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Sir John Constantine, a novel by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
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Chapter 13. How, Without Fighting, Our Army Wasted By Enchantment |
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_ CHAPTER XIII. HOW, WITHOUT FIGHTING, OUR ARMY WASTED BY ENCHANTMENT
GONZALO. ANTONIO. "CALIBAN. ---The Tempest.
My father, meanwhile, had taken a lantern and explored the interior. "I know this place," he announced quietly, as he reappeared, after two or three minutes, in the ruinous doorway; "it is called Paomia. We can bivouac in peace, and I doubt if by searching we could find a better spot." We ate our supper of cold bacon and ship-bread, both slightly damaged by sea-water--but the wine solaced us, being excellent--and stretched ourselves to sleep under the ilex boughs, my father undertaking to stand sentry till daybreak. Nat and I protested against this, and offered ourselves; but he cut us short. He had his reasons, he said. It must have been two or even three hours later that I awoke at the touch of his hand on my shoulder. I stared up through the boughs at the setting moon, and around me at my comrades asleep in the grasses. He signed to me not to awake them, but to rise and follow him softly. Passing through the screen of ilex, we came to a gap in the stone wall of the garth, and through this, at the base of the hillside below the forest, to a second screen of cypress which opened suddenly upon a semicircle of turf; and here, bathed in the moon's rays that slanted over the cypress-tops, stood a small Doric temple of weather-stained marble, in proportions most delicate, a background for a dance of nymphs, a fit tiring-room for Diana and her train. Its door--if ever it had possessed one--was gone, like every other door in this strange village. My father led the way up the white steps, halted on the threshold, and, standing aside lest he should block the moonlight, pointed within. I stood at his shoulder and looked. The interior was empty, bare of all ornament. On the wall facing the door, and cut in plain letters a foot high, two words in Greek confronted me-- PHILOPATRI STEPHANOPOULOI. "A tomb?" I asked. "Yes, and a kinsman's; for the Stephanopouli were of blood the emperors did not disdain to mate with. In the last rally the Turks had much ado with them as leaders of the Moreote tribes around Maina, and north along Taygetus to Sparta. Yes, and there were some who revived the Spartan name in those days, maintaining the fight among the mountains until the Turks swarmed across from Crete, overran Maina and closed the struggle. Yet there was a man, Constantine Stephanopoulos, the grandfather of this Philopater, who would buy nothing at the price of slavery, but, collecting a thousand souls-- men, women, and children--escaped by ship from Porto Vitilo and sailed in search of a new home. At first he had thought of Sicily; but, finding no welcome there, he came (in the spring of 1675, I think) to Genoa, and obtained leave from the Genoese to choose a site in Corsica." "And it was here he planted his colony?" "In this very valley; but, mind you, at the price of swearing fealty to the Republic of Genoa--this and the repayment of a beggarly thousand piastres which the Republic had advanced to pay the captain of the ship which brought them, and to buy food and clothing. Very generous treatment it seemed. Yet you have heard me say before now that liberty never stands in its worst peril until the hour of success; then too often men turn her sword against her. So these men of Lacedaemon, coming to an island where the rule of Genoa was a scourge to all except themselves, in gratitude, or for their oath's sake, took sides with the oppressor. Therefore the Corsicans, who never forget an injury, turned upon them, drove them for shelter to Ajaccio, and laid their valley desolate; nor have the Genoese power to restore them. "Fate, Prosper, has landed you on this very spot where your kinsmen found refuge for awhile, and broke the ground, and planted orchards, hoping for a fair continuance of peace and peaceful tillage.
"You say," said I, "that had we found our kinsmen here we had found them in league against freedom, and friends of the tyranny we are here to fight?" "Assuredly." "Then, sir, let me read the omen as a lesson, and avoid my kinsmen's mistake." My father smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. "You say little, as a rule, Prosper. It is a good fault in kings." We walked back to the churchyard, where Mr. Fett sat up, rubbing his eyes in the dawn, and hailed us. "Good morning, signors! I have been dreaming that I came to a kingdom which, indeed, seemed to be an island, but on inspection proved to be a mushroom. What interpretation have you when a man dreams of mushrooms?" "Why, this," said I, "that we passed some score of them in the meadow below. I saw them plain by the moonlight, and kicked at them to make sure." "I did better," said Mr. Fett; I gathered a dozen or two in my cap, foreseeing breakfast. Faith, and while you have been gadding I might have had added a rasher of bacon. Did you meet any hogs on your way? But no; they turned back and took the path that appears to run up to the woods yonder." "Hogs?" queried my father. "They woke me, nosing and grunting among the nettles by the wall-- lean, brown beasts, with Homeric chines, and two or three of them huge as the Boar of Calydon. I was minded to let off my gun at 'em, but refrained upon two considerations--the first, that if they were tame, to shoot them might compromise our welcome here, and perhaps painfully, since the dimensions of the pigs appeared to argue considerable physical strength in their masters; the second, that if wild they might be savage enough to defend themselves when attacked." "Doubtless," said my father, "they belong to some herdsman in the forest above us, and have strayed down in search of acorns. They cannot belong to this village." "And why, pray?" "Because it contains not a single inhabitant. Moreover, gentlemen, while you were sleeping I have taken a pretty extensive stroll. The vineyards lie unkempt, the vines themselves unthinned, up to the edge of the forest. The olive-trees have not been tended, but have shed their fruit for years with no man to gather. Many even have cracked and fallen under the weight of their crops. But no trace of beast, wild or tame, did I discover; no dung, no signs of trampling. The valley is utterly desolate." "It grows mushrooms," said Mr. Fett, cheerfully, piling a heap of dry twigs; "and we have ship's butter and a frying-pan." "Are you sure," asked Mr. Badcock, examining one, "that these are true mushrooms?" "They were grown in Corsica, and have not subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles; still, _mutatis mutandis_, in my belief they are good mushrooms. If you doubt, we can easily make sure by stewing them awhile in a saucepan and stirring them with a silver spoon, or boiling them gently with Mr. Badcock's watch, as was advised by Mr. Locke, author of the famous 'Essay on the Human Understanding.'" "Indeed?" said my father. "The passage must have escaped me." "It does not occur in the 'Essay.' He gave the advice at Montpellier to an English family of the name of Robinson; and had they listened to him it would have robbed Micklethwaite's 'Botany of Pewsey and Devizes' of some fascinating pages." MR. FETT'S STORY OF THE FUNGI OF MONTPELLIER. "About the year 1677, when Mr. Locke resided at Montpellier for the benefit of his health, and while his famous 'Essay' lay as yet in the womb of futurity, there happened to be staying in the same _pension_ an English family--" "Excuse me," put in my father, "I do not quite gather where these people lodged." "The sentence was faultily constructed, I admit. They were lodging in the same _pension_ as Mr. Locke. The family consisted of a Mrs. Robinson, a widow; her son Eustace, aged seventeen; her daughter Laetitia, a child of fourteen, suffering from a slight pulmonary complaint; her son's tutor, whose name I forget for the moment, but he was a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and an ardent botanist; and a good-natured English female named Maria Wilkins, an old servant whom Mrs. Robinson had brought from home--Pewsey, in Wiltshire--to attend upon this Laetitia. The Robinsons, you gather, were well-to-do; they were even well connected; albeit their social position did not quite warrant their story being included in the late Mr. D'Arcy Smith's 'Tragedies and Vicissitudes of Our County Families.' "It appears that the lad Eustace, perceiving that his sister's delicate health procured her some indulgences, complained of headaches, which he attributed to a too intense application upon the 'Memorabilia' of Xenophon, and cajoled his mother into packing him off with the tutor on a holiday expedition to the neighbouring mountains of Garrigues. From this they returned two days later about the time of _dejeuner_, with a quantity of mushrooms, which the tutor, who had discovered them, handed around for inspection, asserting them to be edible. "The opinion of Mr. Locke being invited, that philosopher took up the position he afterwards elaborated so ingeniously, declaring that knowledge concerning these mushrooms could only be the result of experience, and suggesting that the tutor should first make proof of their innocuousness on his own person. Upon this the tutor, a priggish youth, retorted hotly that he should hope his Cambridge studies, for which his parents had pinched themselves by many small economies, had at least taught him to discriminate between the _agarici_. Mr. Locke in vain endeavoured to divert the conversation upon the scope and objects of a university education, and fell back on suggesting that the alleged mushrooms should be stewed, and the stew stirred with a silver spoon, when, if the spoon showed no discolouration, he would take back his opinion that they contained phosphorus in appreciable quantities. He was called an empiricist for his pains; and Mrs. Robinson (who hated a dispute and invariably melted at any allusion to the tutor's _res angusta domi_) weakly gave way. The mushrooms were cooked and pronounced excellent by the entire family, of whom Mrs. Robinson expired at 8.30 that evening, the tutor at 9 o'clock, the faithful domestic Wilkins and Master Eustace shortly after midnight, and an Alsatian cook, attached to the establishment, some time in the small hours. The poor child, who had partaken but sparingly, lingered until the next noon before succumbing." "A strange fatality!" commented Mr. Badcock. Mr. Fett paused, and eyed him awhile in frank admiration before continuing. "The wonder to me is you didn't call it a coincidence," he murmured. "Well, and so it was," said Mr. Badcock, "only the word didn't occur to me." "The bodies," resumed Mr. Fett, "in accordance with the by-laws of Montpellier, were conveyed to the town mortuary, and there bestowed for the time in open coffins, connected by means of wire attachments with a bell in the roof--a municipal device against premature interment. The wires also carried a number of small bells very sensitively hung, so that the smallest movement of reviving animation would at once alarm the night-watchman in an adjoining chamber. "This watchman, an honest fellow with literary tastes above his calling, was engaged towards midnight in reading M. de la Fontaine's 'Elegie aux Nymphes de Vaux,' when a sudden violent jangling fetched him to his feet, with every hair of his head erect and separate. Before he could collect his senses the jangling broke into a series of terrific detonations, in the midst of which the bell in the roof tolled one awful stroke and ceased. "I leave to your imagination the sight that met his eyes when, lantern in hand, he reached the mortuary door. The collected remains, promiscuously interred next day by the municipality of Montpellier, were, at the request of a brother-in-law of Mrs. Robinson, and through the good offices of Mr. Locke, subsequently exhumed and despatched to Pewsey, where they rest under a suitable inscription, locally attributed to the pen of Mr. Locke. His admirers will recognize in the concluding lines that conscientious exactitude which ever distinguished the philosopher. They run--
"Coming at the close of a day's ramble to Pewsey, a small town near the source of the Avon, we visited its parish churchyard and happened upon the memorial to the unfortunate Robinsons. An old man was stooping over the turf beside it, engaged in gathering mushrooms, numbers of which grew in the grass around this stone, _but nowhere else in the whole enclosure_. The old man, who proved to be the sexton, assured us not only of this, but also that previous to the interment of the Robinsons no mushrooms had grown within a mile of the spot. He added that, albeit regarded with abhorrence by the more superstitious inhabitants of Pewsey, the fungi were edible, and gave no trouble to ordinary digestions (his own, for example); nor upon close examination could Mr. Micklethwaite detect that they differed at all from the common _agaricus campestris_. So, sirs, concludes my tale." Mr. Fett ended amid impressive silence. "I don't feel altogether so keen-set as I did five minutes back," muttered Billy Priske. "For my part," said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship's butter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio--'." "Faith, and so there are," broke in Nat Fiennes, catching me on a sudden by the arm. "Listen!" High on the forest ridge, far and faint, yet clear over the pine-tops, a voice was singing. The voice was a girl's--a girl's, or else some spirit's; for it fell to us out of the very dawn, pausing and anon dropping again in little cadences, as though upon the waft of wing; and wafted with it, wave upon wave, came also the morning scent of the _macchia_. We could distinguish no words, intently though we listened, or no more than one, which sounded like _Mortu, mortu, mortu_, many times repeated in slow refrain before the voice lifted again to the air. But the air itself was voluble between its cadences, and the voice, though a woman's, seemed to challenge us on a high martial note, half menacing, half triumphant. Nat Fiennes had sprung to his feet, musket in hand, when another and less romantic sound broke the silence of the near woods; and down through a glade on the slope above us, where darkness and day yet mingled in a bluish twilight under the close boughs, came scampering back the hogs described to us by Mr. Fett. Apparently they had recovered from their fright, for they came on at a shuffling gallop through the churchyard gate, nor hesitated until well within the enclosure. There, with much grunting, they drew to a standstill and eyed us, backing a little, and sidling off by twos and threes among the nettles under the wall. "They are tame hogs run wild," said my father, after studying them for a minute. "They have lost their masters, and evidently hope we have succeeded to the care of their troughs." He moistened a manchet of bread from his wine-flask and flung it towards them. The hogs winced away with a squeal of alarm, then took courage and rushed upon the morsel together. The most of them were lean brutes, though here and there a fat sow ran with the herd, her dugs almost brushing the ground. In colour all were reddish-brown, and the chine of each arched itself like a bent bow. Five or six carried formidable tusks. These tusks, I think, must have struck terror in the breast of Mr. Badcock, who, as my father enticed the hogs nearer with fresh morsels of bread until they nuzzled close to us, suddenly made a motion to beat them off with the butt of his musket, whereupon the whole herd wheeled and scampered off through the gateway. "Why, man," cried my father, angrily, "did I not tell you they were tame! And now you have lost us good provender!" He raised his gun. But here Nat touched his arm. "Let me follow them, sir, and see which way they take. Being so tame, they have likely enough some master or herdsman up yonder--" "Or herdswoman," I laughed. "Take me with you, Nat." "Nay, that I won't," he answered, with a quick blush. "You have the temper of Adonis-- "'Hunting he lov'd, but love he laughed to scorn,' "and I fear his fate of you, one little Adonis among so many boars!" "Then take _me_" urged Mr. Badcock. "Indeed, sir," he apologized, turning to my father, "the movement was involuntary. I am no coward, sir, though a sudden apprehension may for the moment flush my nerves. I desire to prove to you that on second thoughts I am ready to face all the boars in Christendom." "I did not accuse you," said my father. "But go with Mr. Fiennes if you wish." Nat nodded, tucked his musket under his arm, and strode out of the churchyard with Mr. Badcock at his heels. By the gateway he halted a moment and listened; but the voice sang no longer from the ridge. We watched the pair as they went up the glade, and turned to our breakfast. The meal over, my father proposed to me to return to the creek and fetch up a three days' supply of provisions from the ship, leaving Mr. Fett and Billy Priske to guard the camp. (In our confidence of finding the valley inhabited, we had brought but two pounds of ship's biscuit, one-third as much butter, and a small keg only of salt pork.) We were absent, maybe, for two hours and a half; and on our way back fell in with Billy, who, having suffered no ill effects from his breakfast of mushrooms (though he had eaten them under protest), was roaming the meadow in search of more. We asked him if the two explorers had returned. He answered "No," and that Mr. Fett had strolled up into the wood in search of chestnuts, leaving him sentry over the camp. "And is it thus you keep sentry?" my father demanded. "Why, master, since this valley has no more tenantry than Sodom or Gomorrah, cities of the plain--" Billy began confidently; but his voice trailed off under my father's frown. "You have done ill, the pair of you," said my father, and strode ahead of us across the meadow. At the gate of the enclosure he came to an abrupt halt. The hogs had returned and were routing among our camp-furniture. For the rest, the churchyard was empty. But where were Nat Fiennes and Mr. Badcock, who had sallied out to follow them? And where was Mr. Fett? We rushed upon the brutes, and drove them squealing out of the gateway leading to the woods. They took the rise of the glade at a scamper, and were lost to us in the undergrowth. We followed, shouting our comrades' names. No answer came back to us, though our voices must have carried far beyond the next ridge. For an hour we beat the wood, keeping together by my father's order, and shouting, now singly, now in chorus. Nat, likely enough, had pressed forward beyond earshot, and led Mr. Badcock on with him. But what had become of Mr. Fett, who, as Billy asseverated, had promised to take but a short stroll? My father's frown grew darker and yet darker as the minutes wore on and still no voice answered our hailing. The sun was declining fast when he gave the order to return to camp, which we found as we had left it. We seated ourselves amid the disordered baggage, pulled out a ration apiece of salt pork and ship's bread, and ate our supper in moody silence. During the meal Billy kept his eye furtively on my father. "Master," said he, at the close, plucking up courage as my father filled and lit a pipe of tobacco, "I be terribly to blame." My father puffed, without answering. "The Lord knows whether they be safe or lost," went on Billy, desperately; "but we be safe, and those as can ought to sleep to-night." Still my father gave no answer. "I can't sleep, sir, with this on my conscience--no, not if I tried. Give me leave, sir, to stand sentry while you and Master Prosper take what rest you may." "I don't know that I can trust you," said my father. "'Twas a careless act, I'll allow. But I've a-been your servant, Sir John, for twenty-two year come nest Martinmas; and you know--or else you ought to know--that for your good opinion, being set to it, I would stand awake till I watched out every eye in my head." My father crammed down the ashes in his pipe, and glanced back at the sun, now dropping into the fold of the glen between us and the sea. "I will give you another chance," he said. Thrice that night, my dreams being troubled, I awoke and stretched myself to see Billy pacing grimly in the moonlight between us and the gateway, tholing his penance. I know not what aroused me the fourth time; some sound, perhaps. The dawn was breaking, and, half-lifted on my elbow, I saw Billy, his musket still at his shoulder, halt by the gateway as if he, too, had been arrested by the sound. After a moment he turned, quite casually, and stepped outside the gate to look. I saw him step outside. I was but half-awake, and drowsily my eyes closed and opened again with a start, expecting to see him back at his sentry-go. He had not returned. I closed my eyes again, in no way alarmed as yet. I would give him another minute, another sixty seconds. But before I had counted thirty my ears caught a sound, and I leapt up, wide awake, and touched my father's shoulder. He sat up, cast a glance about him, and sprang to his feet. Together we ran to the gateway. The voice I had heard was the grunting of the hogs. They were gathered about the gateway again, and, as before, they scampered from us up the glade. But of Billy Priske there was no sign at all. We stared at each other and rubbed our eyes; we two, left alone out of our company of six. Although the sun would not pierce to the valley for another hour, it slanted already between the pine-stems on the ridge, and above us the sky was light with another day. And again, punctual with the dawn, over the ridge a far voice broke into singing. As before, it came to us in cadences descending to a long-drawn refrain--_Mortu, mortu, mortu!_ "Billy! Billy Priske!" we called, and listened. "_Mortu, mortu, mortu!_" sang the voice, and died away behind the ridge. For some time we stood and heard the hogs crashing their way through the undergrowth at the head of the glade, with a snapping and crackling of twigs, which by degrees grew fainter. This, too, died away; and, returning to our camp, we sat among the baggage and stared one another in the face. _ |
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