Chapter 20. I Learn Of Liberty, And Am Restored To It

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_ 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.

"You have taught me much in these evenings, O Marc'antonio," said I.

"And you, cavalier, have taught me much."

"In what way, my friend?"

Marc'antonio looked across the fire with a smile, and held up a carved piece of wood he had been sharpening to a point. In shape it resembled an elephant's tusk, and it formed part of an apparatus to keep a pig from straying, two of these tusks being so fastened above the beast's neck that they caught and hampered him in the undergrowth.

"Eccu!" said Marc'antonio. "You have taught me to be a swinekeeper, for instance. There is no shame in any calling but what a man brings to it. You have taught me to endure lesser things for the sake of greater, and that is a hard lesson at my age."

From Marc'antonio I learned not only that this Corsica was a land with its own ambitions, which no stranger might share--a nation small but earnest, in which my presence was merely impertinent and laughable withal--but that the Prince Camillo's chances of becoming its king were only a trifle less derisory than my own. Marc'antonio would not admit this in so many words; but he gave me to understand that Pasquale Paoli had by this time cleared the interior of the Genoese, and was thrusting them little by little from their last grip on the extremities of the island--Calvi and some smaller strongholds in the north, Bonifacio in the south, and a few isolated forts along the littoral; that the people looked up to him and to him only; that the constitution he had invented was working and working well; that his writ ran throughout Corsica, and his laws were enforced, even those which he had aimed at vendetta and cross-vendetta; and that the militia was faithful to him, almost to a man. "Nor will I deny, cavalier," he added, "that he seems to me an honest patriot and a wise one. They say he seeks the Crown, however."

"Well, and why not?" I demanded. "If he can unite Corsica and win her freedom, does he not deserve to be her king?"

Marc'antonio shook his head.

"Would your Prince Camillo make a better one?" I urged.

"It is a question of right, cavalier. I love this Paoli for trouncing the Genoese; but for denying the Prince his rights I must hate him, and especially for the grounds of his denial."

"Tell me those grounds precisely, Marc'antonio."

But he would not; and somehow I knew that they concerned the Princess.

"Paoli is generous in that he leaves us in peace," he answered, evading the question; "and I must hate him all the more for this, because he spares us out of contempt."

"Yet," said I, musing, "that priest must have a card up his sleeve. Rat that he looked, I cannot fancy him sticking to a ship until she foundered."

Certainly we were left in peace. For any sign that reached to us there, in our cup of he hills, the whole island might have been desolate. The forest and the beasts in it, tame and wild, belonged--so Marc'antonio informed me--to the Colonne; the slopes between us and the sea to the lost great colony of Paomia. No one disturbed us. Week followed week, yet since the Prince had passed with his men no traveller came down the path which ran between our hut and Nat's grave, over which the undergrowth already was pushing its autumn shoots. Indeed, the path led no whither but to the sea and the forsaken village. Twice a week Marc'antonio would leave me for five or six hours and return with bread, and at whiles with a bag of dried figs or a basket of cheeses and olives for supplement. I learned that he purchased them in a _paese_ to the southward, beyond the forest and beyond the ridge of the hills; but he made a mystery of this, and I had to be content with his word that in Corsica folk in the bush need never starve. Also, sometimes I would hear his gun, and he would bring me home five or six brace of blackbirds strung on a wand of osier; and these birds grew plumper and made the better eating as autumn painted the arbutus with scarlet berries.

To me, so long held a prisoner within the hut, this change of season came with a shock upon the never-to-be-sufficiently-blessed day when Marc'antonio, having examined and felt my bones and pronounced them healed, lifted and bore me, as you might carry a child, up the path to the old camp on the ridge. He was proud (good man) as he had a right to be. Surgeons in Corsica there might be none, as he assured me, or none capable of probing an ordinary bullet wound. But in youth he had learnt the art of bone-setting, and practised it upon the sheep which slipped and broke themselves in the gorge of the Taravo; and his care of me was a masterpiece, to be boasted over to his dying day. "The smallest limp, at the outside!" he promised me; he would not answer entirely for the left leg, that thrice-teasing, thrice-accursed fracture. Another ten days, and we might be sure; he could not allow me to set foot to ground under ten days. But while he carried me he whistled a lively air, and broke off to promise me good shooting before a month was out--shooting of blackbirds, of deer perhaps, perhaps even of a _mufro_. Here the whistling grew _largo espressivo_.

And I? I drew the upland air into my lungs, and the scent of the recovered _macchia_ through my nostrils, and inhaled it as a man inhales tobacco-smoke, and could have whooped for joy. Not by one-fifth was the scent so intense as I have since smelt it in spring, when all Corsica breaks into flower; yet intense enough and exhilarating after the dank odours of the valley. But the colours! On a sudden the _macchia_ had burst into fruit--carmine berries of the sarsaparilla, upon which a few late flowerets yet drooped, duller berries of the lentisk, olive-like berries of the phillyria, velvet purple berries of the myrtle, and (putting all to shade) yellow and scarlet fruit of the arbutus, clustering like fairy oranges, here and there so thickly that the whole thicket was afire and aflame, enough to have deceived Moses! God, how good to see it and be alive!

Marc'antonio bore me up through the swimming air and laid me in the shadow of the cave--_her_ cave. It was empty as she had left it, and my back pressed the very bed of fern on which she had lain. The fern was dry now, after long winnowing by the wind that found its way into every crevice of this mountain summit.

How could I choose but think of her? Thinking of her, how could I choose but weary myself in vain speculation, by a hundred guesses attempting to force my way past the edge of the mystery, the sinister shadow which wrapped her round, and penetrate to the heart of it? I recalled her beauty, childlike yet sullen; her eyes, so forthright at times and transparently innocent, yet at times so swiftly clouded with suspicion, not merely shy, but shy with terror, like the eyes of a wild creature entrapped; her bearing, by turns disdainful and defiant with a guarded shame. This turf, these boulders, had made her bower, these matted creepers her curtain. Here she had lived secure among savage men, each one of them ready to die--so Marc'antonio assured me, and all that I had seen confirmed it--rather than injure a hair of her head or suffer it to be injured. She was a king's daughter. Yet this lad of the Rocca Serras, noble, of the best blood of the island, had turned his own gun upon himself rather than wed with her.

I thought much upon this lad Rocca Serra. Why had he died? Was it for loathing her? But men do not easily loathe such beauty. Was it for love of her? But men do not slay themselves for fortunate love. Had _her_ loathing been in some way the secret of his despair? I recalled my words to her, and how she had answered them, turning in the steep track among the pines "I am your hostage. Do with me as you will." "_If I could! Ah, if I could!_" I liked to think that the lad had loved her and been disdained; yet I pitied him for being disdained, and half hated him for having dared to love her. Yes, for certain he had loved her. But, if so, her secret had need be as strange almost as that of Sara, the daughter of Raguel, whom seven husbands married, to perish on the marriage eve--"_for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody but those which come unto her_."

In dreams I found myself travelling beyond the grave in search of this dead lad, to question him; and not seldom would awake with these lines running in my head, remembered as old perplexing favourites with my father, though God knows how I took a fancy that they held the clue--

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who dy'd before the God of Love was born.
I cannot think that he, who then loved most,
Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.
But since this god produc'd a Destiny,
And that Vice-Nature Custom lets it be,
I must love her that loves not me.

"O, were we waken'd by this tyranny
T'ungod this child again, it could not be
I should love her who loves not me.

"Rebel and Atheist too, why murmur I
As though I felt the worst that love could do?
Love may make me leave loving, or might try
A deeper plague--to make her love me too;
Which, since she loves before, I'm loth to see:
Falsehood is worse than hate: and that must be
If she whom I love should love me."

Many wild conjectures I made and patiently built upon, which, if I were to write them down here, would merely bemuse the reader or drive him to think me crazy. There on my enchanted mountain summit, ringed about day after day by the silent land, removed from all human company but Marc'antonio's, with no clock but the sun and no calendar but the creeping change of the season upon the _macchia_, what wonder if I forgot human probabilities at times in piecing and unpiecing solutions of a riddle which itself cried out against nature?

Marc'antonio was all the while as matter-of-fact as a good nurse ought to be. He had fashioned me a capital pair of crutches out of boxwood, and no sooner could I creep about on them than he began to discourse, over the camp-fire, on the hunting excursions we were soon to make together.

"_Pianu, pianu_; we will grow strong, and get our hand in by little and little. At first there will be the blackbirds and the foxes--"

"You shoot foxes in Corsica?" I asked.

Marc'antonio stared at me. "And why not, cavalier? You would not have us run after them and despatch them with the stiletto!"

I endeavoured to explain to him the craft and mystery of fox-hunting as practised in England. He shook his head over it, greatly bewildered.

"It seems a long ceremony for one little fox," was his criticism.

"But if we did it with less ritual the foxes would disappear out of the country," I answered him.

"And why not?"

This naturally led me into a discourse on preserving game and on our English game laws, which, I regret to say, gravelled him utterly.

"A peace of God for foxes and partridges! Why, what do you allow, then, for a _man?_"

I explained that we did not shoot men in England. His jaw dropped.

"Mbe! In the name of the Virgin, whatever do you do with them?"

"We hang them sometimes, and sometimes we fight duels with them." I expounded in brief the distinction between these processes and their formalities, whereat he remained for a long while in a brown study.

"Well," he admitted, "by all accounts you English have achieved liberty; but, _per Baccu_, you do strange things with it!"

"Blackbirds, to begin with," he resumed, "and foxes, and a hare, maybe. Then in the next valley there are boars--small, and wild, and fierce, but our great half-tame ones have driven them off this mountain. After them we will extend ourselves and stalk for deer."

He described the deer to me and its habits. It was, as I made out, an animal not unlike our red deer, but smaller, and of a duller coat; shy, too, and scarce. He gave me reasons for this. In summer the Corsican shepherds, each armed with a gun, pasture their sheep on the mountains, in winter along the plains and valleys; in either season driving off the poor stag, which in summer is left to range the parched lowlands and in winter the upper snows. Of late years, however, owing to the unsettled state of politics, the shepherds pastured not half the numbers of sheep that Marc'antonio remembered in his youth, and by consequence the deer had multiplied and grown bolder. He could promise me a stag. Nay, he even hoped that owing to these same causes the _mufri_ were pushing down by degrees to the seaboard from the inland mountains, which they mostly haunted. Ah, that was sport for kings! If fortune, one of these fine days, would send us a full-grown _mufrone_ now!

But we began upon the blackbirds. I remember yet my first, and how, while I stood trembling a little with that excitement which only a sick man can know who takes up his gun again, Marc'antonio held up the bird and ripped open its crop, filled to bursting with myrtle berries; and the exquisite violet scent they exhaled.

Already I had flung my crutches away, and three weeks later we were after the deer in good earnest. I had lost all account of time; but winter was upon us, with a wealth of laurestinus flower upon the _macchia_ and a sense of stillness in the air such as we feel at home on windless sunny mornings in December after a night of frost. We had started before dawn, and crossed the valley by the track leading past our deserted hut and up between the granite pinnacles on which, when the sunset touched them, I had so often gazed. We had followed it up beyond the pines and over a pass leading out among a range of undulating foot-hills, which seemed to waver and lose heart a dozen times before making up their minds to unite and climb, and be a snowcapped mountain. But they mounted to the snows at length, and the snows had driven down the stag which, under Marc'antonio's guidance, I stalked for two hours, and shot before noon-day. We left him in the track, to be recovered as we returned, and very cautiously made our way to the crest of the next ridge. I chose a granite boulder for my shelter, gained it, crawled under its lee, and, peering over, had whipped my gun to my shoulder and very nearly pulled the trigger--was, in fact, looking along the sight--when I found that I was aiming at a man; and not only that, but at Billy Priske!

I believe, on my faith that thenceforward he owed his life to the shape of his legs--so unlike a deer's.

He was picking his way across the dry bed of a torrent in the dip not fifty yards below us, leaping from slab to slab of outcropping granite as a man crosses a brook by stepping-stones; and upon a slab midway he halted, drew off his hat, extracted a handkerchief, and stood polishing his bald head while he took stock of the climb before him.

"Billy! Billy Priske!"

He tilted his head still higher, towards the ridge and the rock on which I stood against his skyline, frantically waving.

"HOO-ROAR!"

"And to think, lad," he panted, ten minutes later, as he stretched himself on the heath beside me--"to think of your mistaking me for a deer!"

"Did I say so, Billy? Then I lied. It was for a _mufro_ I took you. Marc'antonio here had as good as promised me one."

His beaming smile changed on the instant to a look of extreme gravity.

"See you, lad," he said, "have you ever come across one of these here wild sheep?"

"Not yet."

"I thought not. Well, I have; and I advise you not to talk irreligious about 'em."

"I will talk about nothing," said I, "until you tell me how my father is, and of all your adventures."

"He's well, lad--hearty, and well, and thriving. And he sends you his love, and a paper for your friend here. 'Tis from the Princess; and the upshot is, you're released from your word and free to come back with me."

Marc'antonio, proud of an opportunity to display his scholarship, broke the seal and read the letter with a magisterial frown, which changed, however, to a pleasant, friendly smile as he handed it across to me.

"Your captivity is at an end, cavalier. You said well, after all, that your patience would win the day."

"_My_ patience, Marc'antonio? What, then, of yours?"

The tears sprang suddenly to his eyes, good fellow that he was, and now my good friend. I stretched out a hand, and he grasped and held it for a moment between his twain. We used no more words.

"So my father is with the Princess?" I asked, turning on Billy, who stared--and excusably--at this evidence of our emotion.

"No, he bain't," said Billy; "leastways, he was with her when I left him, at a place called Olmeta, or something of the sort. But by this time he've a-gone north again."

"And why goes he north?"

"Because that's where the Genoese have shut up the lady."

"Meaning the Queen Emilia?"

Billy nodded.

"And you have travelled the length of Corsica alone to tell me this and take me back with you?"

"No, I didn't. Leastways--" Billy opened his bag of provender, selected a crust, and began to munch it very deliberately. "There's a saying," he went on between mouthfuls, "about somebody or other axin' more questions in one breath than a wise man can answer in a week; and likewise, there's another saying that even a bagpipe won't speak till his belly be full. Well, now, as for coming alone, in the first place and in round numbers I didn't; and as for coming to tell you this, partly it was and partly it wasn't; and as for your going back with me, that's for you to choose."

"Well, then," said I, humouring him, "we will take you point by point, in order. To begin with, you did not come alone--_ergo_, you had company. What company?"

"Very poor company, lad, and by name Stephanu. That hatchet-faced Prince Camillo chose him out for a guide to me--" Billy paused, with his mouth open for a bite. "Why, whatever is the matter?" he asked; for I had turned to translate this to Marc'antonio, and Marc'antonio had started up with a growl and an oath.

"Did Stephanu come willingly?" I asked.

"As I was tellin', the Prince chose him for guide to me, and he couldn't have chosen a worse one. If you'll believe me, there wasn't an ounce of comfort in the man from the start; and this morning, having put me in the road so that I couldn't miss it, he turned back and left me--in a sweatin' hurry, too."

I glanced at Marc'antonio, who had risen and was striding to and fro upon the ridge with his fists clenched. There was mischief here for a certainty, and Stephanu's behaviour confirmed it. For a moment, however, I forbore to translate further, and resumed my catechising of Billy.

"In the second place you came with my release, and to bring me news, and--with what purpose beside?"

"Why, with a message for the ship, to be sure."

"The ship?" I stared at him. "What ship?"

"Why, the _Gauntlet_ ketch! You don't tell me," said Billy, with a glance westward, where, however, the hills intervened and hid the coast from us--"you don't tell me you haven't sighted her! But she's here, lad--she _must_ be here! Your father sent home word by her that she was to be back wi' reinforcements by the first day of November; and did you ever in your life know your uncle disappoint him?"

"Marc'antonio," said I, "what is this I hear from Billy about a ship?"

Marc'antonio gave a start, and looked from me to Billy in evident confusion.

"Truly, cavalier, there was a ship. I spied her there three days ago, at sunset, making for the island."

"Was she the same ship that first brought us to the island?"

"She was very like," he answered unwillingly. "Yes, indeed, cavalier, I have no doubt she was the same ship."

"And you never told me! Nay, I see now why for these three days we have been hunting to the east of our camp, and always where the coast was hidden. Yes, yes, I see now a score of tricks you have played me while I trusted to your better knowledge--Marc'antonio," I said sternly, "did you indeed believe so ill of me as that at sight of the ship I should forget my parole?"

"It was not that, cavalier; believe me, it was not that. I feared--"

"Speak on, man."

"I feared you might forget our talks together, and, when your release came, forget also that other adventure on which I had hoped to bind you. The Princess--"

"Then your fear, my friend, did me only a little less injustice. You have heard how my father perseveres for a woman's sake; and I am my father's son, I hope. As for the Princess--"

"She is in worse case than ever, cavalier, since they have contrived to get rid of Stephanu."

"On the contrary, my friend, her case is hopeful at length; since this release sets us free to help her."

We trudged back to the camp, pausing on the way while Marc'antonio skewered the deer's legs and slung him on a pole between us. As we started afresh Billy observed for the first time that I walked with a limp.

"A broken leg," said I, carelessly; for it would not have done to tell him all the truth.

"Well, well," said he, content with the explanation, "accidents will happen to them that travel; and a broken leg, they say, is stronger when well set."

"If that's so," said I, "I've a double excuse to be thankful"--which he did not understand, as I did not mean him to.

Darkness fell on us a little before we reached the camp. From the first I had recognized there could be no chance to-day of visiting the shore and seeking the _Gauntlet_ at her anchorage. We were weary, too, and hungry, and nothing remained to do but light the camp fire, cook our supper, and listen to Billy's tale of his adventures, a good part of which will be found in the following chapter. I ought to say, rather, that Billy and I conversed, while Marc'antonio--for we spoke in English--sat by the fire busy with his own thoughts; and, by his face, they were gloomy ones.

"What puzzles me, Billy," said I, as we parted for the night, "is who can be aboard of the ketch. Reinforcements? Why, what reinforcements could my uncle send?"

"The devil a one of me knows, as the Irishman said," answered Billy, cheerfully. "But sent 'em he has, and, if I know anything of Mr. Gervase, they're good ones."

I was up before dawn, and the sun rose over the shoulder of our mountain to find me a mile and more on my way down the track which led to the sea. I passed the clearing and the copse where Nat had taken his wound, and the rock, high on my right, where I had stood and spied him running, the _macchia-filled hollows and dingles, the wood, the village (still desolate), the graveyard where we had first encamped; and so came to the meadow below it, where Mr. Fett had gathered his mushrooms. It was greener than I remembered it, owing to the autumn rains.

I pulled up with a start. At the foot of the meadow, where the stream ran in a curve between it and the woods, stood a man. He held a fishing-rod in his hand, and was stepping back to make a cast; but, at a cry from me, paused and turned slowly about.

"Uncle Gervase!"

"My _dear_ Prosper!" He dropped his rod and advanced, holding out his hands to me. "Why lad, lad, you have grown to a man in these months!"

"And it really is you, uncle!" I cried again, as yet scarcely believing it, though I clasped him by both hands. "And what are _you_ doing here?"

"Why," said he, quizzically, "'tis a monstrous confession for this time of the year, but I was fishing for trout; and, what is more, I have taken two, with Walton's number two June-fly, lad--Mr. Grylls's variety--the wings, if you remember, made of the black drake's feathers, with a touch of grey horsehair on the shank. I wished to know, first, if a Corsican trout would answer to a Cornish fly, and, next, if they keep the same seasons as in England. They do, Prosper--there or thereabouts. To tell you the truth--though, as they say an angler may catch a fish, but it takes a fisherman to tell the truth about him--I found them woundily out of condition, and restored them, as Mr. Grylls would put it, to their native element."

"You don't tell me that the Vicar is here, too?" I asked, prepared at this time to be surprised at nothing.

"He is not, lad, though I pleaded with him very earnestly to come, being, as you may guess, put to my wits' end by your father's message."

"But how, then, have you managed?"

"Pretty well, Prosper--pretty well. But come and see for yourself. The _Gauntlet_ lies at her old anchorage--or so Captain Pomery tells me--and 'tis but a step down the creek to where my boat is waiting."

We walked down beside the stream, my uncle, as we went, asking a score of questions about our adventures and about my father and his plans--questions which I was in no state of mind to answer coherently. But this mattered the less since he had no leisure to listen to my answers.

I felt, as I said just now, ready to be surprised at nothing. But in this I was mistaken, as I found when we rounded the corner by the creek's head, and my eyes fell on a boat waiting, a stone's throw from the landing-place, and on the crew that manned her.

"Good Lord!" I cried, and stood at a halt.

They were seven--six rowers and a coxswain--and all robed in russet gowns that reached to their ankles. The Trappist monks! _

Read next: Chapter 21. Of My Father's Anabasis...

Read previous: Chapter 19. How Marc'antonio Nursed Me And Gave Me Counsel

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