Part 50 (2/2)
”I have dwelt here these three years,” she persisted, ”and none ever walked the mountain by the path you have come.” She watched us as I held the bowl for the Princess to drink, and asked quaintly, ”But is there truly no marrying in heaven? I have thought upon that many times, and always it puzzles me.”
We said farewell to her, and took her blessings with us as she watched us across the head of the ravine. Then followed another half-hour of silence and sharp climbing: but the worst was over, and by-and-by the range tailed off into a chain of lessening hills over which in the purple distance rose a solitary sharp cone with a ruinous castle upon it, which (said the Princess) was Seneca's Tower at the head of the Vale of Luri.
We were now beyond the danger of the Genoese, and therefore turned aside to the left and descended the slopes to the high-road, along which we made good speed until, having pa.s.sed the tower and the mouth of the gorge which leads up to it from the westward, we came, almost at nightfall, within sight of Pino by the sea.
Here I proposed that I should go forward to the village and find a night's lodging for her, pointing out that, the night being warm and dry, I could make my couch comfortably enough in one of the citron orchards that here lined the road on the landward side. To this at first she a.s.sented--it seemed to me, even eagerly. But I had scarcely taken forty paces up the road before I heard her voice calling me back, and back I went obediently.
”O husband,” she said, ”the dusk has fallen, and now in the dusk I can say a word I have been longing all day to be free of. Nay”--she put out a hand--”you must not forbid me. You must not even delay me now.”
”What is it, that I should forbid you?”
”It is--about Brussels.”
I dropped my hand impatiently and was turning away, but she touched my arm and the touch pleaded with me to face her.
”I have a right. . . . Yes, it was good of you to refuse it; but you cannot go on refusing, because--see you--your goodness makes my right the stronger. This morning I could have told you, but you refused me. All this day I have known that refusal unjust.”
”All this day? Then--pardon, Princess--but why should I hear you now, at this moment?”
”The daylight is past,” she said. ”You can listen now and not see my face.”
On the hedge of the ditch beside the high-road lay a rough fragment of granite, a stone cracked and discarded, once the base of an olive-mill. She found a seat upon it and motioned to me to come close, and I stood close, staring down on her while she stared down at her feet, grey with dust almost as the road itself.
”We were children, Camillo and I,” she said at length, ”in keep of an ill woman we called Maman Trebuchet, and in a house near the entrance of a court leading off the Rue de la Madeleine and close beside the Market. How we had come there we never inquired. . . . I suppose all children take such things as they find them. The house was of five storys, all let out in tenements, and we inhabited two rooms on the fourth floor to the left as you went up the staircase. . . . Some of the men quarrelled with their wives and beat them. There was always a noise of quarrelling in the house: but outside, before the front door, the men who were not beating their women would sit for hours together and smoke and spit and tell one another stories against the Church and against women. The pavement where they sat and the street before it were strewn always with rotting odds and ends of vegetables, for almost every one in that quarter earned his living by the Market, and Maman Trebuchet among the rest. She divided her time between walking the streets with a basket and drinking the profits away in the cabarets, and in the intervals she cursed and beat us.
We lived for the most part on the refuse she brought home at night-- on so much of her stock as had found no purchaser--and we played about the gutters and alleys of the Market. So far as I remember we were neither very happy nor yet very miserable. We knew that we were brother and sister, and that Maman Trebuchet was not our real mother.
Beyond this we were not inquisitive, but took life as we found it.
”Nevertheless, I know now that we were not altogether lost, but that eyes in Brussels were watching us; though how far they were friendly I cannot tell you. I think sometimes that the agents of the Genoese, who had hidden us there, must have been playing their own game as well as their masters'. There was, for example, a dark man who often visited the Market: he called himself a lay-brother, and seemed to be busy with religious work among the poor of the quarter. We knew him as Maitre Antoine at first, and so he was generally called: but he told us that his real name was Antonio--or Antoniu, as he spoke it--and that he came from Italy. He took a great fancy to us and obtained leave of Maman Trebuchet to teach us the Scriptures: but what he really taught us was to speak with him in Italian. We did not know at the time that, though he called it Tuscan, he was all the while teaching us our own Corsican. Nor, I believe, did our guardian know this; but one day, finding out by chance that we knew Italian (for we had begun to talk it together, that she might not understand what we said) and discovering how we had picked it up, she flew into a dreadful rage, lay in wait next day to catch Maitre Antoine as he came up the stairs, and fell upon him with such fury that the poor man fled out of the house and we never saw him again.
”After this--I believe about a year later--there came a day when she bought a new cap and shawl for herself and new clothes for us, and, having seen that we were thoroughly washed, took us up the hill to a fine street near the palace, and to a hotel which was almost the grandest house in the street. We entered, and were led into the presence of a very n.o.ble-looking gentleman in a long yellow dressing-gown, who blessed us and gave us a kiss apiece, and some gold money, and afterwards poured out wine for Maman Trebuchet and thanked her for taking such good care of us.”
”That was your father, Princess.”
”I have often thought so. But I remember nothing of his face except that he had tears in his eyes when we said good-bye to him; at which I wondered a great deal, for I had never seen a man crying. When we were outside again in the street Maman Trebuchet took the gold away from us. I think she too must have received money: for from that day she neglected her marketing and drank more heavily than before.
About a month later she was dead.
”On the day of the funeral there came to our house a man dressed like a gentleman--yet I believe rather that he must have been some kind of courier or valet. He spoke to us very kindly, and said that we had friends, who had sent him to us; that when we grew up we should not want for money; but that just now it was most important we should be put to school and made fit for our proper position in life. We must make up our minds to be separated, he said--and at this we both wept--but we should see one another often. For Camillo he had found lodgings with an excellent tutor, in whose care, after a year's study, he was to travel abroad and see the world: while for me he had chosen a home with some discreet ladies who would attend to my schooling.”
”The house was in the Rue de Luxembourg--a corner house, where the street is joined by a lane running from the Place du Parvis. He led me to it that same evening, and Camillo came too, to make sure that I was comfortable. It was a strange house and full of ladies, the most of them young and all very handsomely dressed. But for their dresses I could almost have fancied it some kind of convent. At all events, they received me kindly, and many of them wept when they saw my parting with Camillo.”
Here the Princess paused, and sat silent for so long that I bent forward in the dusk to read her face. She drew away, s.h.i.+vering, and put up both hands as if to cover it.
”Well, Princess?”
”That house, Cavalier! . . . that horrible house! . . . Ah, remember that I was a child, scarcely twelve years old--I had heard vile words among the market folk, but they were words and meant nothing to me: and now I saw things which I did not understand and--and I became used to them before ever guessing that these were the things those vile words had meant. The women were pretty, you see . . . and merry, and kind to me at first. Before G.o.d I never dreamed that I was looking on harm--not at first--but afterwards, when it was too late. The people who had put me there ceased to send money, and being a strong child and willing to work, at first I was put to make the women their chocolate, and carry it up to them of a morning, and so, little by little, I came to be their house-drudge. I had lost all news of Camillo. For hours I have hunted through the streets of Brussels, if by chance I might get sight of him . . . but he was lost. And I--O Cavalier, have pity on me!”
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