Part 50 (1/2)
I turned and led the way up the path between the bushes: and she followed my stride almost at a run. On the bare mountain-spur above the high-road she overtook and fell into pace with me: and so, skirting Nonza, we breasted the long slope of the range.
CHAPTER XXV.
MY WEDDING DAY.
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see whether the vine hath budded and the tender grape appear.-- _The Song of Songs_.
Ahead of us, high on our right, rose the mountain ridges, scarp upon scarp, to the snowy peak of Monte Stella; low on our left lay Nonza, and beyond it a sea blue as a sapphire, scarcely rippled, void save for one white sail far away on the south-west horizon--not the _Gauntlet_; for, distant though she was, I could make out the shape of her canvas, and it was square cut.
Nonza itself lay in the shadow of the sh.o.r.e with the early light s.h.i.+mmering upon its citadel and upper works--a fortress to all appearance asleep: but the Genoese pickets would be awake and guarding the northward road for at least a league beyond, and to avoid them we must cross the high mountain spurs, using where we could their patches of forest and our best speed where these left the ridges bare.
The way was hard--harder by far than I had deemed possible--and kept us too busy for talk. Our silence was not otherwise constrained at all. Pa.s.sion fell away from us as we climbed; fell away with its strife, its confusion, its distempered memories of the night now past; and was left with the vapours of the coast where the malaria brooded. Through the upper, clearer atmosphere we walked as G.o.ds on the roof of the world, saw with clear eyes, knew with mind and spirit untroubled by self-sickness. We were silent, having fallen into an accord which made all speech idle. Arduous as the road soon became, and, while unknown to both of us, more arduous to me because of my inexperience, we chose without hesitating, almost without consulting.
Each difficulty brought decision, and with decision, its own help.
Now it was I who steadied her leap across a chasm; now came her turn to underprop my foothold till I clambered to a ledge whence I could reach down a hand and drag her up to me. As a rule I may call myself a blundering climber, my build being too heavy; but I made no mistake that day.
In the course of a three hours' scramble she spoke to me (as I remember) once only, and then as a comrade, in quiet approval of my mountaineering. We had come to a crag over which--with no word said--I had lowered her by help of my bandolier. She had waited at the foot while I followed her down without a.s.sistance, traversing on the way an outward-sloping ledge of smooth rock which overhung a precipice and a sheer fall of at least three hundred feet. The ledge had nowhere a notch in it to grip the boot-sole, and was moreover slippery with the green ooze of a mountain spring. It has haunted my dreams since then; I would not essay it again for my weight in money; but I crossed it that day, so to speak, with my hands in my pockets.
The most curious (you might call it the most uncanny) part of the whole adventure, was that from time to time we came out of these breathless scrambles plump upon a patch of cultivated ground and a hill-farm with its steading; the explanation being that these farms stand each at the head of its own ravine, and, inaccessible one to another, have communication with the world only by the tracks which lead down their ravines. Here, three thousand feet and more above the sea--upon which we looked down between cliff and woodland as through a funnel, and upon the roofs and whitewashed walls of fis.h.i.+ng-villages on the edge of the blue--lived slow, sedate folks, who called their dogs off us and stared upon us as portents and gave us goat's-milk and bread, refusing the coins we proffered.
The inhabitants of this Cape (I have since learned) are a race apart in Corsica; slow, peaceable, without politics and almost (as we should say) without patriotism. We came to them as G.o.ds from the heights, and they received and sped us as G.o.ds. They were too slow of speech to question us, or even to express their astonishment.
There was one farm with a stream plunging past it, and, by the house wall, a locked mill-wheel (G.o.d knows what it had ever ground), and by the door below it a woman, seated on a flight of steps, with her bosom half-covered and a sucking-child laid asleep in her lap.
She blinked in the suns.h.i.+ne as we came across the yard to her, and said she--
”Salutation, O strangers, and pardon that I cannot rise: but the little one is sick of a fever and I fear to stir him, for he makes as if he would sleep. Nor is there any one else to entertain you, since my husband has gone down to the _marina_ to fetch the wise woman who lives there.”
The Princess stepped close and stood over her. ”_O paesana_,” said she, ”do you and your man live here alone, so far up the mountain?”
”There is the _bambino_,” said the mother, simply. ”He is my first-- and a boy, by the gift of the Holy Virgin. Already he takes notice, and soon he will be learning to talk: but since we both talk to him and about him, you may say that already there are three of us, and anon the good Lord may send us others. It is hard work, _O bella donna_, on such a farm as ours, and doubly hard on my husband now for these months that I have been able to help him but little. But with a good man and his child--if G.o.d spare the child--I shall want no happiness.”
”Give me the child,” said the Princess, taking a seat on the stone slab beside her. ”He shall not hurt with me while you fetch us a draught of milk.”
The woman stared at her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief and a growing hope.
”Even when you came,” she said hoa.r.s.ely after a while, ”I was praying for an angel to help my child. . . . O blind, O hard of faith that I am! And when I lifted my eyes and saw you, I bethought me not that none walk this mountain by the path you have come, nor has this land any like you twain for beauty and stature. . . . O lady--whether from heaven or earth--you will not take my child but to cure it? He is my only one.”
”Give him to me.”
The woman laid her child in the Princess's arms and ran into the house, throwing one look of terror back at us from the doorstep.
The Princess sat motionless, gazing down on the closed lids, frowning, deep in thoughts I could not follow.
”You will not,” said I, ”leave this good foolish soul in her error?”
”I have heard,” she answered quietly, without lifting her eyes, ”that a royal touch has virtue to heal sometimes--and there was a time when you claimed to be King of Corsica. Nay, forgive me,” she took herself up quickly, ”there is bitterness yet left in me, but that speech shall be the last of it. . . . O husband, O my friend, I was thinking that this child will grow into a man; and of what his mother said, that there is such a thing as a good man: and I am trying to believe her. . . . _Eccu!_ he sleeps, poor mite! Listen to his breathing.”
The farm-wife came out with a full bowl of milk. Her hands shook and spilled some as she handed it to me, so eager were they to hold her infant again. Taking it and feeling the damp sweat as she pa.s.sed a hand over its brow, she broke forth into blessings.
We told her of her mistake: but I doubt if she heard.