Part 51 (1/2)
”Wife,” said I, standing before her, ”why have you told me this?
Did I not say to you that I have seen your face and believe, and no story shall shake my belief? . . . Nay, then, I am glad--yes, glad.
Dear enough, G.o.d knows, you would have been to me had I met you, a child among these hills and ignorant of evil as a child.
How much dearer you, who have trodden the hot plough-shares and come to me through the fires! . . . See now, I could kneel to you, O queen, for shame at the little I have deserved.”
But she put out a hand to check me. ”O friend,” she said sadly, ”will you never understand? For the great faith you pay me I shall go thankfully all my days: but the faith that should answer it I cannot give you. . . . Ah, there lies the cruelty! You are able to trust, and I can never trust in return. You can believe, but I cannot believe. I have seen all men so vile that the root of faith is withered in me. . . . Sir, believe, that though everything that makes me will to thank you must make me seem the more ungrateful, yet I honour you too much to give you less than an equal faith.
I am your slave, if you command. But if you ask what only can honour us two as man and wife, you lose all, and I am for ever degraded.”
I stepped back a pace. ”O Princess,” I said slowly, ”I shall never claim your faith until you bring it to me. . . . And now, let all this rest for a while. Take up your story again and tell me the story to the end.”
So in the darkness, seated there upon the millstone with her gun across her knees, she told me all the story, very quietly:--How at the last she had been found in the house in Brussels by Marc'antonio and Stephanu and fetched home to the island; how she had found there her brother Camillo in charge of Fra Domenico, his tutor and confessor; with what kindness the priest had received her, how he had confessed her and a.s.sured her that the book of those horrible years was closed; and how, nevertheless, the story had crept out, poisoning the people's loyalty and her brother's chances.
I heard her to the end, or almost to the end: for while she drew near to conclude, and while I stood grinding my teeth upon the certainty that the whole plot--from the kidnapping to the spreading of the slanders--had been Master Domenico's work, and his only, the air thudded with a distant dull concussion: whereat she broke off, lifting her head to listen.
”It is the sound of guns,” said I, listening too, while half a dozen similar concussions followed. ”Heavy artillery, too, and from the southward.”
”Nay; but what light is yonder, to the north?”
She pointed into the night behind me, and I turned to see a faint glow spreading along the northern horizon, and mounting, and reddening as it mounted, until the black hills between us and Cape Corso stood up against it in sharp outline.
”O wife,” said I, ”since you must be weary, sleep for a while, and I will keep watch: but wake soon, for yonder is something worth your seeing.”
”Whose work is it, think you?”
”The work,” said I, ”of a man who would set the whole world on fire, and only for love.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE FLAME AND THE ALTAR.
”And when he saw the statly towre s.h.i.+ning baith clere and bricht, Whilk stood abune the jawing wave, Built on a rock of height,
”'Says, Row the boat, my mariners, And bring me to the land, For yonder I see my love's castle Close by the saut sea strand.”
_Rough Royal_.
”As 'twixt two equal armies Fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls--which to advance our state Were gone out--hung 'twixt her and me:
”And whilst our souls negotiate there, We like sepulchral statues lay; All day the same our postures were, And we said nothing, all the day.”
DONNE, _The Ecstasie_.
She rose from the stone, but swayed a little, finding her feet.
The dim light, as she turned her face to it, showed me that she was weary almost to fainting. She had come to a pa.s.s where the more haste would certainly make the worse speed.
”It is not spirit you lack, but sleep,” said I; and she confessed that it was so. An hour's rest would recover her, she said, and obediently lay down where I found a couch for her on a bank of sweet-smelling heath above the road. I too wanted rest, and settled myself down with my back against a citron tree, some twenty paces distant.
Chaucer says somewhere (and it is true), that women take less sleep and take it more lightly than men. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes before I opened them again at a touch on my shoulder. The night was yet dark around us, save for the glow to the northward, and at first I would hardly believe when the Princess told me that I had been sleeping near upon three hours. Then it occurred to me that for a long while the sky overhead had been shaking and repeating the boom of cannon.