again with her eyes on Marc'antonio, who nodded.

"And that also is the truth," he said. "She put a gun into his hands, that he might kill me for having killed his friend. I did not understand at the time."

"A pretty coward!" The young man flung this taunt out at me viciously; but I had enough to do to hold myself steady, there by the grave's edge, and did not heed him.

"I do not think he is a coward," said she. (O, but those words were sweet! and for the first time I blessed her.) "But coward or no coward, he is our hostage, and you must not kill him."

He turned to the priest, who all this while had stood with head on one side, eyes aslant, and the air and attitude of a stranger who having stumbled on a family squabble politely awaits its termination.

"Father Domenico, is my sister right? And may I not kill this man?"

"She is right," answered the reverend father, with something like a sigh. "You cannot kill him consistently with honour, though I admit the provocation to be great. The Princess appears to have committed herself to something like a pledge." He paused here, and with his tongue moistened his loose lips. "Moreover," he continued, "to kill him, on our present information, would be inadvisable. I know—at least I have heard—something of this Sir John Constantine whom the young man asserts to be his father; and, by what has reached me, he is capable of much."

"Do you mean," asked the Prince, bridling angrily, "that I am to fear him?"

"Not at all," the priest answered quickly, still with his eyes aslant. "But, from what I have heard, he was fortunate, long ago, to earn the esteem of the good lady your mother, and"—he paused and felt for his snuff-box—"it would appear that the trick runs in the family."

"By God, then, if I may not kill him, I may at least improve on my sister's treatment," swore the young man. "Made him her swine-keeper, did she? I will promote him a step. Here, you! Take and truss him by the heels!—and fetch me a chain, one of you, from the forage-shed. . . ."

In the short time it took him to devise my punishment the Prince displayed a devilishly ingenious turn of mind. Within ten minutes under his careful directions they had me down flat on my back in the filth of the sty, with my neck securely chained to a post of the palisade, my legs outstretched, and either ankle strapped to a peg. My hands they left free, to supply me (as the Prince explained) with food and drink: that is to say, to reach for the loaf and the pannikin of water which Marc'antonio, under orders, fetched from the hut and laid beside me. Marc'antonio's punishment (for bearing witness to the truth) was to be my gaoler and sty-keeper in my room. He was promised, moreover, the job of hanging me as soon as my comrades returned.

In this pleasant posture they left me, whether under surveillance or not I could not tell, being unable to turn my head, and scarce able even to move it an inch either way.

So I lay and stared up at the sky, until the blazing sun outstared me. I will dwell on none of my torments but this, which toward midday became intolerable. Certainly I had either died or gone mad under it, but that my hands were free to shield me; and these I turned in the blistering glare as a cook turns a steak on the gridiron. Now and again I dabbled them in the pannikin beside me, very carefully, ekeing out the short supply of water.

I had neither resisted nor protested. I hugged this thought and meant, if die I must, to die hugging it. I had challenged the girl, promising her to be patient. To be sure protest or resistance would have been idle. But I had kept my word. I don't doubt that from time to time a moan escaped me. . . . I could not believe that Marc'antonio was near me, watching. I heard no sound at all, no distant voice or bugle-call from the camp on the mountain. The woods were silent . . . silent as Nat, yonder, in his grave. Surely none but a fiend could sit and watch me without a word. . . .

Toward evening I broke off a crust of bread and ate it. The water I husbanded. I might need it worse by-and-by, if Marc'antonio delayed to come.

But what if no one should come?

I had been dozing—or maybe was wandering in slight delirium—when this question wrote itself across my dreams in letters of fire, so bright that it cleared and lit up my brain in a flash, chasing away all other terrors. . . .

Mercifully, it was soon answered. Far up the glade a horn sounded— my swine-horn, blown no doubt by Marc'antonio. The hogs were coming. . . . Well, I must use my hands to keep them at their distance.

I listened with all my ears. Yes, I caught the sound of their grunting; it came nearer and nearer, and—was that a footstep, close at hand, behind the palisade?

Something dropped at my side—dropped in the mire with a soft thud. I stretched out my hand, felt for it, clutched it.

It was a file.

My heart gave a leap. I had found a friend, then!—but in whom? Was it Marc'antonio? No: for I heard his voice now, fifty yards away, marshalling and cursing the hogs. His footstep was near the gate. As he opened it and the hogs rushed in, I slipped the file beneath me, under my shoulder blades.

The first of the hogs, as he ran by me, put a hoof into my pannikin and upset it; and while I struck out at him, to fend him aside, another brute gobbled up my last morsel of crust. The clatter of the pannikin brought Marc'antonio to my side. For a while he stood there looking down on me in the dusk; then walked off through the sty to the hut and returned with two hurdles which he rested over me, one against another, tentwise, driving their stakes an inch or two into the soil. Slight as the fence was, it would protect me from the hogs; and I thanked him. He growled ungraciously, and, picking up the pannikin, slouched off upon a second errand. Again when he brought it replenished, and a fresh loaf of bread with it, I thanked him, and again his only answer was a growl.

I heard him latch the gate and walk away toward the hut. Night was falling on the valley. Through my roof of hurdles a star or two shone down palely. Now was my time. I slipped a hand beneath me and recovered my file—my blessed file.

The chain about my neck was not very stout. I had felt its links with my fingers a good score of times in efforts, some deliberate, others frantic, to loosen it even by a little. Loosen it I could not; the Prince had done his work too cleverly: but by my calculation an hour would suffice me to file it through.

But an hour passed, and two hours, and still I lay staring up at the stars, listening to the hogs as they rubbed flanks and chose and fought for their lairs: still I lay staring, with teeth clenched and the file idle in my hand.

I had challenged, and I had sworn. "Bethink you now what pains you can put upon me. . . ." These tortures were not of her devising; but I would hold her to them. I was her hostage, and, though it killed me, I would hold her to the last inch of her bond. As a Catholic, she must believe in hell. I would carry my wrong even to hell then, and meet her there with it and master her.

I was mad. After hours of such a crucifixion a man must needs be mad. . . . "Prosper, lad, your ideas are naught and your ambitions earth: but you have a streak of damned obstinacy which makes me not altogether hopeless of you!" These had been Nat's words, a month ago; and Nat lay in his grave yonder. . . . The cramp in my legs, the fiery pain ringing my neck, met and ran over me in waves of total anguish. At the point where my will failed me to hold out, the power failed me (I thank Heaven) to lift a hand. Yet the will struggled feebly; struggled on to the verge over which all sensation dropped plumb, as into a pit.

I unclosed my eyes upon the grey dawn; but upon what dawn I knew not, whether of earth or purgatory or hell itself. They saw it swimming in a vague light: but my ears, from a sound as of rushing waters, awoke to a silence on which a small footfall broke, a few yards away. Marc'antonio must have unpenned the hogs; for the sty was empty. And the hogs in their rush must have thrown down the hurdles protecting me; for these lay collapsed, the one at my side, the other across me.

The light footfall drew close and halted. I looked up into the face of the Princess.

She came, picking her way across the mire; and with caution, as if she feared to be overheard. Clearly she had expected to find the sty empty, for even to my dazed senses her dismay was evident as she caught sight of me beneath the hurdle.

"You have not gone! Oh, why have you not gone?"

She was on her knees beside me in the filth. I heard her calling to Marc'antonio, and presently Marc'antonio came, obedient as ever, yet protesting.

"He has not gone!" She moved her hands with a wringing gesture.

I tried to speak, but for answer could only spread my hand, which still grasped the file: and for days after it kept a blue weal bitten across the palm.

I heard Marc'antonio's voice protesting as she took the file and sawed with it frantically across my neck-chain.

"But he must escape and hide, at least."

"He cannot, Princess. The torture has worn him out."

"It were better he died, then. For I must go."

"It were better he died, Princess: but his youth is tough. And that you must go is above all things necessary. The Prince would kill me. . . ."

"A little while, Marc'antonio! The file is working."

"To what end, Princess?—since time is wanting. The bugle will call—it may call now at any moment. And if the Prince should miss you—Indeed it were better that he died—"

Their voices swam on my ear through giddy whirls of mist, I heard him persuade her to go—at the last insist upon her going. Still the file worked.

Suddenly it ceased working. It seemed to me that they both had withdrawn, and my neck still remained in bondage, though my legs were free. I knew that my legs were free though I had not the power to test this by drawing them up. I tried once, and closed my eyes, swooning with pain.

Upon the swoon broke a shattering blow, across my legs and below the knees; a blow that lifted my body to clutch with both hands upon night and fall back again upon black unconsciousness.



CHAPTER XIX.

HOW MARC'ANTONIO NURSED ME AND GAVE ME COUNSEL.

"Yet sometimes famous Princes like thyself, Drawn by report, adventurous by desire, Tell thee, with speechless tongues and semblance pale, That without covering, save yon field of stars, They here stand martyrs, slain in Cupid's wars; And with dead cheeks advise thee to desist For going on Death's net, whom none resist." Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

His honour forbidding him to kill me, the Prince Camillo had given orders to break my legs: and since to abandon me in this plight went against the conscience of his followers (and even, it is possible, against his own), he had left Marc'antonio behind to nurse me—thus gratifying a second spite. The Prince was an ingenious young man.

So much I gathered in faint intervals between anguish while Marc'antonio bound me with rude splints of his own manufacture. Yet he said little and did his surgery, though not ungently, with a taciturn frown which I set down to moroseness, having learnt somehow that the bandits had broken up their camp on the mountain and marched off, leaving us two alone.

"Did the Princess know of this?" I managed to ask, and I believe this was my first intelligible question.

Marc'antonio paused before answering. "She knew that you were to be hurt, but not the manner of it. It was she that brought you the file, by stealth. Why did you not use it, and escape?"

"She brought me the file?" I knew it already, but found a fierce satisfaction in the words. "And she—and you—tried to use it upon my chain here and deliver me: I forced you to that, my friends! As for using it myself, you heard what I promised her, yesterday, before her brother came."

"I heard you talk very foolishly; and now you have done worse than foolishly. I do not understand you at all—no, by the Mother of God, I do not! You had the whole night for filing at your chain: and it would have been better for you, and in the end for her."

"And for you also, Marc'antonio."

He was silent.

"And for you also, Marc'antonio?" I repeated it as a question.

"Your escape would have been put down to me, Englishman. I had provided for that," he answered simply.

"Forgive me," I muttered, thrown back upon sudden contrition. "I was thinking only that you must feel it a punishment to be left alone with me. I had forgot—"

"It is hard," he interrupted, "to bear everything in mind when one is young." His tone was quiet, decisive, as of one stating a fact of common knowledge; but the reproof cut me like a knife.

"The Princess has gone too?" I asked.

"She has gone. They are all gone. That is why it would have been better for her too that you had escaped."

I pondered this for a minute. "You mean," said I, "that—always supposing the Prince had not killed you in his rage—you would now be at her side?"

He nodded. "Still, she has Stephanu. Stephanu will do his best," I suggested.

"Against what, eh?" He put his poser to me, turning with angry eyes, but ended on a short laugh of contempt. "Do not try make-believe with me, O Englishman."

"There is one thing I know," said I, doggedly, "that the Princess is in trouble or danger. And a second thing I know, that you and Stephanu are her champions. But a third thing, which I do not know, is why you and Stephanu hate one another."

"And yet that should have been the easiest guess of the three," said he, rising abruptly and taking first a dozen paces toward the hut, then a dozen back to the shadow of the chestnut tree against the bole of which my head rested as he had laid me, having borne me thither from the sty.

"Campioni? That is a good word, and I thank you for it, Englishman. Yet you wonder why I hate Stephanu? Listen. Were you ever in Florence, in the Boboli gardens?"

"Never. But why?"

"Mbe! I have travelled, for my part." Marc'antonio now and always mentioned his travels with an innocent boastfulness. "Well, in the gardens there you will find a fountain, and on either side of it a statue—the statues of two old kings. They sit there, those two, carved in stone, face to face across the fountain; and with faces so full of hate that I declare it gives you a shiver down the spine—all the worse, if you will understand, because their eyes have no sight in them. Now the story goes that these two kings in life were friends of a princess of Tuscany far younger than themselves, and championed her, and established her house while she was weak and her enemies were strong; and that afterwards in gratitude she caused these statues to be set up beside the fountain. Another story (to me it sounds like a child's tale) says that at first there was no fountain, and that the princess knew nothing of the hatred between these old men; but the sculptor knew. Having left the order with him, she married a husband of her own age and lived for years at a foreign court. At length she returned to Florence and led her husband one day out through the garden to show him the statues, when for the first time she saw what the sculptor had done and knew for the first time that these dead men had hated one another for her sake; whereupon she let fall one tear which became the source of the fountain. To me all this part of the story is foolishness: but that I and Stephanu hate one another not otherwise than those two old kings, and for no very different cause, is God's truth, cavalier."

"You are devoted to her, you two?" I asked, tempting him to continue.

He gazed down on me for a moment with immeasurable contempt.

"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.