Max Pemberton

“ Even the peasants in their numbers scarce dare venture out upon the [139] hills when the sun has set and the howling of the wolves makes dismal music of the night. I, who know the passes as I know these waters, would as soon cast myself down from yonder campanile as put horses to my sleigh when the light of the sunshine is no longer upon the snow. For if I did so, then might I look to leave my bones upon the road—to be torn limb from limb by hungry beasts before the lamps of the village were lost to my view. Christine was aware of no such dangers. ”

“ Ugo is my friend, he has been good to me. I thought that we should be friends always, that he would take me to the great city; but when I was with him in the hut and he put his arm upon my neck and burnt my lips with kisses, I knew that it could never be, that God had meant it otherwise. Oh, his kisses hurt me; I shuddered at his touch—I, who wished to thank him and to be his friend. Herr Count, blame me not; we cannot give these things; we cannot love because we wish it. Do not send for him; let me be your servant always. I will work for you, I will serve you. ”

“ In the island it was different, excellency. We remain children of Italy, faithful sons of the Church; the old spirit of our past still breathes upon us the breath of freedom and of faith. But cross the mountains and all is changed. It is to pass from the West to the East; to leave a land where woman is the creature of reason and of affection for one where she is but a beast of burden and the slave of passion. ”

“ She had suffered bitterly—suffered from weakness and from solitude, from the regret of home and the loneliness of the hills. She had looked out across the mountains, and in her fancy had seen the cities and the men of her dreams lying beyond the ramparts and the eternal snows. That strange and haunting voice which often had bidden her in her childhood to rise up and look upon these things with her own eyes now returned and whispered to her that fortune lay beyond the heights. She had memories still of those early years when love and affection had been hers in a home beyond the seas. ”

“ The village, which stood then in the shelter of the bight, stands no longer; gardens bear flowers where swamps breathed out fever and pestilence; there are paths in the brushwood where then the foot of man could find no resting-place. Yet the island was a haven to many a cut-purse when Christine ran wild in it; and many an assassin turned to bless the dark places upon its heights. ”

“ I will lead where no soldier can follow. You do not fear, Christine?’
“‘I fear nothing, Ugo,’ she answered; ‘I have no time to think. Surely, they will not follow to the mountains!’
“‘Who can tell?’ cried he; ‘if they had known in the city yonder when I passed through, we had never heard the gate close behind us, sweetheart. They are devils, those Austrians, and hunt men like swine. Some day we shall have our hands upon their throats. ”

“ We are no children, you and I, and we do not play harlequin for fools to laugh. Why, then, should we not talk to each other as men that have a common desire? You are well aware that Alvise, the father of the man Ugo, bribed a corporal to report the lad as dead. I will not stop to point out to you how grave a crime you contemplated in permitting Christine to go to the altar with one who could never be a husband to her. For the sake of the woman’s soul, and for the eternal good of my master, I have acted as became a priest and a servant of Jesus Christ. ”

“ Even I, to whom the bark of a wolf is no more than the clatter of a pebble in a brook, found some comfort in the fact that I stood at the priest’s side, and was thus in the centre of the group. As for the pack in the thicket, it had become bolder at our halt, and we could now see the brutes, some snarling in the bushes at our side, some jumping before us from the wood to the road, and again from the road to the wood, others dogging our steps and waiting for that moment when one beast more bold than the rest should spring to the attack and a hundred should follow him. ”

“ I remember Christine—aye, God witness, I remember the day she came, the day she went. Her father was an Italian merchant of Zara; her mother was the daughter of a musician of Marseilles. They brought her to my city when she was a babe; she was seven years old when the fever struck them down and left her to the care of her half-brother, Nicolò Boldù. You have heard of Nicolò—nay, how should you have heard? He was one to be forgotten in his shame, a drunkard, and a lover of women. ”

“ The poor love the poor; and this man, who lived upon maize bread and ate meat only at the feasts, had spread upon his table a supper from which a noble would not have turned. Fresh sweet fruits, crisp loaves, a steaming dish of meat dressed with garlic, a dainty confection, a bottle of Chianti—these were the treasures he spread before their astonished eyes.
“‘Nay, Ugo, it is nothing,’ he answered to their words of wonder; ‘there is only one day in a man’s life when a fast comes ill—and this is thy day. Let thy wife eat and drink before there is sleep in her eyes. ”

“ Zol has told me often, excellency, that his only thought in all the fierce minutes of that terrible struggle was one of little Christine. ‘She will return to find my body here,’ he thought. Quick as he was, sure-footed, and with nerves of steel, he knew that he was no match for the woodlander’s son. Ugo had muscles like ropes of iron; a life lived in the mountains had broadened his chest and trained his limbs so that few even in his own village could stand against him. ”

“ The diamond ring—which was Count Paul’s first present to her—had served to pay their fare to the capital. He feared pursuit no longer; in his own way he felt himself the equal of his rival. His puny soul was filled with delight because this woman was his own to do with as he would.
“As for Christine, she walked like one from whom all life and hope had been snatched as by a sudden visitation of God. They speak in fables, excellency, of the difficulty we have to realise misfortune. Rather should they say that it is difficult to believe in the good things which come to us. ”

“ And now to speak of Christine’s relations with Count Paul. I have told you that she regards him as a father. She has reason to. He saved her life when she was perishing of hunger in the mountains. She thinks of him as a friend—it would be impossible for her to think of him otherwise, for he is twice her age—a gloomy man, living like a hermit in a house of gloom. It may be that she would have remained always at Jézero, but for the cruelty of the scoundrel Klun, who dragged her from her happiness that she might be his slave in this city. She was never a wife to him. ”

“ I had called him Barbarossa, though heaven knows he was neither Suabian nor renegade Greek of Mitylene, but an old sinner of Sebenico who chanced to have a yacht to let and a week to idle through.
“Shew your excellency the islands?” cried he, when I had made him the offer. “Madonna mia, there is no man in all the city that knows them so well! From Trieste to Cattaro I shall lead you with a handkerchief upon my eyes. [2] Hills and woods and cities—they are my children; the Adriatic—she is my daughter. Hasten to step in, excellency. God has been good to you in sending you to me.” ”

“ Women bejewelled and begowned to the limits of splendour, pretty girls in the galleries, courtesans flaunting in the circles, cast their flowers to the stage. The glitter of the gems, the flash of the countless lights, the clamour of the people, the changing lustre of colour—these, excellency, blinded my eyes and deafened my ears. For two hours had I sat in my little box trembling as one with the palsy for the success of Christine. ”

“ But while I say this of the man, it is difficult to speak of the new Christine I found in the château of Jajce. Oh, she was changed beyond words, signor. Five months had made a woman of her; had robbed her of none of the graces of her childhood, yet had added other graces to them. She was always a tall child; but she had grown since I had seen her, and now stood up almost to the shoulder of the Count. Her new dress, brought from Vienna; her new manner of speech, for they had taught her much German; her pretty airs, like the airs of a little princess, all became her exceedingly. ”

“ The boundless plains of Hungary, wearying the eye with their unmarked horizon, told her the more that she was utterly alone. The great city of Pesth, with its clatter of horses and its hum of men, dinned always in her ears a word of new foreboding. ‘For ever, for ever,’ she heard this alone of all the whirl of the city’s life. The very magnificence of building and of street terrified her. She cried in her heart for the woods of Zlarin and the desolation of her childish life. ”

“ Should he marry the daughter of a merchant of Zara—and that was how the world would hear of it—there would be a few to express surprise that he had not taken a wife from the salons of the capital, but none who would have the right to remonstrate. Nay, everything pointed to the one end—his loneliness, his care of the child, the anger he had shewn when she was in danger, his tenderness to her when she was in the carriage with him. ”

“ A man has not lived his life at forty. He will love again, and find an object more worthy. It may be even that I shall meet someone who will think it worth his while to deal with Ugo Klun. And if the lad were sent to the frontier, who can tell what would happen? Priests are priests, and have not men’s eyes. We of the world judge more justly. It is unlikely,’ I said, ‘that those at Jézero will think any more of old Andrea now that he has left them. He must be just to himself and watch patiently. ”

“ What should we do in Zlarin? Say rather that I shall take thee to the hut of Duka, and there get supper. Oh, we will have a merry supper, Christine! There is wine in the pack, and the meat which Dame Vitali cooked, and confections from the shop, and a lamp to light us and sheets for the bed. Madonna mia, I had thought of the hut often. It lies in the mountains like a kernel in a nut. It is the hut of Orio, the shepherd, and I have his word to take thee there. To-night we rest there ”

“ My head was too full of the saying ‘He lives,’ my heart burnt too fiercely with anger and with regret of the present, to permit reflection upon the future. This only was I determined upon—that neither the Count nor Christine should learn of that which I had seen. ‘Perchance,’ I said, ‘fear will keep him to the mountains; perchance he will not find courage to claim what right he has. And if he does, then God help him, for I will strike him down with my own hand!’
“The month which followed upon this dreadful [163] night, excellency, was one that time will never obliterate from my memory. ”

“ From wood to wood they skulked—scores, nay hundreds, of the famished beasts; and their howling was [141] like a very dirge of the dead. Mournfully, weirdly, now with a ferocity which chilled the heart, now long-drawn as the sighs of damned spirits, the haunting wail went up. That was a heavy winter—a winter when the frost made the hills like domes of iron; when the snow lay heavy and deep upon the grass; when the cattle died in the fields and the bears came down even to the gardens of the houses. ”

“ The strength of the old passion filled her veins and made her brain burn. She went through the rehearsal of the morning hearing nothing, seeing nothing, giving no heed to the scene about her. ‘He has come for love of me’ was the entrancing thought which conquered all other [250] thoughts, of prudence or of fear. She longed to run to her lover’s arms, to kneel by his side as she used to kneel, to know that here was her haven from the storm of life. The remonstrances of the conductor, the anger of the stage manager, fell lightly upon her ears. ”

“ If we, fifteen good men, with torches to light us and guns in our hands, must press together to turn the peril from our path, how, I asked, had it fared with an unarmed girl knowing nothing of the peril or the road. One hope only I had, and it was this—that Christine had passed through the wood while it was yet daylight, and had taken shelter ultimately in the village lying between the great house and Jajce. Yet I knew that this was unlikely; and it was ever in my head that the child had perished already, and that we must go to the Count with the story of her death in our mouths. ”

“ For the matter of that, the lad was one of those affectionate, big-hearted boys who make friends with all the world; he had followed little Christine like a dog since the day he first set eyes upon her at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires. He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her pictures were everywhere in his rooms. He used to dress with one at the right hand of his mirror. His first waking act was to touch with his lips a little photograph of her hung above his bed. ”

“ Ah, she is a queen of the hills, a white city of the mountains; her minarets rise up abundantly like silver spires above the unsurpassable green of the heights; she listens ever to the foam of the great cascade which thunders at her gates ”

“ Is there not something in every life which it is happiness to forget? And I have so much to remember here, so much to learn, so much to repay. The day has not hours enough for all that I would do to tell Count Paul of my gratitude.’
“‘He speaks, then, of keeping you at the château?’
“‘He has said so from the first, though the priest wishes him to send me to a convent in Vienna. It is dreadful when he contradicts Father Mark, Andrea. You see, one does not learn much in the woods of Zlarin. But I work every day, and they are very kind, and the Count is patient, and I am never to leave them. ”