Chapter 30. The Summit And The Stars

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_ CHAPTER XXX. THE SUMMIT AND THE STARS

"Aucassins, biax amis doux
En quel terre en irons nous?
--Douce amie, que sai jou?
Moi ne caut u nous aillons,
En forest u en destor,
Mais que je soie aveuc vous!"
---Aucassin and Nicolete.

"E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle."
---Dante.

I awoke to a hum of voices . . . but when my eyes opened, the speakers were gone, and I lay staring at an open window beyond which the sky shone, blue and deep as a well. On a chair beside the window sat the Princess, her hands in her lap. . . . While I stared at her, two strange fancies played together in my mind like couples crossing in a dance; the first, that she sat there waiting for something to happen, and had been waiting for a very long, an endless, while; the other that her body had grown transparent. The sunlight seemed to float through it as through a curtain.

I dare say that I lay incapable of movement; but this did not distress me at all, for I felt no desire to stir--only a contentment, deep as the sky outside, to rest there and let my eyes rest on her. Yet either I must have spoken or (yes, the miracle was no less likely!) she heard my thoughts; for she lifted her head and, rising, came towards me. As she drew close, her form appeared to expand, shutting out the light . . . and I drifted back into darkness.

By-and-by the light glimmered again. I seemed to be rising to it, this time, like a drowned man out of deep water; drowned, not drowning, for I felt no struggle, but rather stood apart from my body and watched it ascending, the arms held downwards, rigid, the palms touching its thighs--until at the surface, on the top of a wave, my will rejoined it and forced it to look. Then I knew that I had been mistaken. The sky was there, deep as a well; and, as before, it shone through an opening; and the opening had a rounded top like the arch of a window; yet it was not a window. As before, my love sat between me and the light, and the light shone through her. My bed rocked a little under me, and for a while I fancied myself on board the _Gauntlet_, laid in my bunk and listening to the rolling of her loose ballast--until my ear distinguished and recognized the sound for that of wheels, a low rumble through which a horse's footfall plodded, beating time.

I was scarcely satisfied of this before the sound grew indistinct again and became a murmur of voices. The arch that framed the sunlight widened; the sky drew nearer, breaking into vivid separate tinctures--orange, blood-red, sapphire-blue; and at the same time the Princess receded and diminished in stature. . . . The frame was a window again, and she a figure on a coloured pane, shining there in a company of saints and angels. But her voice remained beside me, speaking with another voice in a great emptiness.

The other voice--a man's--talked most of the while. I could not follow what it said, but by-and-by caught a single word, "Milano"; and again two words, "The mountains" and yet again, but after an interval, "The people are poor; they give nothing; from year's end to year's end"--and the voice prolonged itself like an echo, repeating the words until, as they died away, they seemed to measure out the time.

"The more reason why _you_--" began the Princess's voice. "There shall be spared one--a little one--for Our Lady."

But here I felt myself drifting off once more. I was as one afloat in a whirlpool, now carried near to a straw and anon swept away as I clutched at it.

The eddy brought me round again to the window that was no window, the rumble of wheels, the plodding of a horse's hoofs. Beyond the low arch--or was it a pent?--shone a star or two, and against their pale radiance a shadow loomed--the shadow of the Princess, still seated, still patient, still with her hands in her lap. The rumble of the wheels, the slow rocking of my bed beneath me, fitted themselves to the intermittent flash of the stars, and beat out a rhythm in my memory--a rhythm, and by degrees the words to fit it--

"Tanto ch'io vidi delle cose belle
Che porta il ciel, per un pertugio tondo,
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle."

_A riveder le stelle_--I closed my eyes, opened them again, and lo! the stars were gone. In their place shone pale dawn, touching the grey-white arch of a tilt-waggon, on the floor of which I lay in a deep litter of straw. But still by the tilt, between me and the dawn, rested my love, and drowsed, still patient, her hands in her lap.

"At last! At last!"

She called to the driver--I could not see him, for I lay with my face to the tilt--and he pulled up his horse with a jolt. Belike he had been slumbering, and with the same jolt awoke himself. I tried to lift a hand--I think to brush away the illusion of the window and its painted panes.

Maybe, slight as it was, she mistook the movement to mean that I felt stifled under the hood of the waggon and wanted air. At any rate, she called again, and the driver (I have clean forgotten his face), left his reins and came around to her. Between them they lifted me out and laid me on a bank between the road and a water-course that ran beside it. I heard the water rippling, near by, and presently felt the cool, delicious touch of it as she dipped up a little in her hollowed palms and moistened my bandages.

Our waggon had come to a halt in the very centre (as it seemed) of a great plain, criss-crossed with dykes and lines of trees, and dotted with distant hamlets. The hamlets twinkled in the fresh daylight, and in the nearest one--a mile back on the road--a fine campanile stood up against the sun, which pierced through three windows in its topmost story. So flat was the plain that mere sky filled nine-tenths of the prospect; and all the wide dome of it tinkled with the singing of larks.

"_Ma dove? dove?_ . . ."

The Princess pointed, and far on the road, miles beyond the waggon, I saw that which no man, sick or hale, sees for the first time in his life without a lift of the heart--the long glittering rampart of the Alps.

"Do we cross them?"

"_Pianu_. . . . In time, O beloved; thou and I . . . all in good time."

I gazed up at her, half-frightened by the tenderness in her voice; and what I saw frightened me wholly. The sullenness had gone from her eyes; as a mother upon the child in her lap, so she looked down upon me; but her face was wan, even in the warm sunlight, and pinched, and hollow-eyed. I lifted her hand--a little way only, my own being so weak. It was frail, transparent, as though wasted by very hunger.

She read the question I could not ask, and answered it with a brave laugh. (It appeared, then, that she had taught herself to laugh.)

"We have been sick, thou and I. The mountains will cure us."

I looked along the road towards them, then up at her again. I remembered afterwards that though she spoke so cheerfully of the mountains, her gaze had turned from them, to travel back across the plain.

"A little while!" she went on. "We must wait a little while to recover our strength. But there are friends yonder, to help us."

"Friends?" I echoed, wondering that I possessed any.

"You must leave all talk to me," she commanded; "and, if you are rested, we ought not to sit idling here." She helped the driver to lift me back into the waggon, where, as it moved on, she seated herself in the straw and took my hand. All her shyness had gone, with all her sullenness.

"There is a farm," began she, "a bare twelve leagues from here, says the waggoner, who knows it. I carry a letter to the farmer from his brother, who is the parish priest of Trecate, and a good man. He says that his brother, too, is a good man, and will show us kindness for his sake, because the farm once belonged to my friend, as the elder, until he gave it up to follow God. The pair have not met since twenty years; for Trecate lies not far from Milan, and the farm is deep in the mountains, above a village called Domodossola, where the folk are no travellers. . . ."

Here her voice faded into a dream again; for a very little waking wearied me, then and for weeks to come, and the word Milano brought back the church, the stained window, the priest's voice talking, and confused all these with the rumbling of the waggon. But I held my love's hand, and that was enough.

We came that same evening to the shore of a lake, beautiful as a pool dropped out of Paradise, and the next day crawled uphill, hour after hour, over a jolting road to the village, where I lay while the driver climbed to the farm with the Princess's letter. He was gone five hours, but returned with the farmer, and the farmer's tall eldest son; and the pair had brought a litter, in which to carry me home.

The name of this good man was Bavarello--Giacomo Bavarello--and he lived with his wife Battestina in a house full of lean children and live-stock. The house had deep overhanging eaves, held down by cords and weighted with rocks; but this must have been rather in deference to the custom of the country than as a precaution against storms, for the farmstead lay cosily in a dingle of the mountain, where storms never reached it. Yet it took the sun from earliest dawn almost to the last beam of midsummer daylight. Behind it a pine forest climbed to the snow; and up and across the snow a corniced path traversed the face of the mountain and joined the _diligence_-road a little below the summit of the pass. At the point of junction stood a small chapel, with a dwelling-room attached, where lived a brother from the Benedictine _hospice_ on the far side of the pass. His name was Brother Polifilo, and it was supposed that he had fallen in love with solitude (else how could he have endured to live in such a place?); yet his smile justified his name, and his manner of playing with the children when he descended to bring us the consolations of religion-- which he did by arrangement with the infirm parish priest in the valley. Also, on fine mornings when the snow held and the little ones could be trusted along the path, the entire household of the Bavarelli would troop up to Mass in his tiny chapel.

For me, it was many weeks before my sick brain allowed me to climb beyond the pines; and many weeks, though the Princess always went with me--before she told me all the story of what had happened in Genoa. Yet we talked much, at one time and another, though we were silent more; for the silences told more. Only our talk and our silences were always of the present. It was understood that the whole story of the past would come, some day, when I had strength for it. Of the future we never spoke. I could not then have told why; though now all too well I can.

Sick man though I was, bliss filled those days for me, and their memory is steeped in bliss. Yet a thought began, after a while, to trouble me. We were living on these poor Bavarelli, and, for aught I knew, paying them not a penny. The good farmer might be grateful to his priest-brother down yonder; but even if his gratitude were inexhaustible we--strangers as we were--ought not to test it so. To be sure, he and his wife wore a smile for us, morning and evening--and this, though I had a notion that Donna Battestina was of a saving disposition. I had heard the pair of them protest when the Princess offered to make herself useful in the farm-work--for which she was plainly unfit--or, failing that, in the housework. They had made up their minds about us, that we were persons of gentle blood, to whom all work must be derogatory.

The next day I insisted on climbing the slope to the pine-wood without support of her arm.

"It is time," said I, "that I grew strong; unless somewhere you are hiding a fairy purse."

She looked at me--for between us, by this time, one spoken word would be the key to a dozen unspoken. "You are not fit to start," she stammered hastily, "nor will be for a long while. There are mountains behind these, and again more mountains--" She broke off and sat down upon a pine-log, trembling.

"I was not thinking of that," said I; "but of these people and their hospitality. Since we have no money I must work for them--at least, until I can get money sent from England."

She glanced at me again, and with a shiver up at the snow peaks beyond the pines. I could read that she struggled with something, deep within her, and I waited. By-and-by she leaned forward, clasped her hands about her knee, and sat silent for a long minute, gazing southward over the plain at our feet.

"Listen," she said at length, but without turning her eyes. "I have something to confess to you." Her voice dragged upon the words; but she went on, "You have not asked me what has happened in Genoa after--that night. The snow covered up our footmarks and the blood--for you were bleeding all the way; but at our lodgings the actors were frightened out of their wits, and worse than ever when I told them what had happened to Marc'antonio and Stephanu. They would all be arrested, they declared; the Bank of Genoa had eyes all over the city. Nevertheless one of them showed great courage. It was that strange friend of yours, Messer' Badcock. My first thought was to get you down to the boat and slip away to sea; and he offered--he alone--first of all to make his way to the harbour and bring word if the coast (as he said) was clear. He went very cautiously, by way of a cellar leading under our house and the next, and opening on a back street--this, that his steps might not be traced to the front door; and it was well that he went, for on the quay, hiding behind a stack of timber, he saw two men in uniform posted at the head of the water-stairs. So he hastened back, using less caution, because by this time the snow had smoothed over his tracks, and was falling faster every moment. The actors had already begun to pack, and Messer' Fazio was running about in a twitter, albeit he declared that, beside themselves, not a soul in Genoa knew of his having lodged these Corsicans. Doubtless, however, his house would be searched in the morning, and the important, the pressing need was to get rid of us.

"In his haste he could think of nothing better than an old onion-loft, some sixty paces up the lane at the back. It was a store merely, not connected with any house, but owned by a rich merchant of the city who had acquired it for some debt and straightway forgotten all about it--at least, so Messer' Fazio declared. If we were discovered in hiding there, it could be explained that we had found it, and used it for a lodging, asking no man's leave; and suspicion would fall on no good citizen.

"I made sure that you were dying, and for myself I was past caring; so I thanked him and told him to do with us as he thought best. He and Messer' Badcock carried you out then, and I followed. The building was of two floors, with a door to each. A flight of steps led from the lane to the upper door, which was padlocked; and no one had used that way for twenty years, or so the landlord said. We entered by the lower door, which was broken--both hasp and hinge-- and led straight from the lane into a dirty cellar, worse than any cowshed and paved with mud. But from this a ladder rested against the wooden ceiling, and just above it was a plank that had worked loose. Messer' Fazio slipped the plank aside, and with great pains we carried you up through the opening and into the loft. I had bandaged your head so that we left no traces of blood in the lane or on the floor below. Then Messer' Fazio gathered up some onions which were strewn on the floor--I believe he had been drying them there on the sly--and took leave of us in a hurry. When he reached the bottom again, he carried away the ladder, declaring that it belonged to him.

"I had brought with me but a loaf of bread, a flask of milk, and one thing else--I will tell you what that was, by-and-by. I sat by you, waiting for you to die. When morning came I forced you to drink some of the milk. The loft was bitterly cold, and I wondered indeed that you were not dead.

"Towards evening I felt faint with hunger, and was gnawing a piece of my loaf, when a voice spoke up to me from below. It was a woman's voice, and I took it at first for Lauretta's--she was the girl, you remember, who played the confidante's part and such-like. But when I pulled the plank a little aside and looked down, I saw a girl unknown to me--until I recognized her for one of those who lived above the archway at the entrance of Messer' Fazio's court. Lauretta had told her, swearing her to be secret, and she was here in pity. She called herself Gioconda; and I bless her, for your sake.

"She fetched me bread, milk, and a little wine. But for her--for Messer' Fazio came never near us, and the actors, she told me, had decamped--we should both have perished. The cold lasted for ten days; I cannot tell how you endured it; but at the end of them I hoped you might recover, and with that I tried to think of some plan for escaping from Genoa. The worst was, I had no money. . . ."

The Princess paused, and shivered a little.

"That cold . . . it is in my bones yet. I feel as though the least touch of it now would kill me . . . and I want to live. Ah, my love, turn your eyes from me while I tell you what next I did! The crown . . . it belonged to Corsica. I had denied your right to it; but you had won it back from dishonour, and I remembered that in the band of it were jewels, the price of which might save you. Moreover, the little that kept us from starving came from--those women; and it was hateful to owe them even for a little bread. So I felt then. Afterwards--But you shall hear; only turn away your eyes. I prayed to the Virgin, but my prayers seemed to get no clear answer. . . . Then I pulled a staple from the wall, and with the point of it prised out one of the jewels, an amethyst. . . . I had spoken already to Gioconda. That evening she brought me one of her dresses, with shoes, stockings, and underskirt; a mirror, too, and brush and comb, with paints, powders, and black stuff for the eye-lashes, all in the same bundle, which she passed up through the floor. I dressed myself, painted my face, tired my hair, till I looked like even such a woman as Gioconda; and then, letting myself down at dark by a rope made of the sheet I drew from under you, I ran through the streets to the quarter of the merchants. La Gioconda had forgotten to pack a cloak in the bundle; the night was snowing, with snow underfoot; and I had run past the quays before the fear struck me that, at so late an hour, the jewellers would have closed their shops. But in the street behind the Dogano I found one open, and the jeweller asked no questions. It appeared that he was used to such women, and, having examined the stone through his magnifying-glass, he counted me out three hundred livres.

"I ran back, faster than I had come, and climbed to the loft, hand over hand, with the money weighing me down. It was in my mind to bribe one of the market-women, through Gioconda, to smuggle you out through the North Gate, under the baskets in her cart. But the day had scarcely broken before Gioconda came (and she had never come yet until evening) with terrible news. She said that I must count on her no more, for the accursed clericals (as she called them) had made interest with the Genoese Government to clear all the stews, and that she and her sisters by the gateway had orders to be quit of the city within twenty-four hours; in fact her sisters had begun to pack already, and the whole party would drive away, with their belongings, soon after night-fall. I asked her whither. 'To Milan,' she said; for at Turin the Church was even stronger and more bigoted than in Genoa.

"A new thought came to me then. I handed down my money to Gioconda, keeping back only a little, and prayed her to go to the woman, her mistress, and bargain with her to carry you out of the city, concealed beneath the furniture. The girl clapped her hands at the notion, and ran, but in an hour's time came creeping back in tears. The woman would have more money--even threatened to betray us unless I found her five hundred livres in all. . . .

"I borrowed Gioconda's shawl and sent her away, charging her to return before evening. Then I loosened another stone from the crown--a sardonyx--and again I went out through the streets to the jeweller's. It was worse now than by night, for the people stared, and certain men followed me. I took them for spies at first; but presently my stupid brain cleared, and I guessed for what they mistook me; and then I kept them at their distance, using such tricks as in Brussels I had seen the women use. . . ."

"O brave one! O beloved!"

I stretched out my hand, but she turned from the caress, and hurried on with her tale, her eyes still fastened on the distant plain, her voice held level on the tone of a child reciting its task.

"The jeweller, too, asked many questions. I think he was suspicious at my coming twice in a few hours. But the sardonyx was a finer stone than the amethyst, and he ended by giving me three hundred and fifty livres. Two of the men were loitering for me outside the shop. I gave them a false address and walked home quickly, longing to run but not daring. To mislead the men, in case they were following, I made first for the house by the archway, and there on the stairs I met the woman coming down with a bundle of stuff.

"I bargained with her, then and there. There was a horrible man belonging to the house, and at night-fall he fetched you, a little before the carts arrived; and this was not a minute too soon. For a crowd came with the carts. While the loading went on they stood around the door, calling out vile jokes, and afterwards they followed through the streets, waving torches and beating upon old pans. I sat in the second cart, among half a dozen women. My face was painted, and I smiled when they smiled. But you lay under the straw at my feet; and when the gate was passed, while the women were calling back insults to the soldiers there, I gave thanks to Our Lady.

"Beloved, that is my story. At Tortona I parted from the women, and hired the waggon which brought us the rest of the way. But I had done better, perhaps, to go with them to Milan, as Gioconda advised. For my money began to run low, and, save Milan, there was no large town on the road where I could sell another jewel. Yet here again Our Lady helped; for at Trecate I found the good priest, the brother of these Bavarelli, and he, having heard my tale, offered to travel to Milan and do my business. So I parted with two more of the stones; and yet a third--a little one--I gave him for Our Lady of Trecate, as a thank-offering. We have money enough to reward these good people, though they lodge us for yet another six months; but the crown has only one stone remaining. It is a diamond--set in the very front of the band--and, I think, more valuable than all the rest."

Her voice came to a halt. "O beloved," she asked after a while, quietly, almost desperately, "why are you silent? Can you not forgive?"

"Forgive?" I echoed. "Dear, I was silent, being lost in wonder, in love. Forget that foolish crown; forget even Corsica! Soon we will take the diamond and cross the mountains together, to a kingdom better than Corsica. There," I wound up, forcing myself to speak lightly, "if ever dispute should arise between us, as king and queen we will ask my uncle Gervase to decide. He, gallant man, will say, 'Prosper, to whom do you owe your life?' . . ."

"The mountains? Ah, not yet--not yet!" She put out her hands and crept to me blindly, nestling, pressing her face against my ragged coat. "A little while," she sobbed while I held her so. "A little while!--until the child--until our child--"

How can I write what yet remains to be written?

Our child was never born. So often, hand in hand, we had climbed to the pine-woods that it escaped my notice how she, who had used to be my support, came by degrees to lean on my arm. I saw her broken by fasting and vigil, and for me, I winced at the sound of her cough. The blood on her handkerchief accused me. "But we must wait until the child is born," I promised myself, "and the mountain air will quickly cure her." Fool! the good farm-people knew better. While I gained strength, day by day she was wasting. "Only let us cross the mountains," I prayed, "and at home all my life shall pay for her love!" Fool, again! She would never cross the mountains, now.

There came a day when I climbed the pine-wood alone. With my new strength, and because her weight was not on my arm, I climbed higher than usual; and then the noise of chopping drew me on to the upper edge of the forest, where I found Brother Polifilo with his sleeves rolled, hacking at a tree. He dropped his axe and stared at me, as at a ghost. I could not guess what perturbed him; for he had called at the farm but the day before and heard me boast of my new strength.

I sat down to watch him. But after a stroke or two his arm appeared to fail him, and he desisted. Without a word, almost without looking at me, he laid the axe over his shoulder and went up the path towards his chapel.

I gazed after him, wondering. Then, of a sudden, I understood.

Three days later she died. To the end they could not persuade me it was possible; nay at the very end, while she lay panting against my arm, I could not believe.

She died quietly--so quietly. A little before the end she had been restless, lying with a pucker on her brow, and eyes that asked pitiably for something--I could not guess what, until she turned them to the chair, over the back of which (for the day was sultry), I had tossed my coat.

I reached for the coat and slipped it on. Her eyes grew glad at once.

"Closer!" she whispered. As I bent closer, she nestled her face against it. "_La macchia! . . . la macchia!_"

With that last breath, drawing in the scent of it, she laid her head slowly back, and slept.

The Bavarelli took it for granted that I would bury her in the graveyard, down the valley. But I consulted with Brother Polifilo. I argued that every high mountain-top by its very nature came within the definition of consecrated ground; and after a show of reluctance he accepted the heresy, on condition I allowed him first to visit the spot chosen and recite the prayer of consecration over it.

We laid her in the coffin that Brother Polifilo brought, and carried her to the summit of the mountain overlooking the pass, where the rock had allowed us to dig the shallowest of graves. Beside it, when the coffin was covered, I said good-bye to the Bavarelli and dismissed them down the hill. They understood that I had yet a word to speak to the good monk.

"One thing remains," I said, and showed him the crown with the five empty settings, and the one diamond yet glittering in its band.

"Help me to build a cairn," said I.

So he helped me. We built a tall cairn, and I laid the crown within it.

The sun was setting as we laid the last stone in place. We walked in silence down to the pass, and there I shook hands with him by the little chapel, and received his blessing before setting my face northwards.

I dare say that he stood for a long while, watching me as I descended the curves of the road. But I never once looked back until I had crossed the valley, far below. The great peak rose behind me; and it seemed to me that on its summit a diamond shone amongst the stars. _

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