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Bog-Myrtle and Peat

by S. R. Crockett · English · Gutenberg #13667 · 658,483 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bog-Myrtle and Peat

Author: S. R. Crockett


        
Release date: October 7, 2004 [eBook #13667]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT ***

BOG-MYRTLE AND PEAT

TALES CHIEFLY OF GALLOWAY

GATHERED FROM THE YEARS 1889 TO 1895, BY

S.R. CROCKETT

LONDON

BLISS, SANDS AND FOSTER
15 CRAVEN STREET, STRAND
MDCCCXCV




  _Inscribed with the Name of
  George Milner of Manchester,
  a Man most Generous, Brave, True,
  to whom, because he freely gave me That of His
  which I the most desired--
  I, having Nothing worthier to give,
  Give This_.




KENMURE

1715


  "The heather's in a blaze, Willie,
    The White Rose decks the tree,
  The Fiery-Cross is on the braes,
    And the King is on the sea.

  "Remember great Montrose, Willie,
    Remember fair Dundee,
  And strike one stroke at the foreign foes
    Of the King that's on the sea.

  "There's Gordons in the North, Willie,
    Are rising frank and free,
  Shall a Kenmure Gordon not go forth
    For the King that's on the sea?

  "A trusty sword to draw, Willie,
    A comely weird to dree,
  For the royal Rose that's like the snaw,
    And the King that's on the sea!"

  He cast ae look upon his lands,
    Looked over loch and lea,
  He took his fortune in his hands,
    For the King was on the sea.

  Kenmures have fought in Galloway
    For Kirk and Presbyt'rie,
  This Kenmure faced his dying day,
    For King James across the sea.

  It little skills what faith men vaunt,
    If loyal men they be
  To Christ's ain Kirk and Covenant,
    Or the King that's o'er the sea.

  ANDREW LANG.




CONTENTS


BOOK FIRST. ADVENTURES

  I. THE MINISTER OF DOUR
 II. A CRY ACROSS THE BLACK WATER
III. SAINT LUCY OF THE EYES
 IV. UNDER THE RED TERROR
  V. THE CASE OF JOHN ARNISTON'S CONSCIENCE
 VI. THE GLISTERING BEACHES


BOOK SECOND. INTIMACIES

  I. THE LAST ANDERSON OF DEESIDE
 II. A SCOTTISH SABBATH DAY
III. THE COURTSHIP OF TAMMOCK THAKANRAIP, AYRSHIREMAN
 IV. THE OLD TORY
  V. THE GREAT RIGHT-OF-WAY CASE
 VI. DOMINIE GRIER
VII. THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER


BOOK THIRD. HISTORIES

  I. FENWICK MAJOR'S LITTLE 'UN
 II. MAC'S ENTERIC FEVER
III. THE COLLEGING OF SIMEON GLEG
 IV. KIT KENNEDY, NE'ER-DO-WELL
  V. THE BACK O' BEYONT
 VI. NORTH TO THE ARCTIC


BOOK FOURTH. IDYLLS

  I. ACROSS THE MARCH DYKE
 II. A FINISHED YOUNG LADY
III. THE LITTLE LAME ANGEL


BOOK FIFTH. TALES OF THE KIRK

  I. THE MINISTER-EMERITUS
 II. A MINISTER'S DAY
III. THE MINISTER'S LOON
 IV. THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN INEFFICIENT
  V. JOHN
 VI. EUROCLYDON OF THE RED HEAD
VII. THE CAIRN EDWARD KIRK MILITANT


EPILOGUE: IN PRAISE OF GALLOWAY

NIGHT IN THE GALLOWAY WOODS
BIRDS AT NIGHT
THE COMING OF THE DAWN
FLOOD-TIDE OF NIGHT
WAY FOR THE SUN
THE EARLY BIRD
FULL CHORUS
THE BUTCHER'S BOY OF THE WOODS
THE DUST OF BATTLE
COMES THE DAY




_PREFACE_


_There is a certain book of mine which no publisher has paid royalty
upon, which has never yet been confined in spidery lines upon any paper,
a book that is nevertheless the Book of my Youth, of my Love, and of my
Heart_.

_There never was such a book, and in the chill of type certainly there
never will be. It has, so far as I know, no title, this unpublished book
of mine. For it would need the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds
crusted on ivory to set the title of this book_.

_Mostly I see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to
the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for
about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a
little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an
impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics,
the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I
read. Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some
bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly. All are expressed
in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem
which would give me deathless fame--could I, alas! but remember_.

_Then the morning comes, and with the first red I awake to a sense of
utter loss and bottomless despair. Once more I have clutched and missed
and forgotten. It is gone from me. The imagination of my heart is left
unto me desolate. Sometimes indeed when a waking bird--by preference a
mavis--sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward
out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one
stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the
brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the
adorable refrain_.

_Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and
summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now
remember that the mystic name is "The Book Sealed." Sometimes in these
dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the
clasps. I touch the binding wax of the seals. When the first rosy
fingers of the dawn point upward to the zenith with the sunlight behind
them, sanguine like a maid's hand held before a lamp, I catch a farewell
glimpse of the hidden pages_.

_Tales, not poems, are written upon them now. I hear the voices of "Them
Ones," as Irish folk impressively say of the Little People, telling me
tales out of the Book Sealed, tales which in the very hearing make a man
blush hotly and thrill with hopes mysterious. Such stories as they are!
The romances of high young blood, of maidens' winsome purity and frank
disdain, of strong men who take their lives in hand and hurl themselves
upon the push of pikes. And though I cannot grasp more than a hint of
the plot, yet as my feet swish through the dewy swathes of the hyacinths
or crisp along the frost-bitten snow, a wild thought quickens within me
into a belief, that one day I shall hear them all, and tell these tales
for my very own so that the world must listen_.

_But as the rosy fingers of the morn melt and the broad day fares forth,
the vision fades, and I who saw and heard must go and sit down to my
plain saltless tale. Once I wrote a book, every word of it, in the open
air. It was full of the sweet things of the country, so at least as they
seemed to me. I saw the hens nestle sleepily in the holes of the
bank-side where the dry dust is, and so I wrote it down. I heard the
rain drum on the broad leaves over my head, and I wrote that down also.
Day after day I rose and wrote in the dawn, and sometimes I seemed to
recapture a leaf or a passing glance of a chapter-heading out of the
Book Sealed. It came back to me how the girls were kissed and love was
made in the days when the Book Sealed was the Book Open, and when I
cared not a jot for anything that was written therein. So as well as I
could I wrote these things down in the red dawn. And so till the book
was done_.

_Then the day comes when the book is printed and bound, and when the
critics write of it after their kind, things good and things evil. But I
that have gathered the fairy gold dare not for my life look again
within, lest it should be even as they say, and I should find but
withered leaves therein. For the sake of the vision of the breaking day
and the incommunicable hope, I shall look no more upon it. But ever with
the eternal human expectation, I rise and wait the morning and the final
opening of the "Book Sealed_."

S.R. CROCKETT.




_NOTE_.


_I am deeply in the debt of my friend, Mr. Andrew Lang, for the ballad
of 'Kenmure' which he has written to grace my bare boards and spice the
plain fare here set out in honour of the ancient Free Province_.




BOOK FIRST

ADVENTURES


  _Lo, in the dance the wine-drenched coronal
  From shoulder white and golden hair doth fall!
  A-nigh his breast each youth doth hold an head,
  Twin flushing cheeks and locks unfilleted;
  Swifter and swifter doth the revel move
  Athwart the dim recesses of the grove ...
  Where Aphrodite reigneth in her prime,
  And laughter ringeth all the summer time_.

  _There hemlock branches make a languorous gloom,
  And heavy-headed poppies drip perfume
  In secret arbours set in garden close;
  And all the air, one glorious breath of rose,
  Shakes not a dainty petal from the trees.
  Nor stirs a ripple on the Cyprian seas_.

  "_The Choice of Herakles_."




I

THE MINISTER OF DOUR

  _This window looketh towards the west,
    And o'er the meadows grey
  Glimmer the snows that coldly crest
    The hills of Galloway_.

  _The winter broods on all between--
    In every furrow lies;
  Nor is there aught of summer green,
    Nor blue of summer skies_.

  _Athwart the dark grey rain-clouds flash
    The seabird's sweeping wings,
  And through the stark and ghostly ash
    The wind of winter sings_.

  _The purple woods are dim with rain,
    The cornfields dank and bare;
  And eyes that look for golden grain
    Find only stubble there_.

  _And while I write, behold the night
    Comes slowly blotting all,
  And o'er grey waste and meadow bright
    The gloaming shadows fall_.

  "_From Two Windows_."


The wide frith lay under the manse windows of the parish of Dour. The
village of Dour straggled, a score of white-washed cottages, along four
hundred yards of rocky shore. There was a little port, to attempt which
in a south-west wind was to risk an abrupt change of condition. This was
what made half of the men in the parish of Dour God-fearing men. The
other half feared the minister.

Abraham Ligartwood was the minister. He also feared God exceedingly, but
he made up for it by not regarding man in the slightest. The manse of
Dour was conspicuously set like a watch-tower on a hill--or like a
baron's castle above the huts of his retainers. The fishermen out on the
water made it their lighthouse. The lamp burned in the minister's study
half the night, and was alight long ere the winter sun had reached the
horizon.

Abraham Ligartwood would have been a better man had he been less
painfully good. When he came to the parish of Dour he found that he had
to succeed a man who had allowed his people to run wild. Dour was a
garden filled with the degenerate fruit of a strange vine.

The minister said so in the pulpit. Dour smiled complacently, and
considered that its hoary wickednesses would beat the minister in the
long-run. But Dour did not at that time know the minister. It was the
day of the free-traders. The traffic with the Isle of Man, whence the
hardy fishermen ran their cargoes of Holland gin and ankers of French
brandy, put good gear on the back of many a burgher's wife, and porridge
into the belly of many a fisherman's bairn.

The new minister found all this out when he came. He did not greatly
object. It was, he said, no part of his business to collect King
George's dues. But he did object when the running of a vessel's cargo
became the signal for half his parishioners settling themselves to a
fortnight of black, solemn, evil-hearted drinking. He said that he would
break up these colloguings. He would not have half the wives in the
parish coming to his kirk with black eyes upon the Lord's Sabbath day.

The parish of Dour laughed. But the parish of Dour was to get news of
the minister, for Abraham Ligartwood was not a man to trifle with.

One night there was a fine cargo cleanly run at Port Saint Johnston, the
village next to Dour. It was got as safely off. The "lingtowmen" went
out, and there was the jangling of hooked chains along all the shores;
then the troll of the smugglers' song as the cavalcade struck inwards
through the low shore-hills for the main free-trade route to Edinburgh
and Glasgow. The king's preventive men had notice, and came down as
usual three hours late. Then they seized ten casks of the best Bordeaux,
which had been left for the purpose on the sand. They were able and
intelligent officers--in especial the latter. And they had an acute
perception of the fact that if their bread was to be buttered on both
sides, it were indeed well not to let it fall.

This cargo-running and seizures were all according to rule, and the
minister of Dour had nothing to say. But at night seventeen of his kirk
members in good standing and fourteen adherents met at the Back Spital
of Port Dour to drink prosperity to the cargo which had been safely run.
There was an elder in the chair, and six unbroached casks on a board in
the corner.

There was among those who assembled some word of scoffing merriment at
the expense of the minister. Abraham Ligartwood had preached a sermon on
the Sabbath before, which each man, as the custom was, took home and
applied to his neighbour.

"Ay man, Mains, did ye hear what the minister said aboot ye? O man, he
was sair on ye!"

"Hoot na, Portmark, it was yersel' he was hittin' at, and the black e'e
ye gied Kirsty six weeks syne."

But when the first keg was on the table, and the men, each with his
pint-stoup before him, had seated themselves round, there came a
knocking at the door--loud, insistent, imperious. Each man ran his hand
down his side to the loaded whip or jockteleg (the smuggler's
sheath-knife) which he carried with him.

But no man was in haste to open the door. The red coats of King George's
troopers might be on the other side. For no mere gauger or preventive
man would have the assurance to come chapping on Portmark's door in that
fashion.

"Open the door in the name of Most High God!" cried a loud, solemn voice
they all knew. The seventeen men and an elder quaked through all their
inches; but none moved. Writs from the authority mentioned did not run
in the parish of Dour.

The fourteen adherents fled underneath the table like chickens in a
storm.

"Then will I open it in my own name!" Whereon followed a crash, and the
two halves of the kitchen door sprang asunder with great and sudden
noise. Abraham Ligartwood came in.

The men sat awed, each man wishful to creep behind his neighbour.

The minister's breadth of shoulder filled up the doorway completely, so
that there was not room for a child to pass. He carried a mighty staff
in his hand, and his dark hair shone through the powder which was upon
it. His glance swept the gathering. His eye glowed with a sparkle of
such fiery wrath that not a man of all the seventeen and an elder, was
unafraid. Yet not of his violence, but rather of the lightnings of his
words. And above all, of his power to loose and to bind. It is a
mistaken belief that priestdom died when they spelled it Presbytery.

The comprehensive nature of the anathema that followed--spoken from the
advantage of the doorway, with personal applications to the seventeen
individuals and the elder--cannot now be recalled; but scraps of that
address are circulated to this day, mostly spoken under the breath of
the narrator.

"And you, Portmark," the minister is reported to have said, "with your
face like the moon in harvest and your girth like a tun of Rhenish, gin
ye turn not from your evil ways, within four year ye shall sup with the
devil whom ye serve. Have ye never a word to say, ye scorners of the
halesome word, ye blaspheming despisers of doctrine? Your children shall
yet stand and rebuke you in the gate. Heard ye not my word on the
Sabbath in the kirk? Dumb dogs are ye every one! Have ye not a word to
say? There was a brave gabble of tongues enough when I came in. Are ye
silent before a man? How, then, shall ye stand in That Day?"

The minister paused for a reply. But no answer came.

"And you, Alexander Kippen, puir windlestrae, the Lord shall thresh ye
like ill-grown corn in the day of His wrath. Ye are hardly worth the
word of rebuke; but for mine office I wad let ye slip quick to hell! The
devil takes no care of you, for he is sure of ye!"

The minister advanced, and with the iron-pointed shod of his staff drove
in the bung of the first keg. Then there arose a groan from the
seventeen men who sat about. Some of them stood up on their feet. But
the minister turned on them with such fearsome words, laying the ban of
anathema on them, that their hearts became as water and they sat down.
The good spirit gurgled and ran, and deep within them the seventeen men
groaned for the pity of it.

Thus the minister broke up the black drinkings. And the opinion of the
parish was with him in all, except as to the spilling of the liquor.
Rebuke and threatening were within his right, but to pour out the spirit
was a waste even in a minister.

"It is the destruction of God's good creature!" said the parish of Dour.

But the minister held on his way. The communion followed after, and
Abraham Ligartwood had, as was usual, three days of humiliation and
prayer beforehand. Then he set himself to "fence the tables." He stated
clearly who had a right to come forward to the table of the Lord, and
who were to be debarred. He explained personally and exactly why it was
that each defaulter had no right there. As he went on, the congregation,
one after another, rose astonished and terrified and went out, till
Abraham Ligartwood was left alone with the elements of communion. Every
elder and member had left the building, so effective had been the
minister's rebuke.

At this the parish of Dour seethed with rebellion. Secret cabals in
corners arose, to be scattered like smoke-drift by the whisper that the
minister was coming. Deputations were chosen, and started for the manse
full of courage and hardihood. Portmark, as the man who smarted sorest,
generally headed them; and by the aid of square wide-mouthed bottles of
Hollands, it was possible to get the members as far as the foot of the
manse loaning. But beyond that they would not follow Portmark's leading,
nor indeed that of any man. The footfall of the minister of Dour as he
paced alone in his study chilled them to the bone.

They told one another on the way home how Ganger Patie, of the black
blood of the gypsy Marshalls, finding his occupation gone, cursed the
minister on Glen Morrison brae; but broke neck-bone by the sudden fright
of his horse and his own drunkenness at the foot of the same brae on his
home-coming. They said that the minister had prophesied that in the spot
where Ganger Patie had cursed the messenger of God, even there God would
enter into judgment with him. And they told how the fair whitethorn
hedge was blasted for ten yards about the spot where the Death Angel had
waited for the blasphemer. There were four men who were willing to give
warrandice that their horses had turned with them and refused to pass
the place.

So the parish was exceedingly careful of its words to the minister. It
left him severely alone. He even made his own porridge in the
wide-sounding kitchen of the gabled manse, on the hill above the
harbour. He rang with his own hands the kirk-bell on the Sabbath morn.
But none came near the preachings. There was no child baptized in the
parish of Dour; and no wholesome diets of catechising, where old and
young might learn the Way more perfectly.

Mr. Ligartwood's brethren spoke to him and pled with him to use milder
courses; but all in vain. In those days the Pope was not so autocratic
in Rome as a minister in his own parish.

"They left me of their own accord, and of their own accord shall they
return," said Abraham Ligartwood.

But in the fall of the year the White Death came to Dour. They say that
it came from the blasted town of Kirk Oswald, where the plague had been
all the summer. The men of the landward parishes set a watch on all that
came out of the accursed streets. But in the night-time men with laden
horses ran the blockade, for the prices to be obtained within were like
those in a besieged city.

Some said that it was the farmer of Portmark who had done this thing
once too often. At least it is sure that it was to his house that the
Death first came in the parish of Dour. At the sound of the shrill
crying, of which they every one knew the meaning, men dropped their
tools in the field and fled to the hills. It was like the Day of
Judgment. The household servants disappeared. Hired men and
field-workers dispersed like the wave from a stone in a pool, carrying
infection with them. Men fell over at their own doors with the rattle in
their throats, and there lay, none daring to touch them. In Kirk Oswald
town the grass grew in the vennels and along the High Street. In Dour
the horses starved in the stables, the cattle in the byres.

Then came Abraham Ligartwood out of the manse of Dour. He went down to
the farm towns and into the village huts and lifted the dead. He
harnessed the horse in the cart, and swathed the body in sheets. He dug
the graves, and laid the corpse in the kindly soil. He nursed the sick.
He organised help everywhere. He went from house to stricken house with
the high assured words of a messenger fresh from God.

He let out the horses to the pasture. He milked the kine, that bellowed
after him with the plague of their milk. He had thought and hands for
all. His courage shamed the cowards. He quickened the laggards. He
stilled the agony of fear that killed three for every one who died of
the White Death.

For the first time since the minister came to Dour, the kirk-bell did
not ring on Sabbath, for the minister was at the other end of the parish
setting a house in order whence three children had been carried. In the
kirkyard there was the dull rattle of sods. The burying-party consisted
of the roughest rogues in the parish, whom the minister had fetched from
their hiding-holes in the hills.

Up the long roads that led to the kirk on its windy height the scanty
funerals wended their way. For three weeks they say that in the
kirkyard, from dawn to dusk, there was always a grave uncovered or a
funeral in sight. There was no burial service in the kirkyard save the
rattle of the clods; for now the minister had set the carpenters to
work and coffins were being made. But the minister had prayer in all the
houses ere the dead was lifted.

Then he went off to lay hot stones to the feet of another, and to get a
nurse for yet another. For twenty days he never slept and seldom ate,
till the plague was stayed.

The last case was on the 27th of September. Then Abraham Ligartwood
himself was stricken in one of the village hovels, and fell forward
across a sick man's bed. They carried him to the manse of Dour, and wept
as they went. The next day all the men that were alive in the parish of
Dour stood about the minister's grave in the kirkyard on the hill. There
was none there that could pray. But as they were about to separate, some
one, it was never known who, raised the tune of the first Psalm. And the
wind wafted to the weeping wives in the cottages of the stricken parish
of Dour the sound of the hoarse and broken singing of men. In three
weeks the minister had brought the evil parish of Dour into the presence
of God.

And these were the words of their singing, while the gravediggers stood
with the red earth ready on their spades, but before a clod fell on the
minister's grave:--

  "That man hath perfect blessedness
    Who walketh not astray
  In counsel of ungodly men,
    Nor stands in sinners' way,
  Nor sitteth in the scorner's chair;
    But placeth his delight
  Upon God's law, and meditates
    On his law day and night."

The new minister who succeeded had an easy time and a willing people.
But he can never be to them what Abraham Ligartwood was. They graved on
his tomb, and that with good cause, the words, "Here lyes a Man who
never feared the face of Man."

  _The lovers are whispering under thy shade,
          Grey Tower of Dalmeny!
  I leave them and wander alone in the glade
          Beneath thee, Dalmeny.
  Their thoughts are of all the bright years coming on,
  But mine are of days and of dreams that are gone;
  They see the fair flowers Spring has thrown on the grass,
  And the clouds in the blue light their eyes as they pass;
  But my feet are deep dawn in a drift of dead leaves,
  And I hear what they hear not--a lone bird that grieves.
  What matter? the end is not far for us all,
  And spring, through the summer, to winter must fall,
  And the lovers' light hearts, e'en as mine, will be laid,
  At last, and for ever, low under thy shade,
          Grey Tower of Dalmeny_.

  GEORGE MILNER.




II

A CRY ACROSS THE BLACK WATER

  _With Rosemary for remembrance,
                 And Rue, sweet Rue, for you_.


It was at the waterfoot of the Ken, and the time of the year was June.

"Boat ahoy!"

The loud, bold cry carried far through the still morning air. The rain
had washed down all that was in the sky during the night, so that the
hail echoed through a world blue and empty.

Gregory Jeffray, a noble figure of a youth, stood leaning on the arch of
his mare's neck, quieting the nervous tremors of Eulalie, that very
dainty lady. His tall, alert figure, tight-reined and manly, was brought
out by his riding-dress. His pose against the neck of the beautiful
beast, from which a moment before he had swung himself, was that of
Hadrian's young Antinous.

"Boat ahoy!"

Gregory Jeffray, growing a little impatient, made a trumpet of his
hands, and sent the powerful voice, with which one day he meant to
thrill listening senates, sounding athwart the dancing ripples of the
loch.

On the farther shore was a flat white ferry-boat, looking, as it lay
motionless in the river, like a white table chained in the water with
its legs in the air. The chain along which it moved plunged into the
shallows beside him, and he could see it descending till he lost it in
the dusky pool across which the ferry plied. To the north, Loch Ken ran
in glistening levels and island-studded reaches to the base of
Cairnsmuir.

"Boat ahoy!"

A figure, like a white mark of exclamation moving over green paper, came
out of the little low whitewashed cottage opposite, and stood a moment
looking across the ferry, with one hand resting on its side and the
other held level with the eyes. Then the observer disappeared behind a
hedge, to be seen immediately coming down the narrow, deep-rutted lane
towards the ferry-boat. When the figure came again in sight of Gregory
Jeffray, he had no difficulty in distinguishing a slim girl, clad in
white, who came sedately towards him.

When she arrived at the white boat which floated so stilly on the
morning glitter of the water, only just stirred by a breeze from the
south, she stepped at once on board. Gregory could see her as she took
from the corner of the flat, where it stood erect along with other
boating gear, something which looked like a short iron hoe. With this
she walked to the end of the boat nearest him. She laid the hoe end of
the instrument against a chain that ran breast-high along one side of
the boat and at the stern plunged diagonally into the water. His mare
lifted her feet impatiently, as though the shoreward end of the chain
had brought a thrill across the loch from the moving ferry-boat. Turning
her back to him, the girl bent her slim young body without an effort;
and, as though by the gentlest magic, the ferry-boat drew nearer to him.
It did not seem to move; yet gradually the space of blue water between
it and the shore on which the whitewashed cottage stood spread and
widened. He could hear the gentle clatter of the wavelets against the
lip of the landing-drop as the boat came nearer. His mare tossed her
head and snuffed at this strange four-footed thing that glided towards
them.

Gregory, who loved all women, watched with natural interest the sway and
poise of the girlish figure. He heard the click and rattle of the chain
as she deftly disengaged her gripper-iron at the farther end, and,
turning, walked the deck's length towards him.

She seemed but a young thing to move so large a boat. He forgot to be
angry at being kept so long waiting, for of all women, he told himself,
he most admired tall girls in simple dresses. His exceptional interest
arose from the fact that he had never before seen one manage a
ferry-boat.

As he stood on the shore, and the great flat boat moved towards him, he
saw that the end of it nearest him was pulled up a couple of feet clear
of the water. Still the boat moved noiselessly forward, till he heard it
first grate and then ground gently, as the graceful pilot bore her
weight upon the iron bar to stay its progress. Gregory specially admired
the flex of her arms bent outwardly as she did so. Then she went to the
end of the boat, and let down the tilted gangway upon the pebbles at his
feet.

Gregory Jeffray instinctively took off his hat as he said to this girl,
"Good-morning! Can I get to the village of Dullarg by this ferry?"

"This is the way to the Dullarg," said the girl, simply and naturally,
leaning as she spoke upon her dripping gripper-iron.

Her eyes did not refuse to take in the goodliness of the youth while his
attention was for the moment given to his mare.

"Gently, gently, lass!" he said, patting the neck which arched
impatiently as she felt the boards hollow beneath her feet. Yet she
came obediently enough on deck, arching her fore-feet high and throwing
them out in an uncertain and tentative manner.

Then the girl, with a quiet and matter-of-fact acceptance of her duties,
placed her iron once more upon the chain, and bent herself to the task
with well-accustomed effort of her slender body.

The heart of the young man was stirred within him. True, he might have
beheld fifty field-wenches breaking their backs among the harvest
sheaves without a pang. This, however, was very different.

"Let me help you," he said.

"It is better that you stand by your horse," she said.

Gregory Jeffray looked disappointed.

"Is it not too hard work for you?" he queried, humbly and with abased
eyes.

"No," said the girl. "Ye see, sir, I live with my mother's two sisters
at the boathouse. They are very kind to me. They brought me up, though I
had neither father nor mother. And what signifies bringing the boat
across the Water a time or two?"

Her ready and easy movements told the tale for her. She needed no pity.
She asked for none, for which Gregory was rather sorry. He liked to pity
people, and then to right their grievances, if it were not very
difficult. Of what use otherwise was it to be, what he was called in
Galloway, the "Boy Sheriff"? Besides, he was taking a morning ride from
the Great House of the Barr, and upon his return to breakfast he desired
to have a tale to tell which would rivet attention upon himself.

"And do you do nothing all day, but only take the boat to and fro across
the loch?" he asked.

He saw the way clear now, he thought, to matter for an interesting
episode--the basis of which should be the delight of a beautiful girl
in spending her life in the carrying of desirable young men, riding upon
horses, over the shining morning waters of the Ken. They should all look
with eyes of wonder upon her; but she, the cold Dian of the lochside,
would never return look for look to any of them, save perhaps to Gregory
Jeffray. Gregory went about the world finding pictures and making
romances for himself. He meant to be a statesman; and, with this purpose
in view, it was wholly necessary for him to study the people, and
especially, he might have added, the young women of the people. Hitherto
he had done this chiefly in his imagination, but here certainly was
material attractive to his hand.

"Do you work at nothing else?" he repeated, for the girl was
uncomplimentarily intent upon her gripper-iron. How deftly she lifted it
just at the right moment, when it was in danger of being caught upon the
revolving wheel! How exactly she exerted just the right amount of
strength to keep the chain running sweetly upon its cogs! How daintily
she stepped back, avoiding the dripping of the water from the linked
iron which rose from the bed of the loch, passed under her hand, and
dipped diagonally down again into the deeps! Gregory had never seen
anything like it, so he told himself.

It was not until he had put his question the third time that the girl
answered, "Whiles I take the boat over to the waterfoot when there's a
cry across the Black Water."

The young man was mystified.

"'A cry across the Black Water!' What may that be?" he said.

The girl looked at him directly almost for the first time. Was he making
fun of her? She wondered. His face seemed earnest enough, and handsome.
It was not possible, she concluded.

"Ye'll be a stranger in these parts?" she answered interrogatively,
because she was a Scottish girl, and one question for another is good
national barter and exchange.

Gregory Jeffray was about to declare his names, titles, and
expectations; but he looked at the girl again, and saw something that
withheld him.

"Yes," he said, "I am staying for a week or two over at Barr."

The boat grounded on the pebbles, and the girl went to let down the
hinged end. It had seemed a very brief passage to Gregory Jeffray. He
stood still by his mare, as though he had much more to say.

The girl placed her cleek in the corner, and moved to leave the boat. It
piqued the young man to find her so unresponsive. "Tell me what you mean
by 'a cry across the Black Water,'" he said.

The girl pointed to the strip of sullen blackness that lay under the
willows upon the southern shore.

"That is the Black Water of Dee," she said simply, "and the green point
among the trees is the Rhonefoot. Whiles there's a cry from there. Then
I go over in the boat, and set them across."

"Not in this boat?" he said, looking at the upturned deal table swinging
upon its iron chain.

She smiled at his ignorance.

"That is the boat that goes across the Black Water of Dee," she said,
pointing to a small boat which lay under the bank on the left.

"And do you never go anywhere else?" he asked, wondering how she came by
her beauty and her manners.

"Only to the kirk on the Sabbaths," she said, "when I can get some one
to watch the boat for me."

"I will watch the boat for you!" he said impulsively.

The girl looked distressed. This gay gentleman was making fun of her,
assuredly. She did not answer. Would he never go away?

"That is your way," she said, pointing along the track in front. Indeed,
there was but one way, and the information was superfluous.

The end of the white, rose-smothered boathouse was towards them. A tall,
bowed woman's figure passed quickly round the gable.

"Is that your aunt?" he asked.

"That is my aunt Annie," said the girl; "my aunt Barbara is confined to
her bed."

"And what is your name, if I may ask?"

The girl glanced at him. He was certainly not making fun of her now.

"My name is Grace Allen," she said.

They paced together up the path. The bridle rein slipped from his arm,
but his hand instinctively caught it, and Eulalie cropped crisply at the
grasses on the bank, unregarded of her master.

They did not shake hands when they parted, but their eyes followed each
other a long way.

"Where is the money?" said Aunt Barbara from her bed as Grace Allen came
in at the open door.

"Dear me!" said the girl, frightened: "I have forgotten to ask him for
it!"

"Did I ever see sic a lassie! Rin after him an' get it; haste ye fast."

But Gregory was far out of reach by the time Grace got to the door. The
sound of hoofs came from high up the wooded heights.

Gregory Jeffray reached the Barr in time for late breakfast. There was a
large house company. The men were prowling discontentedly about, looking
under covers or cutting slices from dishes on the sideboard; but the
ladies were brightly curious, and eagerly welcomed Gregory. He at least
did not rise with a headache and a bad temper every morning. They
desired an account of his morning's ride. But on the way home he had
changed his mind about telling of his adventure. He said that he had had
a pleasant ride. It had been a beautiful morning.

"But have you nothing whatever to tell us?" they asked; for, indeed,
they had a right to expect something.

Gregory said nothing. This was not usual, for at other times when he had
nothing to tell, it did not cost him much to invent something
interesting.

"You are very dull this morning, Sheriff," said the youngest daughter of
the house, who, being the baby and pretty, had grown pettishly
privileged in speech.

But deep within him Gregory was saying, "What a blessing that I forgot
to pay the ferry!"

When he got outside he said to his host, "Is there such a place
hereabouts as the Rhonefoot?"

"Why, yes, there is," said Laird Cunningham of Barr. "But why do you
ask? I thought a Sheriff would know everything without asking--even an
ornamental one on his way to the Premiership."

"Oh, I heard the name," said Gregory. "It struck me as a curious one."

So that evening there came over the river from the Waterfoot of the
Rhone the sound of a voice calling. Grace Allen sat thoughtfully looking
out of the rose-hung window of the boathouse. Her face was an oval of
perfect curve, crowned with a mass of light brown hair, in which were
red lights when the sun shone directly upon it. Her skin was clear, pale
as ivory, and even exertion hardly brought the latent under-flush of red
to the surface.

"There's somebody at the waterfit. Gang, lassie, an' dinna be lettin'
them aff withoot their siller this time!" said her aunt Barbara from
her bed. Annie Allen was accustomed to say nothing, and she did it now.

The boat to the Rhonefoot was seldom needed, and the oars were not kept
in it. They leaned against the end of the cottage, and Grace Allen took
them on her shoulder as she went down. She carried them as easily as
another girl might carry a parasol.

Again there came the cry from the Rhonefoot, echoing joyously across the
river.

Standing well back in the boat, so as to throw up the bow, she pushed
off. The water was deep where the boat lay, and it had been drawn half
up on the bank. Where Grace dipped her oars into the silent water, the
pool was so black that the blade of the oar was lost in the gloom before
it got half-way down. Above there was a light wind moaning and rustling
in the trees, but it did not stir even a ripple on the dark surface of
the pool where the Black Water of Dee meets the brighter Ken.

Grace bent to her oars with a springing _verve_ and force which made the
tubby little boat draw towards the shore, the whispering lapse of water
gliding under its sides all the while. Three lines of wake were marked
behind--a vague white turbulence in the middle and two lines of bubbles
on either side where the oars had dipped, which flashed a moment and
then winked themselves out.

When she reached the Waterfoot, and the boat touched the shore, Grace
Allen looked up to see Gregory Jeffray standing alone on the little
copse-enclosed triangle of grass. He smiled pleasantly. She had not time
to be surprised.

"What did you think of me this morning, running away without paying my
fare?" he asked.

It seemed very natural now that he should come. She was glad that he had
not brought his horse.

"I thought you would come by again," said Grace Allen, standing up,
with one oar over the side ready to pull in or push off.

Gregory extended his hand as though to ask for hers to steady him as he
came into the boat. Grace was surprised. No one ever did that at the
Rhonefoot, but she thought it might be that he was a stranger and did
not understand about boats. She held out her hand. Gregory leapt in
beside her in a moment, but did not at once release the hand. She tried
to pull it away.

"It is too little a hand to do so much hard work," he said.

Instantly Grace became conscious that it was rough and hard with rowing.
She had not thought of this before. He stooped and kissed it.

"Now," he said, "let me row across for you, and sit in front of me where
I can see you. You made me forget all about everything else this
morning, and now I must make up for it."

It was a long way across, and evidently Gregory Jeffray was not a good
oarsman, for it was dark when Grace Allen went indoors to her aunts. Her
heart was bounding within her. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed
quickly and silently through her parted red lips. There was a new thing
in her eye.

Every evening thereafter, through all that glorious height of midsummer,
there came a crying at the Waterfoot; and every evening Grace Allen went
over to the edge of the Rhone wood to answer it. There the boat lay
moored to a stone upon the turf, while Gregory and she walked upon the
flowery forest carpet, and the dry leaves watched and clashed and
muttered above them as the gloaming fell. These were days of rapture,
each a doorway into yet fuller and more perfect joy.

Over at the Waterfoot the copses grew close. The green turf was velvet
underfoot. The blackbirds fluted in the hazels there. None of them
listened to the voice of Gregory Jeffray, or cared for what he said to
Grace Allen when she went nightly to meet him over the Black Water.

She rowed back alone, the simple soul that was in her forwandered and
mazed with excess of joy. As she set the boat to the shore and came up
the bank bearing the oars which were her wings into the world of love
under the green alders, the light in the west, lingering clear and pure
and cold, shone upon her and added radiances to her eyes.

But Aunt Annie watched her with silent pain. Barbara from her bed spoke
sharp and cruel words which Grace Allen listened to not at all.

For as soon as the morning shone bright over the hills and ran on
tip-toe up the sparkling ripples of the loch, she looked across the
Black Water to the hidden ways where in the evening her love should meet
her.

As she went her daily rounds, and the gripper-iron slipped on the wet
chain or grew hot in the sun, as she heard the clack of the wheel and
the soft slow grind of the boat's broad lip on the pebbles, Grace Allen
said over and over to herself, "It is so long, only so long, till he
will come."

So all the days she waited in a sweet content. Barbara reproached her;
Aunt Annie perilled her soul by lying to shield her; but Grace herself
was shut out from shame or fear, from things past or things to come, by
faith and joy that at last she had found one whom her soul loved.

And overhead the dry poplar leaves clashed and rustled, telling out to
one another that love was a vain thing, and the thrush cried thrice,
"Beware." But Grace Allen would not have believed had one risen to her
from the dead.

So the great wasteful summer days went by, the glory of the passionate
nights of July, the crisper blonde luxuriance of August. Every night
there was the calling from the green plot across the Black Water. Every
night Aunt Annie wandered, a withered grey ghost, along the hither side
of the inky pool, looking for what she could not see and listening for
that which she could not hear. Then she would go in to lie gratuitously
to Barbara, who told her to her face that she did not believe her.

But in the first chill of mid-September, swift as the dividing of the
blue-black thunder-cloud by the winking flame, fell the sword of God,
smiting and shattering. It seemed hard that it should fall on the weaker
and the more innocent. But then God has plenty of time.

One chilly gloaming there was no calling at the Rhonefoot. Nevertheless
Grace rowed over and waited, imagining that all evil had befallen her
lover. Within, her aunt Barbara fretted and murmured at her absence,
driving her silent sister into involved refuges of lies to shield young
Grace Allen, whom her soul loved.

The next day went by as the night had passed, with an awful constriction
about her heart, a numbness over all her body; yet Grace did her work as
one who dares not stop.

Two serving-men crossed in the ferry-boat, unconcernedly talking over
the country news as men do when they meet.

"Did ye hear aboot young Jeffray?" asked the herd from the Mains.

"Whatna Jeffray?" asked, without much show of interest, the ploughman
from Drumglass.

"Wi' man, the young lad that the daft folk in Enbra sent here for
Sheriff."

"I didna ken he was hereawa'," said the Mains, with a purely perfunctory
surprise.

"Ou ay, he has been a feck ower by at the Barr. They say he's gaun to
get marriet to the youngest dochter. She's hae a gye fat stockin'-fit,
I'se warrant."

"Ye may say sae, or a lawyer wadna come speerin' her," returned him from
Drumglass as the boat reached the farther side.

"Guid-e'en to ye, Grace," said they both as they put their pennies down
on the little tin plate in the corner.

"She's an awesome still lassie, that," said the Mains, as he took the
road down to Parton Raw, where he had trysted with a maid of another
sort. "Did ye notice she never said a word to us, neyther 'Thank ye,'
nor yet 'Guid-day'? Her een were fair stelled in her head."

"Na, I didna observe," said Drumglass cotman indifferently.

"Some fowk are like swine. They notice nocht that's no pitten intil the
trough afore them!" said the Mains indignantly.

So they parted, each to his own errand.

Day swayed and swirled into a strange night of shooting stars and
intensest darkness. The soul of Grace Allen wandered in blackest night.
Sometimes the earth appeared ready to open and swallow her up. Sometimes
she seemed to be wandering by the side of the great pool of the Black
Water with her hands full of flowers. There were roses blush-red, like
what he had said her cheeks were sometimes. There were velvety pansies,
and flowers of strange intoxicating perfume, the like of which she had
never seen. But at every few yards she felt that she must fling them all
into the black water and fare forth into the darkness to gather more.

Then in her bed she would start up, hearing the hail of a dear voice
calling to her from the Rhonefoot. Once she put on her clothes in haste
and would have gone forth; but her aunt Annie, waking and startled, a
tall, gaunt apparition, came to her.

"Grace Allen," she said, "where are you gangin' at this time o' the
nicht?"

"There's somebody at the boat," she said, "waiting. Let me gang, Aunt
Annie: they want me; I hear them cry. O Annie, I hear them crying as a
bairn cries!"

"Lie doon on yer bed like a clever lass," said her aunt gently. "There's
naebody there."

"Or gin there be," said Aunt Barbara from her bed, "e'en let them cry.
Is this a time for decent fowk to be gaun play-actin' aboot?"

So the daylight came, and the evening and the morning were the second
day. And Grace Allen went about her work with clack of gripper-iron and
dip of oar.

Late on in the gloaming of the third day following, Aunt Annie went down
to the broad flat boat that lay so still at the water's edge. Something
black was knocking dully against it.

Grace had been gone four hours, and it was weary work watching along the
shore or going within out of the chill wind to endure Barbara's bitter
tongue.

The black thing that knocked was the small boat, broken loose from her
moorings and floating helplessly. Annie Allen took a boathook and pulled
it to the shore. Except that the boat was half full of flowers, there
was nothing and no one inside.

But the world span round and the stars went out when the finder saw the
flowers.

When Aunt Annie Allen came to herself, she found the water was rising
rapidly. It was up to her ankles. She went indoors and asked for Grace.

"Save us, Ann!" said Barbara; "I thocht she was wi' you. Where hae ye
been till this time o' nicht? An' your feet's dreepin' wat. Haud aff the
clean floor!"

"But Gracie! Oor lassie Grade! What's come o' Gracie?" wailed the elder
woman.

At that instant there came so thrilling a cry from over the dark waters
out of the night that the women turned to one another and instinctively
caught at each other's hands.

"Leave me, I maun gang," said Aunt Annie. "That's surely Grace."

Her sister gripped her tight.

"Let me gang--let me gang. She's my ain lassie, no yours!" Annie said
fiercely, endeavouring to thrust off Barbara's hands as they clutched
her like birds' talons from the bed.

"Help me to get up," said Barbara; "I canna be left here. I'll come wi'
ye."

So she that had been sick for twelve years arose, like a ghost from the
tomb, and with her sister went out to seek for the girl they had lost.
They found their way to the boat, reeling together like drunken men.
Annie almost lifted her sister in, and then fell herself among the
drenched and waterlogged flowers.

With the instinct of old habitude they fell to the oars, Barbara rowing
the better and the stronger. They felt the oily swirl of the Dee rising
beneath them, and knew that there had been a mighty rain upon the hills.

"The Lord save us!" cried Barbara suddenly. "Look!"

She pointed up the long pool of the Black Water. What she saw no man
knows, for Aunt Annie had fainted, and Barbara was never herself after
that hour.

Aunt Annie lay like a log across her thwart. But, with the strength of
another world, Barbara unshipped the oar of her sister and slipped it
upon the thole-pin opposite to her own. Then she turned the head of the
boat up the pool of the Black Watery Something white floated dancingly
alongside, upborne for a moment on the boiling swirls of the rising
water. Barbara dropped her oars, and snatched at it. She held on to some
light wet fabric by one hand; with the other she shook her sister.

"Here's oor wee Gracie," she said: "Ann, help me hame wi' her!"

So they brought her home, and laid her all in dripping white upon her
white bed. Barbara sat at the bed-head and crooned, having lost her
wits. Aunt Annie moved all in a piece, as though she were about to fall
headlong.

"White floo'ers for the angels, where Gracie's ga'en to! Annie, woman,
dinna ye see them by her body--four great angels, at ilka corner yin?"

Barbara's voice rose and fell, wayward and querulous. There was no other
sound in the house, only the water sobbing against the edge of the
ferry-boat.

"And the first is like a lion," she went on, in a more even recitative,
"and the second is like an ox, and the third has a face like a man, and
the fourth is like a flying eagle. An' they're sittin' on ilka bedpost;
and they hae sax wings, that meet owre my Gracie, an' they cry withoot
ceasing, 'Holy! holy! holy! Woe unto him that causeth one of these
little ones to perish! It were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps o' the Black
Water!'"

But the neighbours paid no attention to her--for, of course, she was
mad.

Then the wise folk came and explained how it had all happened. Here she
had been gathering flowers; here she had slipped; and here, again, she
had fallen. Nothing could be clearer. There were the flowers. There was
the dangerous pool on the Black Water. And there was the body of Grace
Allen, a young thing dead in the flower of her days.

"I see them! I see them!" cried Barbara, fixing her eyes on the bed,
her voice like a shriek; "they are full of eyes, behind and before, and
they see into the heart of man. Their faces are full of anger, and their
mouths are open to devour--"

"Wheesh, wheesh, woman! Here's the young Sheriff come doon frae the Barr
wi' the Fiscal to tak' evidence."

And Barbara Allen was silent as Gregory Jeffray came in.

To do him justice, when he wrote her the letter that killed--concerning
the necessities of his position and career--he had tried to break the
parting gently. How should he know all that she knew? It was clearly an
ill turn that fate had played him. Indeed, he felt ill-used. So he
listened to the Fiscal taking evidence, and in due course departed.

But within an inner pocket he had a letter that was not filed with the
documents, but which might have shed clearer light upon when and how
Grace Allen slipped and fell, gathering flowers at night above the great
pool of the Black Water.

"There is set up a throne in the heavens," chanted mad Barbara Allen as
Gregory went out; "and One sits upon it--and my Gracie's there, clothed
in white robes, an' a palm in her hand. And you'll be there, young man,"
she cried after him, "and I'll be there. There's a cry comin' owre the
Black Water for you, like the cry that raised me oot o' my bed yestreen.
An' ye'll hear it--ye'll hear it, braw young man; ay--and rise up and
answer, too!"

But they paid no heed to her--for, of course, she was mad. Neither did
Gregory Jeffray hear aught as he went out, but the water lapping against
the little boat that was still half full of flowers.

The days went by, and being added together one at a time, they made the
years. And the years grew into one decade, and lengthened out towards
another.

Aunt Annie was long dead, a white stone over her; but there was no stone
over Grace Allen--only a green mound where daisies grew.

Sir Gregory Jeffray came that way. He was a great law-officer of the
Crown, and first heir to the next vacant judgeship. This, however, he
was thinking of refusing because of the greatness of his private
practice.

He had come to shoot at the Barr, and his baggage was at Barmark
station. How strange it would be to see the old places again in the
gloom of a September evening!

Gregory still loved a new sensation. All was so long past--the
bitterness clean gone out of it. The old boathouse had fallen into other
hands, and railways had come to carry the traffic beyond the ferry.

As Sir Gregory Jeffray walked from the late train which set him down at
the station, he felt curiously at peace. The times of the Long Ago came
back not ungratefully to his mind. There had been much pleasure in them.
He even thought kindly of the girl with whom he had walked in the glory
of a forgotten summer along the hidden ways of the woods. Her last
letter, long since destroyed, was not disagreeable to him when he
thought of the secret which had been laid to rest so quietly in the pool
of the Black Water.

He came to the water's edge. He sent his voice, stronger now than of
yore, but without the old ring of boyish hopefulness, across the loch. A
moment's silence, the whisper of the night wind, and then from the gloom
of the farther side an answering hail--low, clear, and penetrating.

"I am in luck to find them out of bed," said Gregory Jeffray to himself.

He waited and listened. The wind blew chill from the south athwart the
ferry. He shivered, and drew his fur-lined travelling-coat about him. He
could hear the water lapping against the mighty piers of the railway
viaduct above, which, with its gaunt iron spans, like bows bent to send
arrows into the heavens, dimly towered between him and the skies.

Now, this is all that men definitely know of the fate of Sir Gregory
Jeffray. A surfaceman who lived in the new houses above the
landing-place saw him standing there, heard him hailing the Waterfoot of
the Dee, to which no boat had plied for years. Maliciously he let the
stranger call, and abode to see what should happen.

Yet astonishment held him dumb when again across the dark stream came
the crying, thrilling him with an unknown terror, till he clutched the
door to make sure of his retreat within. Mastering his fear, he stole
nearer till he could hear the oars planted in the iron pins, the push
off the shore, and then the measured dip of oars coming towards the
stranger across the pool of the Black Water.

"How do they know, I wonder, that I want to be taken to the Rhonefoot?
They are bringing the small boat," he heard him say.

A skiff shot out of the gloom. It was a woman who was rowing. The boat
grounded stern on. The watcher saw the man step in and settle himself on
the seat.

"What rubbish is this?" Gregory Jeffray cried angrily as he cleared a
great armful of flowers off the seat and threw them among his feet.

The oars dipped, and without sound the boat glided out upon the waves of
the loch towards the Black Water, into whose oily depths the blades fall
silently, and where the water does not lap about the prow. The night
grew suddenly very cold. Somewhere in the darkness over the Black Water
the watching surfaceman heard some one call three times the name of
Gregory Jeffray. It sounded like a young child's voice. And for very
fear he ran in and shut the door, well knowing that for twenty years no
boat had plied there.

It was noted as a strange thing that, on the same night on which Sir
Gregory Jeffray was lost, the last of the Allens of the old ferry-house
died in the Crichton Asylum. Barbara Allen was, without doubt, mad to
the end, for the burden of her latest cry was, "He kens noo! he kens
noo! The Lord our God is a jealous God! Now let Thy servant depart in
peace!"

But Gregory Jeffray was never seen again by water or on shore. He had
heard the cry across the Black Water.




III

SAINT LUCY OF THE EYES

[_Taken from the Journals of Travel written by Stephen Douglas, sometime
of Culsharg in Galloway_.]

  I.

  _O mellow rain upon the clover tops;
    O breath of morning blown o'er meadow-sweet;
  Lush apple-blooms from which the wild bee drops
    Inebriate; O hayfield scents, my feet_

  _Scatter abroad some morning in July;
    O wildwood odours of the birch and pine,
  And heather breaths from great red hill-tops nigh,
    Than olive sweeter or Sicilian vine_;--

  _Not all of you, nor summer lands of balm--
    Not blest Arabia,
  Nor coral isles in seas of tropic calm.
    Such heart's desire into my heart can draw_.

  II.

  _O scent of sea on dreaming April morn
    Borne landward on a steady-blowing wind;
  O August breeze, o'er leagues of rustling corn,
    Wafts of clear air from uplands left behind_,

  _And outbreathed sweetness of wet wallflower bed,
    O set in mid-May depth of orchard close,
  Tender germander blue, geranium red;
    O expressed sweetness of sweet briar-rose_;

  _Too gross, corporeal, absolute are ye,
    Ye help not to define
  That subtle fragrance, delicate and free,
    Which like a vesture clothes this Love of mine_.

  "_Heart's Delight_."




CHAPTER I

THE WOMAN OF THE RED EYELIDS


It was by Lago d'Istria that I found my pupil. I had come without halt
from Scotland to seek him. For the first time I had crossed the Alps,
and from the snow-flecked mountain-side, where the dull yellow-white
patches remained longest, I saw beneath me the waveless plain of
Lombardy.

The land of Lombardy--how the words had run in my dreams! Surely some
ancestor of mine had wandered northwards from that gracious plain. On
one side of me, at least, I was sib to the vineyards and the chestnut
groves. For strange yearnings thrilled me as I beheld white-garlanded
cities strung across the plain, the blue lakes grey in the haze, like
eyes that look through tears.

Yet hitherto a hill-farm on the moors of Minnigaff had been my
abiding-place. There I had played with the collies and the grey rabbits.
There I had listened to the whaup and the peewits crying in the night;
and save the cold, grey, resonant spaces of Edinburgh, whither I had
gone to study, this was all my eyes had yet known. But when Giovanni
Turazza, exile from the city of Verona, paused in his reading of the
sonorous Italian to rebuke my Scots accent, and continued softly to give
me illustrations of the dialects of north and south, something moved
within me that sickened me to think of the Lombard plain sleeping in the
gracious sunshine--which I might never see.

Yet I saw it. I trod its ways and stood by its still waters. And already
they are become my life and my home.

Now, I who write am Stephen Douglas, of the moorland stock of the
northern Douglases--kin to Douglaswater, and on the wrong side of the
blanket to Drumdarroch himself. It has been the custom that one of the
Douglases should in every generation be sent to the college to rear for
the kirk.

For the hand of the Douglas has ever been kind to kin; and since
patronage came back--in law or out law, the Douglases have managed to
put their man into Drumdarroch parish and to have a Douglas in the white
manse by the Waterside. And so it is like to be when, as they say, the
rights of patron shall again pass away.

Now, I was in process or manufacture for this purpose, though
threatening to turn out somewhat over tardy in development to profit by
the act of patronage. But the Douglas dourness stood me in good stead,
as it has done all the Douglases that ever lived since the greatest of
the race charged to the death, with the point of his spear dropped low
and the heart of his lord thrown before him, among the Paynim hordes.

The lad to undertake whose tutelage I went abroad was a Fenwick of
Allerton in the Border country--the scion of a reputable stock, sometime
impoverished by gambling in the times of the Regent, and before that
with whistling "Owre the water to Charlie"; but now, by the opening-up
of the sea-coal pits, again gathering in the canny siller as none of the
Fenwicks had done in the palmiest days of the moss-trooping.

Well I knew when I set out that I had my work before me, and that I
should earn my two hundred pounds a year or all were done. For I had but
a couple of years more than my pupil to boast myself upon; and he,
having grown up on the Continent, chiefly in Latin cities and German
watering-places, was vastly superior to me in the knowledge which comes
not easily to the lads from the moors, who at all times know better how
to loup a moss-hag than how to make a courtly bow.

Yet for all that I did not mean to be far behind any Border Fenwick when
it came to making bows. Nor, as it happened, was I when all was done.
This confidence was partly owing to full feeding on fine porridge and
braxy, but more to that inbred belief of Galloway in itself which the
ill-affected and envious nominate its conceit.

Henry Fenwick was abiding in this city of Vico Averso, as I had been
informed by his uncle and guardian, for the baths. He had been advised
of my coming, and, like the kindly lad that he proved to be, I found him
waiting for me when the diligence arrived.

We met with few words on either side, but I think with instant hearty
liking. My pupil was tall and dark, his hair a little long, yet not
falling to his shoulders--somewhat feminine in type of feature and
Italianate in complexion. But the mouth shewed breeding, the eyes
kindliness; and, after all, these are the main features. I was
especially glad to find myself taller than he by a span of inches.

He took me to the hotel where a room had been ordered for me--not one of
the common Italian inns, but a hotel built for the accommodation of
foreigners. As we went up the steps, we passed a lady sitting in the
shade with a book. She was a large fair woman, with sleepy eyes and a
mane of bronzed gold hair. She had been looking at us as we came, I will
be bound; but when we passed she became absorbed and unconscious upon
her book.

As Henry raised his hat she bowed slightly to him, lifting at the same
time her heavy eyelids and glancing at me. I had once seen that look
before--in a spectacle of wild beasts when I happened to stand close to
a drowsing tigress that twitched an eyelid and flashed a yellow eye at
me. In that eye-shot on the verandah of the hotel in Vico Averso, the
crossing of glances was like a challenge, and thrilled me as when one is
called to fight. I think we hated one another on the spot; yet for the
life of me I could not tell why, save that the woman of the tiger's
glance had a red edge to her heavy eyelids, and no eyelashes that I
could see--which things are not the marks of a good woman, as I take it.
Yet there was no real cause for the bitter and sudden dislike, for, as
it chanced, she came but little into our adventures. For youth, for the
sake of change, turns as readily away from evil as from good.

So eager was I to be down and out of doors, that I had hardly time to
make disposition of my goods in the room which had been reserved for me.
I threw open the casement. I hung half out of the window, and satisfied
myself with looking upon the still, calm blue of Lago d'Orta beneath,
flecked with heavy-bodied craft with deep yellow sails. My heart all the
while was crying out hungrily, "At last! at last!"

The precipices of hills, coloured like amethysts, fronted us, where the
southern Alps threw themselves downwards to the lake-shore. Half-a-dozen
hotels with white walls and green blinds clung about the outside of the
little town, and specially about the baths, which ever since the time of
the Romans had given the place its reputation. Few English people went
there, but many Italians, some Austrians, especially women--German men,
and cosmopolitan Russians, to whom all outside their native country was
a Fatherland.

"Come," said Henry as soon as we had become a little familiar, "let us
go to the baths."

Entering a low stone door, we ran up a flight of steps and found
ourselves in a circular building of ancient marble. It was to me the
strangest sight. We looked down on a great number of people up to their
necks in a kind of thick, coffee-coloured fluid, which steamed and gave
off strange odours. Men and women were there, old and young. All were
clad in full suits of light material, and comported themselves towards
each other as in a drawing-room. The sight of so many heads all bobbing
about on the coffee-coloured mud, like a hundred John the Baptists on
one large charger, was to me exceedingly diverting.

Little tables were floating about on the muddy water, and some pairs in
quiet corners played chess and even cards. But there was a constant
circulation among the throng. Introductions were effected in form, save
that no one shook hands, at least above the water; only the detached
heads bowed ceremoniously. It was a new canto of the _Inferno_--the
condemned playing dully at human society in the bubbling caldrons of the
place of evil shades. Henry proposed to go down and take a bath, but my
stomach rose against the fumes and the slimy brown stuff.

"It is not nearly so bad when you are once in!" he said, for he had
tried it. But though I had reason to believe that to be true, I had no
heart to make the test for myself.

As we came out, Henry made me an introduction to the Lady of the Red
Eyelids.

"Madame von Eisenhagen!" So that is your name, thought I; and I wonder
what may be your intentions! I had never seen the breed before, but the
side of me that was sib to the South seemed to leap to a comprehension.

As Madame and I crossed our glances again, I am sure we both knew that
it was to the knife. For Henry Fenwick, being a lad, had laid his boy's
heart in her hands. Yet not seriously, but as a boy will when a woman
twice his age thinks it worth her while to spread a net for him,
flattering him with her eyes.

So for a while we sat on the terrace, and a kind of scentless, spineless
whitethorn wept sprays of flowers upon us. We spoke French, in which my
pupil, as I found, had greatly the advantage of me, and thought
extremely well of himself in consequence. But within me I said, "My
friend, wait till I have you a week at Greek!"

And this indeed came to pass, for over the intricacies of that language
I made him presently to sweat consumedly.

Of the matter of our talk there is not much to say. Henry spoke freely
and well, Madame interjecting leading questions, and holding him with
her eyes. I, on the contrary, spoke little, being occupied with the
scenes going on beneath me--the men in the piazza piling the fine grain
for the making of macaroni--the changing and chaffering groups about the
kerchiefed market-women--the dark-faced, gypsy-like men with beady eyes.
The murmur of the conversation came to me only at intervals, like voices
in a dream; and sometimes for whole sentences together I lost its
meaning completely.

Indeed, I had more pleasure in looking at the houses in Vico Averso,
which were tangled together without the semblance of a plan. Each house,
or part of a house, struggled upward to occupy its own patch of
sky-line, in a hundred different heights and breadths. Each had a scrap
of garden clinging to it along the lake-side, in which the green of the
magnolias contrasted with the grey aspens and the warmer oleanders.
There was a bright and laughing charm about the whole which drew my
heart, and I longed to spend a lifetime in these white and
foliage-fringed places.

But I found very soon that the face of Vico Averso was her fortune. For
the side of our hostel which was turned to a dark and narrow Street of
Smells took away my desire to dwell there. There came out clear in my
mind the thought and sight of our hill-farm of Culsharg, set on the edge
of its miles of heather, the free airs blowing about it, and all the
wild birds crying. My mother would be coming to the door to look for my
grandfather as he came off the hill from the sheep. A disgust at the
bubbling devil's-caldron, a horror of the smiling, monosyllabic Woman of
the Red Eyelids, filled my heart. I resolved to battle it out with Henry
that very night, and to leave Vico Averso at once. If he would not do so
much for me, I knew that I might take the diligence back again the way I
came, and report my failure. But, for all that, I did not mean thus
lamely to fail or go home with my finger in my mouth.

That night I drew from the lad his heart. He had been here for two
months--indeed, ever since his Swiss tutor, Herr Gunther, had departed
for Zurich suddenly, having been ignominiously thrashed by his own
pupil. I gathered from him that he had intended to perform the like for
me, but had given up the idea after seeing me leap from the top of the
diligence.

Yet he was not unwilling to be taught that there are better things out
under the free sunshine than to dream away good days with a woman like
Madame Von Eisenhagen, who after all had perhaps done nothing worse than
encourage the lad to philander and to waste his time. Then I cunningly
painted the joys of a walking tour. We should take our packs on our
backs, only a few pounds' weight; and, our staves in our hands, like
student lads of clerkly learning in the ancient times, we should go
forth to seek our adventures--a new one every hour, a new roof to sleep
under every night, and maids fairer than dreams waving hands to us over
every vineyard wall. Thus cunningly I baited my trap.

So had I gone many a time in mine own country, and so I meant to lead my
pupil now. Henry Fenwick rose joyously at the thought. Madame had made
his service a little hard, and, what is worse, a little monotonous. He
was but a boy, and needed not, she thought, the binding distractions
which usually accompany such allegiances.




CHAPTER II

THE WORD OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE


Betimes in the morning we were afoot--long before Madame was awake; and
having committed our heavier luggage to the care of our Swiss landlord,
we set each a knapsack on our backs, and with light foot passed through
the market-place among the bright and chattering throng of Italian folk,
whose greetings of "_Buone feste, buon principio, e buona fine_" told of
the birth of another day of joy for them under the blue of their sky.

Before we were clear of the town, Henry turned, and as he glanced at the
green valanced windows of the Hotel Averso he drew a long breath which
was not quite a sigh. And this was all his farewell to the allegiance of
half a score of weeks. For my part, I was not easy till we swung out of
sight along the dusty road, and had skirted the first two or three miles
of old wall and vineyard terrace, where the lizards were already
flashing and darting in the sun.

But indeed it takes much to chain a young man's fancy, when the road of
life runs enticingly before him, dappled with laurel and carpeted with
primrose.

It was our vagabond year, and, as I had foretold, a fair maid stood at
every door, smiling at us and leading us on. We did not keep long by the
dusty road. Presently we turned up byways, over which the prickly-pear
and red valerian broke in profuse and unprecise beauty--fleshy-leaved
creepers, too, as of a house-leek turned passion-flower, over-crowned
all with scarlet blotches of cunningly placed colour.

We wandered into woodland paths and across fields. A peasant or small
farmer ran out to stay us. Something was forbidden, it appeared. We were
trampling his artichokes or other precious crop. We understood him not
over well, nor indeed tried to. But a touchingly insignificant piece of
silver induced him to think more kindly of our error, and he showed us a
sweet path, by the side of which a brook tinkled down from the cliffs
above. It led us into another scene--and, I am of opinion, upon another
man's property. For at the door of a low, square-roofed house stood a
man with his hands clasped behind him. He frowned, for he had seen his
neighbour of the itching palm lead us to his gate and there leave us.
And of the silver that lay within that palm he had not partaken.

The sun was broad and high. Here were flats of hay, greyish-green, blue
in parts--but with none of that moist and emerald velvet which would
have flashed upon the burnside meadows at home. Again by the water we
brushed against the asters, which had no business to be growing here in
the spring. Among the young wheat the poppies were flaming--red-coat
officers of the Sower of Tares, with flaunting feather leading on to the
inquisition of fires, when the reapers edge their keen sickles and
fall-to, and the tares are separated from the wheat.

For pence judiciously tendered, we had the young Pan himself for
leader--an Italian boy of sixteen, fair as a god of Greece. He went
before with the most innocent grace in the world, and looked at us over
his shoulder. He called his sister to come also, and as a stimulant he
held up his penny. But she hung back, smit with sudden maidenly modesty
at the sight of two such proper young men; and so her brother danced on
without her.

Looking back, we saw that she had called her mother, and now peeped out
wistfully from behind the shelter of the skirt maternal. Perhaps she
regretted that she had not gone with us, for there, far ahead, was her
brother skipping upon his quest. And suddenly there was no interest in
the dull farmyard and the cattle. For that is a way of women--to be
willing too late.

As we go, we talk with the young Pan--Henry Fenwick freely, I slowly,
yet with comprehension greater than speech.

Will Pan sit down and eat with us? we ask.

Surely! There is no doubt whatever that he will, and that gladly. But we
must wait till we come to a spring of hill-water, so that we may have
the true and only apostolic baptism for our red wine.

There presently we arrive. The place is verily an inspiration. It is a
natural well in the shadow of a great rock. Overhead is the virgin cup
rudely cut in the stone. A shelf for sitting on while you drink, and the
rocky laver brimming with clear and icy water. Little grains of fine
white sand dance at the bottom, where from its living source the pure
brew wells up. It is indeed a proper place to break bread.

Here, with Pan talking to us in a speech soft as the Italian air, we eat
and are refreshed. Pan himself willingly opens his heart, and tells us
of the changes that are coming--an Italy free from lagoon to
triangle-which is to say, from Venice to Messina. But there is much
dying to be done before then. The tears must fall from many mothers'
eyes--from his own, who knows? Will he fight? Ay, surely he will fight!
And the face of Pan hardens, till one understands how he could have been
so cruel one day to the reeds which grew in the river.

But the distance beckons us, and the sun draws himself upward to his
strength. We have on us the English itch for change. The breeze comes
and goes as we plunge among the groves of Virgilian ilex, and through
the interstices of the trees we see on a hill-slope above us thirty
great horned oxen, etched black against the sky.

Here Pan leaves us, saying farewell with tears in his woman's eyes; with
silver also in his pocket, which, to do him justice, does not comfort
him wholly. Before he goes, for love and gratitude he tells us of a
rhyme with which to please the children and to cause the good wives to
give us a lodging.

At the next village we try its efficacy upon a company by the well--a
group with those oriental suggestions which are common to all villages
south of the Alps. The effect is instantaneous. The shy maidens draw
nearer, the boys gather from their noisy game, the bambinos stretch to
us from many a sisterly shoulder. We sit down, a couple of wayfarers,
dusty and hot. But no sooner is the rhyme said than, lo! a tin is dipped
for our drinking, and the Rebekah of the well herself expects her kiss,
nor, spite of a possible knife, is she disappointed. For the rhyme's
sake we are friends of the fairies and can put far the evil eye. It is
good to entertain us. Thanks be to Pan! We shall offer him a garland of
enduring ivy, or it may be half a kid. The cry that was heard over the
waters was not true! Pan is not dead. Perhaps he too but sleeps a while,
and in the likeness of young goatherds the god of the earlier time,
reborn in dew, comes out still to tell his secrets to wandering lads
who, asking no favour, go a-wayfaring with strong hearts as in the
ancient days.

Round the corner peeps a laughing face. An urchin of surpassing
impishness, one who has come too late to hear our password, taunts us in
evil words.

"Ha, Giuseppe, beware of the Giant Caranco! Behold, he has the great
teeth of the English. At the water-trough this morning I saw him
sharpening them to eat thee, thou exceeding plump one! In the bag at his
back he carries the bones of sixteen just as fat as thou art!"

And the rascal flees with a cry of pretended fear. So contagious is
terror, that more than half our band flees away a dozen paces, halting
there upon one foot, balancing our evil and our good.

But we have wiles as well as rhymes, and great in all places of the
earth is the fascination of ready money.

"The Giant Caranco! forsooth," we say; "what lack of sense! Does the
Giant Caranco know the good word of the Gentle Folk whose song brings
luck? Can the Giant Caranco tell the tale that only the fairies know?
Has the Giant Caranco those things in his wallet which are loved of lads
and maids? Of a surety, no! Was ever such nonsense heard!"

In vain rings the shout of the maligner on the rocks above, as the
circle gathers in again closer than ever about us.

"Beware of his thrice-sharpened teeth, Giuseppe! I saw him bite a fair
half-moon out of the iron pipe by the fountain trough this morning!" he
cries.

It is worse than useless now. Not only does the devil's advocate lack
his own halfpenny; but with a swirl of the hand and a cunning jerk at
the side, a stone whizzes after this regardless railer upon honest
giants. Wails and agony follow. It is a dangerous thing to sit in the
scorner's chair, specially when the divinity has the popular acclaim,
with store of sweetmeats and _soldi_ as well.

Most dangerous of all is it to interfere with a god in the making, for
proselytism is hot, and there are divine possibilities.




CHAPTER III

THE STORY OF THE SEVEN DEAD MEN


And the stories! There were many of them. The young faces bent closer as
we told the story of Saint Martin dividing his cloak among the beggars.
Then came our own Cornish giant-killer, adapted for an Italian audience,
dressed to taste in a great brigand hat and a beltful of daggers and
pistols. Blunderbore in the Italian manner was a distinguished success.
It was Henry who told the tales, but yet I think it was I who had the
more abundant praise. For they heard me prompt my Mercurius, and they
saw him appeal to me in a difficulty. Obviously, therefore, Henry was
the servant of the chief magician, who like a great lord only
communicated his pleasure through his steward.

Then with a tale of Venice[1] that was new to them we scared them out of
a year's growth--frightening ourselves also, for then we were but young.
It was well that the time was not far from high noon. The story told in
brief ran thus. It was the story of the "Seven Dead Men."

[Footnote 1: For the origin of this and much else as profitable and
pleasant, see Mr. Horatio Brown's _Life on the Lagoons_, the most
charming and characteristic of Venetian books.]

There were once six men that went fishing on the lagoons. They brought
a little boy, the son of one of them, to remain and cook the polenta. In
the night-time he was alone in the cabin, but in the morning the
fishermen came in. And if they found that aught was not to their taste,
they beat him. But if all was well, they only bade him to wash up the
dishes, yet gave him nothing to eat, knowing that he would steal for
himself, as the custom of boys is.

But one morning they brought with them from their fishing the body of a
dead man--a man of the mainland whom they had found tumbling about in
the current of the Brenta. For he had looked out suddenly upon them
where the sea and the river strive together, and the water boils up in
great smooth, oily dimples that are not wholesome for men to meddle
with.

Now, whether these six men had not gone to confession or had not
confessed truly, so that the priest's absolution did them no good, the
tale ventures not to say. But this at least is sure, that for their sins
they set this dead thing that had been a man in the prow of the boat,
all in his wet clothes. And for a jest on the little boy they put his
hand on his brow, as though the dead were in deep cogitation.

As this story was in the telling, the attention of the children grew
keen and even painful. For the moment each was that lonely lad on the
islet, where stood the cabin of the Seven Dead Men.

So as the boat came near in the morning light, the boy stood to greet
them on the little wooden pier where the men landed their fish to clean,
and he called out to the men in the boat--

"Come quickly," he cried; "breakfast is ready--all but the fish to fry."

He saw that one of the men was asleep in the prow; yet, being but a
lad, he was only able to count as many as the crows--that is, four. So
he did not notice that in the boat there was a man too many. Nor would
he have wondered, had he been told of it. For it was not his place to
wonder. He was only sleepy, and desired to lie down after the long night
alone. Also he hoped that they had had a good catch of fish, so that he
would escape being beaten. For indeed he had taken the best of the
polenta for himself before the men came--which was as well, for if he
had waited till they were finished, there had been but dog's leavings
for him. He was a wise boy, this, when it came to eating. Now, eating
and philosophy come by nature, as doth also a hungry stomach; but
arithmetic and Greek do not come by nature. To which Henry Fenwick
presently agreed.

The men went in with a good appetite to their breakfast, and left the
dead man sitting alone in the prow with his hand on his brow.

So when they sat down, the boy said--

"Why does not the other man come in? I see him sitting there. Are you
not going to bring him in to breakfast also?" (For he wished to show
that he had not eaten any of the polenta.)

Then, for a jest upon him, one of the men answered--

"Why, is the man not here? He is indeed a heavy sleeper. You had better
go and wake him."

So the little boy went to the door and called, shouting loud, "Why
cannot you come to breakfast? It has been ready this hour, and is going
cold!"

And when the men within heard that, they thought it the best jest in a
month of Sundays, and they laughed loud and strong.

So the boy came in and said--"What ails the man? He will not answer
though I have called my best."

"Oh" said they, "he is but a deaf old fool, and has had too much to
drink over-night. Go thou and swear bad words at him, and call him beast
and fool!"

So the men put wicked words into the boy's mouth, and laughed the more
to hear them come from the clean and innocent lips of a lad that knew
not their meaning. And perhaps that is the reason of what followed.

So the boy ran in again.

"Come out quickly, one of you," said the lad, "and wake him, for he does
not heed me, and I am sure that there is something the matter with him.
Mayhap he hath a headache or evil in his stomach."

So they laughed again, hardly being able to eat for laughing, and said--

"It must be cramp of the stomach that is the matter with him. But go out
again, and shake him by the leg, and ask him if he means to keep us
waiting here till doomsday."

So the boy went out and shook the man as he was bidden.

Then the dead man turned to him, sitting up in the prow as natural as
life, and said--

"What do you want with me?"

"Why in the name of the saints do you not come?" said the boy; "the men
want to know if they are to wait till doomsday for you."

"Tell them," said the man, "that I am coming as fast as I can. For this
is Doomsday!" said he.

The boy ran back into the hut, well pleased. For a moment his voice
could not be heard, because of the noisy laughter of the men. Then he
said--

"It is all right. He says he is coming."

Then the men thought that the boy was trying in his turn to put a jest
on them, and would have beaten him. In a moment, however, they heard
something coming slowly up the ladder, so they laughed no more, but all
turned very pale and sat still and listened. And only the boy remembered
to cross himself.

The footsteps came nearer. The door was pushed stumblingly open, as by
one that fumbles and is not sure of his way. Then the man that had been
dead and drowned, of whom they had made their sport, came in and sat
down at the boy's place, the seventh at the table. Whereupon there was a
great silence. None spoke, but all looked; for none, save the boy only,
could withdraw his eyes from those of the dead man. Colder and chillier
flowed the blood in their veins, till it ceased to flow at all, and
froze about their hearts.

Whereat the boy flung himself shrieking into a boat and rowed away by
the power of his own saint, Santa Caterina of Siena. He met some
fishermen in a sailing boat, but it was the third day before any dared
row to the lonely Casa on the mud bank. When they did go, three men
climbed up the posts at different sides, for the ladder had fallen away.
They went not in, but only looked through the window. They saw indeed
six men, who sat round the platter of cold polenta. But the seventh, who
sat at the bottom in the boy's place, shone as though he had been on
fire, leaning back in his chair as one that laughed and made merry at a
jest. But the six were fallen silent and very sober.

So the three men that looked fell back from off the platform into the
water as dead men; and had not their companions been active men of
Malamocco, they too had been drowned. So there to this day in the lonely
Casa of the Seven Dead Men the six are sitting, and the fiery seventh at
the table-foot, in the boy's place--until the Day comes that is
Doomsday, which is the last day of all.




CHAPTER IV

THE SINFUL VILLAGE OF SPELLINO


This was the story we told, and there was not a face among the audience
that did not blanch, and in that village there were undoubtedly some who
that night did not sleep.

Now, the success of the story of the Seven Dead Men was great,
surprising, embarrassing. For as soon as we ceased the children ran off
to their homes to bring their mothers, who also had to hear. So we had
to tell as before, without the alteration of a word.

Then home from the meadow pastures where they had been mowing, past the
ripening grain, the fathers came, ill-pleased to find the dinner still
not ready. Then these in their turn had to be fetched, and the story
told from the beginning. Yea, and did we vary so much as the droop of a
hair on the wet beard of the drowned man as he tumbled in the swirl of
the lagoon where the Brenta meets the tide, a dozen voices corrected us,
and we were warned to be careful. A reputation so sudden and tremendous
is, at its beginning, somewhat brittle.

The group about the well now included almost every able-bodied person in
the village, and several of the cripples, who cried out if any pushed
upon them. Into the midst of this inward-bent circle of heads the
village priest elbowed his way, a short and rotund father, with a frown
on his face which evidently had no right there.

"Story-tellers!" he exclaimed. "There is no need for such in my village.
We grow our own. Thou, Beppo, art enough for a municipality, and thou,
Andrea. But what have we here?"

He paused open-mouthed. He had expected the usual whining, mumping
beggar; and lo, here were two well-attired _forestieri_ with their packs
on their backs and their hats upon their heads. But we stood up, and in
due form saluted the father, keeping our hats in our hands till he,
pleased at this recognition and deference before his flock, signed to us
courteously to put them on again.

After this, nothing would do but we must go with him to his house and
share with him a bottle of the noble wine of Montepulciano.

"It is the wine of my brother, who is there in the cure of souls," he
said. "Ah, he is a judge of wine, my brother. It is a fine place, not
like this beast of a village, inhabited by bad heretics and worse
Catholics."

"Bad Protestants--who are they?" I said, for I had been reared in the
belief that all Protestants were good--except, perhaps, they were
English Episcopalians. Specially all Protestants in the lands of Rome
were good by nature.

The priest looked at us with a question in his eye.

"You are of the Church, it may be?" asked he, evidently thinking of our
reverence at the well-stoop.

We shook our heads.

"It matters not," said the easy father; "you are, I perceive, good
Christians. Not like these people of Spellino, who care neither for
priest nor pastor."

"There he goes," said the priest, pointing out of the window at a man in
plain and homely black who went by--the sight of whom, as he went, took
me back to the village streets of Dullarg when I saw the minister go by.
I had a sense that I ought to have been out there with him, instead of
sitting in the presbytery of the Pope's priest. But the father thought
not of that, and the Montepulciano was certainly most excellent. "A
bad, bad village," said the father, looking about him as if in search of
something.

"Margherita!" he cried suddenly.

An old woman appeared, dropping a bleared courtesy, unlike her queenly
name.

"What have you for dinner, Margherita?

"Enough for one; not enough for three, and they hungry off the road,"
she said. "If thou, O father, art about to feed the _lazzaroni_ of the
north and south thou must at least give some notice, and engage another
servant!"

"Nay, good Margherita," answered the priest very meekly, "there is
enough boiled fowl and risotto of liver and rice to serve half a score
of appetites. See to it," he said.

Margherita went grumbling away. What with beggars and leaping dogs,
besides children crawling about the steps, it was ill living in such a
presbytery--one also which was at any rate so old that no one could keep
it clean, though they laboured twenty-four hours in the day--ay, and
rose betimes upon the next day.

As the lady said, the place was old. Father Philip told us that it had
been the wing of a monastery.

"See," he said, "I will show you."

So saying, he led us through a wide, cool, dusky place, with arched roof
and high windows, the walls blotched and peeling, with the steam of many
monkish dinners. The doors had been mostly closed up, and only at one
side did an open window and archway give glimpses of pillared cloisters
and living green. We begged that we might sit out here, which the priest
gladly allowed, for the sight of the green grass and the tall white
lilies standing amid was a mighty refreshment in the hot noontide.
Sunshine flickered through the mulberry and one grey cherry-tree, and
sifted down on the grass.

Then the priest told us all the sin of the villagers of Spellino. It
was not that a remnant of the Waldenses was allowed to live there. The
priest did not object to good Waldensians. But the people of Spellino
would neither pay priest nor pastor. They were infidels.

"A bad people, an accursed people!" he repeated. "I have not had my dues
for ten years as I ought. I send my agent to collect; and as soon as he
appears, every family that is of the religion turns heretic. Not a child
can sign the sign of the Cross, not though I baptized every one of them.
All the men belong to the church of Pastor Gentinetta, and can repeat
his catechism."

The priest paused and shook his head.

"A bad people! a bad people!" he said over and over again. Then he
smiled, with some sense of the humour of the thing.

"But there are many ways with bad people," he said; "for when my good
friend, Pastor Gentinetta, collects his stipend, and the blue envelopes
of the Church are sent round, what a conversion ensues to Holy Church!
Lo, there is a crucifix in every house in Spellino, save in one or two
of the very faithful, who are so poor that they have nothing to give.
Each child blesses himself as he goes in. Each _bambino_ has the picture
of its patron saint swung about its neck. The men are out at the
_festa_, the women not home from confession, and there is not a _soldo_
for priest or pastor in all this evil village of Spellino!"

Father Philip paused to chuckle in some admiration at such abounding
cleverness in his parish.

"How then do you live, either of you?" I asked, for the matter was
certainly curious.

The father looked at us.

"You are going on directly?" he said, in a subdued manner.

"Immediately," we said, "when we have tired out your excellent
hospitality."

"Then I shall tell you. The manner of it is this. My friend
Gentinetta;--he is my friend, and an excellent one in this world, though
it is likely that our paths may not lie together in the next, if all be
true that the Pope preaches. We two have a convention, which is private
and not to be named. It is permitted to circumvent the wicked, and to
drive the reluctant sheep by innocent craft.

"Now, Pastor Gentinetta has the advantage of me during the life of his
people. It is indeed a curious thing that these heretics are eager to
partake of the untransformed and unblessed sacraments, which are no
sacraments. It is the strangest thing! I who preach the truth cannot
drive my people with whips of scorpions to the blessed sacraments of
Holy Church. They will not go for whip or cord. But these heretics will
mourn for days if they be not admitted to their table of communion. It
is one of the mysterious things of God. But, after all, it is a lucky
thing," soliloquised Father Philip; "for what does my friend do when
they come to him for their cards of communion, but turns up his book of
stipend and statute dues. Says he--'My friend, such and such dues are
wanting. A good Christian cannot sit down at the sacrament without
clearing himself with God, and especially with His messenger.' So there
he has them, and they pay up, and often make him a present besides. For
such threats my rascals would not care one black and rotten fig."

"But how," said I in great astonishment, "does this affect you?"

"Gently and soothly," said the priest. "Wait and ye shall hear. If the
pastor has the pull over me in life, when it comes to sickness, and the
thieves get the least little look within the Black Doors that only open
the one way--I have rather the better of my friend. It is my time then.
My fellows indeed care no button to come to holy sacrament. They need to
be paid to come. But, grace be to God for His unspeakable mercy, Holy
Church and I between us have made them most consumedly afraid of the
world that is to come. And with reason!"

Father Philip waited to chuckle.

"But Gentinetta's people have everything so neatly settled for them long
before, that they part content without so much as a 'by your leave' or
the payment of a death-duty. Not so, however, the true believer. He hath
heard of Purgatory and the warmth and comfort thereof. Of the other
place, too, he has heard. He may have scorned and mocked in his days of
lightsome ease, but down below in the roots of his heart he believes.
Oh, yes, he believes and trembles; then he sends for me, and I go!

"'Confession--it is well, my son! extreme unction, the last sacraments
of the Church--better and better! But, my son, there is some small
matter of tithes and dues standing in my book against thy name. Dost
thou wish to go a debtor before the Judge? Alas! how can I give thee
quittance of the heavenly dues, when thou hast not cleared thyself of
the dues of earth?' Then there is a scramble for the old canvas bag from
its hiding-place behind the ingle-nook. A small remembrance to Holy
Church and to me, her minister, can do no harm, and may do much good.
Follows confession, absolution--and, comforted thus, the soul passes; or
bides to turn Protestant the next time that my assessor calls. It
matters not; I have the dues."

"But," said I, "we have here two things that are hard to put together.
In a time of health, when there is no sickness in the land, thou must go
hungry. And when sickness comes, and the pastor's flock are busy with
their dying, they will have no time to go to communion. How are these
things arranged?"

"Even thus," replied Father Philip. "It is agreed upon that we pool the
proceeds and divide fairly, so that our incomes are small but regular.
Yet, I beseech thee, tell it not in this municipality, nor yet in the
next village; for in the public places we scowl at one another as we
pass by, Pastor Gentinetta and I."

"And which is earning the crust now?" said I.

The jovial priest laughed, nodding sagely with his head.

"Gentinetta hath his sacraments on Tuesday, and his addresses to his
folk have been full of pleasant warnings. It will be a good time with
us."

"And when comes your turn?" cried Henry, who was much interested by this
recital.

"There cometh at the end of the barley harvest, by the grace of God, a
fat time of sickness, when many dues are paid; and when the addresses
from the altar of this Church of Sant Philip are worth the hearing."

The old priest moved the glass of good wine at his elbow, the fellow of
the Montepulciano he had set at ours.

"A bad town this Spellino," he muttered; "but I, Father Philip, thank
the saints--and Gentinetta, he thanks his mother, for the wit which
makes it possible for poor servants of God to live."

The old servant thrust her head within.

"Tonino Scala is very sick," she said, "and calleth for thee!"

The priest nodded, rose from his seat, and took down a thick
leather-bound book.

"Lire thirty-six," he said--"it is well. It begins to be my time. This
week Gentinetta and his younglings shall have chicken-broth."

So with heartiest goodwill we bade our kind Father Philip adieu, and
fared forth upon our way.




CHAPTER V

THE COUNTESS CASTEL DEL MONTE


After leaving Spellino we went downhill. There was a plain beneath, but
up on the hillside only the sheep were feeding contentedly, all with
their broad-tailed sterns turned to us. The sun was shining on the white
diamond-shaped causeway stones which led across a marshy place. We came
again to the foot of the hill. It had indeed been no more than a
dividing ridge, which we had crossed over by Spellino.

We saw the riband of the road unwind before us. One turn swerved out of
sight, and one alone. But round this curve, out of the unseen, there
came toward us the trampling of horses. A carriage dashed forward, the
coachman's box empty, the reins flying wide among the horses' feet.
There was but little time for thought; yet as they passed I caught at
their heads, for I was used to horses. Then I hung well back, allowing
myself to be jerked forward in great leaps, yet never quite loosing my
hold. It was but a chance, yet a better one than it looked.

At the turn of the road towards Spellino I managed to set their heads to
the hill, and the steep ascent soon brought the stretching gallop of the
horses to a stand-still.

It seemed a necessary thing that there should be a lady inside. I should
have been content with any kind of lady, but this one was both fair and
young, though neither discomposed nor terrified, as in such cases is
the custom.

"I trust Madame is not disarranged," I said in my poor French, as I went
from the horses' heads to the carriage and assisted the lady to alight.

"It serves me right for bringing English horses here without a coachman
to match," she said in excellent English. "Such international
misalliances do not succeed. Italian horses would not have startled at
an old beggar in a red coat, and an English coachman would not have
thrown down the reins and jumped into the ditch. Ah, here we have our
Beppo"--she turned to a flying figure, which came labouring up hill. To
him the lady gave the charge of the panting horses, to me her hand.

"I must trouble you for your safe-conduct to the hotel," she said. Now,
though her words were English, her manner of speech was not.

By this time Henry had come up, and him I had to present, which was like
to prove a difficulty to me, who did not yet know the name of the lady.
But she, seeing my embarrassment, took pity on me, saying--

"I am the Countess Castel del Monte," looking at me out of eyes so
broadly dark, that they seemed in certain lights violet, like the deeps
of the wine-hearted Greek sea.

By this time Beppo had the horses well under control, and at the lady's
invitation we all got into the carriage. She desired, she said, that her
brother should thank us.

We went upwards, turning suddenly into a lateral valley. Here there was
an excellent road, better than the Government highway. We had not driven
many miles when we came in sight of a house, which seemed half Italian
_palazzo_ and half Swiss cottage, yet which had nevertheless an
undefined air of England. There were balconies all about it, and long
rows of windows.

It did not look like a private house, and Henry and I gazed at it with
great curiosity. For me, I had already resolved that if it chanced to be
a hotel, we should lodge there that night.

The Countess talked to us all the way, pointing out the objects of
interest in the long row of peaks which backed the Val Bergel with their
snows and flashing Alpine steeps. I longed to ask a question, but dared
not. "Hotel" was what she had said, yet this place had scarcely the look
of one. But she afforded us an answer of her own accord.

"You must know that my brother has a fancy of playing at landlord," she
said, looking at us in a playful way. "He has built a hostel for the
English and the Italians of the Court. It was to be a new Paris, was it
not so? And no doubt it would have been, but that the distance was over
great. It was indeed almost a Paris in the happy days of one summer. But
since then I have been almost the only guest."

"It is marvellously beautiful," I replied. "I would that we might be
permitted to become guests as well."

"As to that, my brother will have no objections, I am sure," replied the
Countess, "specially if you tell your countrymen on your return to your
own country. He counts on the English to get him his money back. The
French have no taste for scenery. They care only for theatres and pretty
women, and the Italians have no money--alas! poor Castel del Monte!"

I understood that she was referring to her husband, and said hastily--

"Madame is Italian?"

"Who knows?" she returned, with a pretty, indescribable movement of her
shoulders. "My father was a Russian of rank. He married an Englishwoman.
I was born in Italy, educated in England. I married an Italian of rank
at seventeen; at nineteen I found myself a widow, and free to choose the
world as my home. Since then I have lived as an Englishwoman
expatriated--for she of all human beings is the freest."

I looked at her for explanation. Henry, whose appreciation of women was
for the time-being seared by his recent experience of Madame of the Red
Eyelids, got out to assist Beppo with the horses. In a little I saw him
take the reins. We were going slowly uphill all the time.

"In what way," I said, "is the Englishwoman abroad the freest of all
human beings?"

"Because, being English, she is supposed to be a little mad at any rate.
Secondly, because she is known to be rich, for all English are rich.
And, lastly, because she is recognised to be a woman of sense and
discretion, having the wisdom to live out of her own country."

We arrived on the sweep of gravel before the door. I was astonished at
the decorations. Upon a flat plateau of small extent, which lay along
the edge of a small mountain lake, gravelled paths cut the green sward
in every direction. The waters of the lake had been carefully led here
and there, in order apparently that they might be crossed by rustic
bridges which seemed transplanted from an opera. Little windmills made
pretty waterwheels to revolve, which in turn set in motion mechanical
toys and models of race-courses in open booths and gaily painted
summer-houses.

"You must not laugh," said the Countess gravely, seeing me smile, "for
this, you must know, is a mixture of the courts of Italy and Russia
among the Alps. It is to my brother a very serious matter. To me it is
the Fair of Asnières and the madhouse at Charenton rolled into one."

I remarked that she did the place scant justice.

"Oh," she said, "the place is lovely enough, and in a little while one
becomes accustomed to the tomfoolery."

We ascended the steps. At the top stood a small dark man, with a flash
in his eyes which I recognised as kin to the glance which Madame the
Countess shot from hers, save that the eyes of the man were black as
jet.

"These gentlemen," said the Countess, "are English. They are travelling
for their pleasure, and one of them stopped my stupid horses when the
stupider Beppo let them run away, and jumped himself into the ditch to
save his useless skin. You will thank the gentlemen for me, Nicholas."

The small dark man bowed low, yet with a certain reserve.

"You are welcome, messieurs," he said in English, spoken with a very
strong foreign accent. "I am greatly in your debt that you have been of
service to my sister."

He bowed again to both of us, without in the least distinguishing which
of us had done the service, which I thought unfair.

"It is my desire," he went on more freely, as one that falls into a
topic upon which he is accustomed to speak, "that English people should
be made aware of the beauty of this noble plateau of Promontonio. It is
a favourable chance which brings you here. Will you permit me to show
you the hotel?"

He paused as though he felt the constraint of the circumstances. "Here,
you understand, gentlemen, I am a hotel-keeper. In my own country--that
is another matter. I trust, gentlemen, I may receive you some day in my
own house in the province of Kasan."

"It will make us but too happy," said I, "if in your capacity as
landlord you can permit us to remain a few days in this paradise."

I saw Henry look at me in some astonishment; but his training forbade
him to make any reply, and the little noble landlord was too obviously
pleased to do more than bow. He rang a bell and called a very
distinguished gentleman in a black dress-coat, whose spotless attire
made our rough outfit look exceedingly disreputable, and the knapsacks
upon our backs no less than criminal. We decided to send at once to Vico
Averso for our baggage.

But these very eccentricities riveted the admiration of our
distinguished host, for only the mad English would think of tramping
through the Val Bergel in the heart of May with a donkey's load on their
backs. Herr Gutwein, a mild, spectacled German, and the manager of this
cosmopolitan palace, was instructed to show us to the best rooms in the
house. From him we learned that the hotel was nearly empty, but that it
was being carried on at great loss, in the hope of ultimate success.

We found it indeed an abode of garish luxury. In the great salon, the
furniture was crimson velvet and gold. All the chairs were gilt. The
very table-legs were gilded. There were clocks chiming and ticking
everywhere, no one of them telling the right time. In the bedrooms,
which were lofty and spacious, there were beautiful canopies, and the
most recent improvements for comfort. The sitting-rooms had glass
observatories built out, like swallows' nests plastered against the
sides of the house. Blue Vallauris vases were set in the corners and
filled with flowers. Turkey carpets of red and blue covered the floor.
Marvellous gold-worked tablecloths from Smyrna were on the tables.
Everywhere there was a tinge of romance made real--the dream of many
luxuries and civilisations transplanted and etherealised among the
mountains.

Then, when we had asked the charges for the rooms and found them
exceedingly reasonable, we received from the excellent Herr Gutwein much
information.

The hotel was the favourite hobby of Count Nicholas. It was the dream of
his life that he should make it pay. While he lived in it, he paid
tariff for his rooms and all that he had. His sister also did the same,
and all her suite. Indeed, the working expenses were at present paid by
Madame the Countess of Castel del Monte, who was a half-sister of Count
Nicholas, and much younger. The husband of Madame was dead some years.
She had been married when no more than a girl to an Italian of thrice
her age. He, dying in the second year of their marriage, had left her
free to please herself as to what she did with her large fortune. Madame
was rich, eccentric, generous; but to men generally more than a little
sarcastic and cold.

At dinner that night Count Nicholas took the head of the table, while
Dr. Carson, the resident English physician, sat at his left hand, and
Madame at his right. I sat next to the Countess, and Henry Fenwick next
to the doctor. We made a merry party. The Count opened for us a bottle
of Forzato and another of Sassella, of the quaint, untranslatable
bouquet which will not bear transportation over the seas, and to taste
which you must go to the Swiss confines of the Valtellina.

"Lucia," said Count Nicholas, "you will join me in a bottle of the Straw
wine in honour of the stopping of the horses; and you will drink to the
health of these gentlemen who are with us, to whom we owe so much."
Afterwards we drank to Madame, to the Count himself, and to the
interests of science in the person of the doctor. Then finally we
pledged the common good of the hotel and kursaal of the Promontonio.

The Countess was dressed in some rose-coloured fabric, thickly draped
with black lace, through whose folds the faint pink blush struggled
upward with some suggestion of rose fragrance, so sheathed was she in
close-fitting drapery. She looked still a very girl, though there was
the slower grace of womanhood in the lissom turn of her figure, slender
and _svelte_. Her blue-black hair had purple lights in it. And her great
dark violet eyes were soft as La Vallière's. I know not why, but to
myself I called her from that moment, "My Lady of the Violet Crown."
There was a passion-flower in her hair, and on her pale face her lips,
perfectly shaped, lay like the twin petals of a geranium flower fallen a
little apart.

Dinner was over. The lingering lights of May were shining through the
hill gaps, glorifying the scant woods and the little mountain lake.
Henry Fenwick and the Count were soon deep in shooting and
breechloaders. Presently they disappeared in the direction of the
Count's rooms to examine some new and beautiful specimens more at their
leisure.

In an hour Henry came rushing back to us in great excitement.

"I have written for all my things from Lago d'Istria," he said, "and I
am getting my guns from home. There is some good shooting, the Count
says. Do you object to us staying here a little time?"

I did not contradict him, for indeed such a new-born desire to abide in
one place was at that moment very much to my mind. And though I could
not conceive what, save rabbits, there could be to shoot in May on a
sub-Alpine hillside, I took care not to say a word which might damp my
pupil's excellent enthusiasms.




CHAPTER VI

LOVE ME A LITTLE--NOT TOO MUCH


I stood by the wooden pillars of the wide piazza and watched the stars
come out. Presently a door opened and the Countess appeared. She had a
black shawl of soft lace about her head, which came round her shoulders
and outlined her figure.

I knew that this must be that mantilla of Spain of which I had read, and
which I had been led to conceive of as a clumsy and beauty-concealing
garment, like the _yashmak_ of the Turks. But the goodliness of the
picture was such that in my own country I had never seen green nor grey
which set any maid one-half so well.

"Let us walk by the lake," she said, "and listen to the night."

So quite naturally I offered her my arm, and she took it as though it
were a nothing hardly to be perceived. Yet in Galloway of the hills it
would have taken me weeks even to conceive myself offering an arm to a
beautiful woman. Here such things were in the air. Nevertheless was my
heart beating wildly within me, like a bird's wings that must perforce
pulsate faster in a rarer atmosphere. So I held my arm a little wide of
my side lest she should feel my heart throbbing. Foolish youth! As
though any woman does not know, most of all one who is beautiful. So
there on my arm, light and white as the dropped feather of an angel's
wing, her hand rested. It was bare, and a diamond shone upon it.

The lake was a steel-grey mirror where it took the light of the sky.
But in the shadows it was dark as night. The evening was very still, and
only the Thal wind drew upward largely and contentedly.

"Tell me of yourself!" she said, as soon as we had passed from under the
shelter of the hotel.

I hesitated, for indeed it seemed a strange thing to speak to so great a
lady concerning the little moorland home, of my mother, and all the
simple people out there upon the hills of sheep.

The Countess looked up at me, and I saw a light shine in the depths of
her eyes.

"You have a mother--tell me of her!" she said.

So I told her in simple words a tale which I had spoken of to no one
before--of slights and scorns, for she was a woman, and understood. It
came into my mind as I spoke that as soon as I had finished she would
leave me; and I slackened my arm that she might the more easily withdraw
her hand. But yet I spoke on faithfully, hiding nothing. I told of our
poverty, of the struggle with the hill-farm and the backward seasons, of
my mother who looked over the moorland with sweet tired eyes as for some
one that came not. I spoke of the sheep that had been my care, of the
books I had read on the heather, and of all the mystery and the sadness
of our life.

Then we fell silent, and the shadows of the sadness I had left behind me
seemed to shut out the kindly stars. I would have taken my arm away, but
that the Countess drew it nearer to herself, clasping her hands about
it, and said softly--

"Tell me more--" and then, after a little pause, she added, "and you may
call me Lucia! For have you not saved my life?"

Like a dream the old Edinburgh room, where with Giovanni Turazza I read
the Tuscan poets, came to me. An ancient rhyme was in my head, and ere
I was aware I murmured--

"Saint Lucy of the Eyes!"

The Countess started as if she had been stung.

"No, not that--not that," she said; "I am not good enough."

There was some meaning in the phrase to her which was not known to me.

"You are good enough to be an angel--I am sure," I said--foolishly, I
fear.

There was a little silence, and a waft of scented air like balm--I think
the perfume of her hair, or it may have been the roses clambering on the
wall. I know not. We were passing some.

"No," she said, very firmly, "not so, nor nearly so--only good enough to
desire to be better, and to walk here with you and listen to you telling
of your mother."

We walked on thus till we heard the roar of the Trevisa falls, and then
turned back, pacing slowly along the shore. The Countess kept her head
hid beneath the mantilla, but swayed a little towards me as though
listening. And I spoke out my heart to her as I had never done before.
Many of the things I said to her then, caused me to blush at the
remembrance of them for many days after. But under the hush of night,
with her hands pressing on my arm, the perfume of flowers in the air,
and a warm woman's heart beating so near mine, it is small wonder that I
was not quite myself. At last, all too soon, we came to the door, and
the Countess stood to say good-night.

"Good-night!" she said, giving me her hand and looking up, yet staying
me with her great eyes; "good-night, friend of mine! You saved my life
to-day, or at least I hold it so. It is not much to save, and I did not
value it highly, but you were not to know that. You have told me much,
and I think I know more. You are young. Twenty-three is childhood. I am
twenty-six, and ages older than you. Remember, you are not to fall in
love with me. You have never been in love, I know. You do not know what
it is. So you must not grow to love me--or, at least, not too much. Then
you will be ready when the True Love that waits somewhere comes your
way."

She left me standing without a word. She ran up the steps swiftly. On
the topmost she poised a moment, as a bird does for flight.

"Good-night, Douglas!" she said. "Stephen is a name too common for
you--I shall call you Douglas. Remember, you must love me a little--but
not too much."

I stood dull and stupid, in a maze of whirling thought. My great lady
had suddenly grown human, but human of a kind that I had had no
conception of. Only this morning I had been opening the stores of very
chill wisdom to my pupil, Henry Fenwick of Allerton. Yet here, long ere
night was at its zenith, was I, standing amazed, trying under the stars
to remember exactly what a woman had said, and how she looked when she
said it.

"To love her a little--yet not to love her too much."

That was the difficult task she had set me. How to perform I knew not.

At the top of the steps I met Henry.

"Do you think that we need go on to-morrow morning?" he said. "Do you
not think we are in a very good quarter of the world, and that we might
do worse than stop a while?"

"If you wish it, I have no objections," I said, with due caution.

"Thank you!" he said, and ran off to give some further directions about
his guns.




CHAPTER VII

THE NEW DAY


It need not be wondered at that during the night I slept little. It
seemed such a strange thing which had happened to me. That a great lady
should lean upon my arm--a lady of whom before that day I had never
heard--seemed impossible to my slow-moving Scots intelligence.

I sat most of the night by my window, from which I looked down the
valley. The moonlight was filling it. The stars tingled keen and frosty
above. Lucent haze of colourless pearl-grey filled the chasm. On the
horizon there was a flush of rose, in the midst of which hung a snowy
peak like a wave arrested when it curves to break, and on the upmost
surge of white winked a star.

I opened the casement and flung it back. The cool, icy air of night took
hold on me. I listened. There came from below the far sound of falling
waters. Nearer at hand a goat bleated keenly. A dull, muffled sound,
vast and mysterious, rose slumberously. I remembered that I was near to
the great Alps. Without doubt it was the rumble of an avalanche.

But more than all these things,--under this roof, closed within the
white curtains, was the woman who with her well-deep, serene eyes had
looked into my life.

"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow!" I said to myself, seeing the
possibilities waver and thicken before me. So I went to my bed, leaving
the window open, and after a time slept.

But very early I was astir. The lake lay asleep. The shadows in its
depths dreamed on untroubled. There was not the lapse of a wavelet on
the shore. The stars diminished to pin-points, and wistfully withdrew
themselves into the coming mystery of blue. Behind the eastern mountains
the sun rose--not yet on us who were in the valley, but flooding the
world overhead with intense light. On the second floor a casement opened
and a blind was drawn aside. There was nothing more--a serving-maid,
belike. But my heart beat tumultuously.

_Nova dies_ indeed, but I fear me not _nova quies_. But when ever to a
man was love a synonym for quietness? Quietness is rest. Rest is
embryonic sleep. Sleep is death's brother. But, contrariwise, love to a
man is life--new life. Life is energy--the opening of new possibilities,
the breaking of ancient habitudes. Sulky self-satisfactions are hunted
from their lair. Sloth is banished, selfishness done violence to with
swiftest poniard-stroke.

Again, even to a passionate woman love is rest. That low sigh which
comes from her when, after weary waiting, at last her lips prove what
she has long expected, is the sigh for rest achieved. There is indeed
nothing that she does not know. But, for her, knowledge is not
enough--she desires possession. The poorest man is glorified when she
takes him to her heart. She desires no longer to doubt and fret--only to
rest and to be quiet. A woman's love when she is true is like a heaven
of Sabbaths. A man's, at his best, like a Monday morn when the work of
day and week begins. For love, to a true man, is above all things a call
to work. And this is more than enough of theory.

Once I was in a manufacturing city when the horns of the factories blew,
and in every street there was the noise of footsteps moving to the work
of the day. It struck me as infinitely cheerful. All these many men had
the best of reasons for working. Behind them, as they came out into the
chill morning air, they shut-to the doors upon wife and children. Why
should they not work? Why should they desire to be idle? Had I,
methought, such reasons and pledges for work, I should never be idle,
and therefore never unhappy. For me, I choose a Monday morning of work
with the whistles blowing, and men shutting their doors behind them. For
that is what I mean by love.

All this came back to me as I walked alone by the lake while the day was
breaking behind the mountains.

As though she had heard the trumpet of my heart calling her, she came. I
did not see her till she was near me on the gravel path which leads to
the châlet by the lake. There was a book of devotion in her hand. It was
marked with a cross. I had forgotten my prayers that morning till I saw
this.

Yet I hardly felt rebuked, for it was morning and the day was before me.
With so much that was new, the old could well wait a little. For which I
had bitterly to repent.

She looked beyond conception lovely as she came towards me. Taller than
I had thought, for I had not seen her--you must remember--since. It
seemed to me that in the night she had been recreated, and came forth
fresh as Eve from the Eden sleep. Her eyelashes were so long that they
swept her cheeks; and her eyes, that I had thought to be violet, had now
the sparkle in them which you may see in the depths of the southern sea
just where the sapphire changes into amethyst.

Did we say good-morning? I forget, and it matters little. We were
walking together. How light the air was!--cool and rapturous like
snow-chilled wine that is drunk beneath the rose at thirsty Teheran. The
ground on which we trod, too, how strangely elastic! The pine-trees
give out how good a smell! Is my heart beating at all, or only so fine
and quick that I cannot count its pulsings?

What is she saying--this lady of mine? I am not speaking aloud--only
thinking. Cannot I think?

She told me, I believe, why she had come out. I have forgotten why. It
was her custom thus to walk in the prime. She had still the mantilla
over her head, which, as soon as the sun looked over the eastern crest
of the mountains, she let drop on her shoulders and so walked
bareheaded, with her head carried a trifle to the side and thrown back,
so that her little rounded chin was in the air.

"I have thought," she was saying when I came to myself, "all the night
of what you told me of your home on the hills. It must be happiness of
the greatest and most perfect, to be alone there with the voices of
nature--the birds crying over the heather and the cattle in the fields."

"Good enough," I said, "it is for us moorland folk who know nothing
better than each other's society--the bleating sheep to take us out upon
the hills and the lamp-light streaming through the door as we return
homewards."

"There is nothing better in this world!" said the Countess with
emphasis.

But just then I was not at all of that mind.

"Ah, you think so," said I, "because you do not know the hardness of the
life and its weary sameness. It is better to be free to wander where you
will, in this old land of enchantments, where each morning brings a new
joy and every sun a clear sky."

"You are young--young," she said, shaking her head musingly, "and you do
not know. I am old. I have tried many ways of life, and I know."

It angered me thus to hear her speak of being old. It seemed to put her
far from me I remembered afterwards that I spoke with some sharpness,
like a petulant boy.

"You are not so much older than I, and a great lady cannot know of the
hardness of the life of those who have to earn their daily bread."

She smiled in an infinitely patient way behind her eyelashes.

"Douglas," she said, "I have earned my living for more years than the
difference of age that is between us."

I looked at her in amazement, but she went on--

"In my brother's country, which is Russia, we are not secure of what is
our own, even for a day. We may well pray there for our daily bread. In
Russia we learn the meaning of the Lord's Prayer."

"But have you not," I asked, "great possessions in Italy?"

"I have," the Countess said, "an estate here that is my own, and many
anxieties therewith. Also I have, at present, the command of
wealth--which I have never yet seen bring happiness. But for all, I
would that I dwelt on the wide moors and baked my own bread."

I did not contradict her, seeing that her heart was set on such things;
nevertheless, I knew better than she.

"You do not believe!" she said suddenly, for I think from the first she
read my heart like a printed book. "You do not understand! Well, I do
not ask you to believe. You do not know me yet, though I know you. Some
day you will have proof!"

"I believe everything you tell me," I answered fervently.

"Remember," she said, lifting a finger at me--"only enough and not too
much. Tell me what is your idea of the place where I could be happy."

This I could answer, for I had thought of it.

"In a town of clear rivers and marble palaces," I answered, "where
there are brave knights to escort fair ladies and save them from harm.
In a city where to be a woman is to be honoured, and to be young is to
be loved."

"And you, young seer, that are of the moorland and the heather," she
said, "where would you be in such a city?"

"As for me," I said, "I would stand far off and watch you as you passed
by."

"Ah, Messer Dante Alighieri, do not make a mistake. I am no Beatrice. I
love not chill aloofness. I am but Lucia, here to-day and gone
to-morrow. But rather than all rhapsodies, I would that you were just my
friend, and no further off than where I can reach you my hand and you
can take it."

So saying, because we came to the little bridge where the pines meet
overhead, she reached me her hand at the word; and as it lay in mine I
stooped and kissed it, which seemed the most natural thing in the world
to do.

She looked at me earnestly, and I thought there was a reproachful pity
in her eyes.

"Friend of mine, you will keep your promise," she said. I knew well
enough what promise it was that she meant.

"Fear not," I replied; "I promise and I keep."

Yet all the while my heart was busy planning how through all the future
I might abide near by her side.

We turned and walked slowly back. The hotel stood clear and sharp in the
morning sunshine, and a light wind was making the little waves plash on
the pebbles with a pleasant clapping sound.

"See," she said, "here is my brother coming to meet us. Tell me if you
have been happy this morning?"

"Oh," I said quickly, "happy!--you know that without needing to be
told."

"No matter what I know," the Countess said, with a certain petulance,
swift and lovable--"tell it me."

So I said obediently, yet as one that means his words to the full--

"I have been happier than ever I thought to be this morning!"

"Lucia!" she said softly--"say Lucia!"

"Lucia!" I answered to her will; yet I thought she did not well to try
me so hard.

Then her brother came up briskly and heartily, like one who had been
a-foot many hours, asking us how we did.




CHAPTER VIII

THE CRIMSON SHAWL


Henry Fenwick and the Count went shooting. He came and asked my leave as
one who is uncertain of an answer. And I gave it guiltily, saying to
myself that anything which took his mind off Madame Von Eisenhagen was
certainly good. But there leaped in my heart a great hope that, in what
remained of the day, I might again see the Countess.

I was grievously disappointed. For though I lounged all the afternoon in
the pleasant spaces by the lake, only the servants, of the great empty
hotel passed at rare intervals. Of Lucia I saw nothing, till the Count
and Henry passed in with their guns and found me with my book.

"Have you been alone all the afternoon?" they said, innocently enough.
And it was some consolation to answer "Yes," and so to receive their
sympathy.

Henry came again to me after dinner. The Count was going over the hills
to the Forno glacier, and had asked him; but he would not go unless I
wished it. I bade him take my blessing and depart, and again he thanked
me.

There was that night a band of thirty excellent performers to discourse
music to the guests at the table--being, as the saw says, us four and no
more. But the Count was greatly at his ease, and told us tales of the
forests of Russia, of wolf-hunts, and of other hunts when the wolves
were the hunters--tales to make the blood run cold, yet not amiss being
recounted over a bottle of Forzato in the bright dining-room. For,
though it was the beginning of May, the fire was sparkling and roaring
upwards to dispel the chill which fell with the evening in these high
regions.

There is talk of mountaineering and of the English madness for it. The
Count and Henry Fenwick are on a side. Henry has been over long by
himself on the Continent. He is at present all for sport. Every day he
must kill something, that he may have something to show. The Countess is
for the hills, as I am, and the _élan_ of going ever upward. So we fall
to talk about the mountains that are about us, and the Count says that
it is an impossibility to climb them at this season of the year.
Avalanches are frequent, and the cliffs are slippery with the daily
sun-thaw congealing in thin sheets upon the rocks. He tells us that
there is one peak immediately behind the hotel which yet remains
unclimbed. It is the Piz Langrev, and it rises like a tower. No man
could climb that mural precipice and live.

I tell them that I have never climbed in this country; but that I do not
believe that there is a peak in, the world which cannot in some fashion
or another be surmounted--time, money, and pluck being provided
wherewith to do it.

"You have a fine chance, my friend," says the Count kindly, "for you
will be canonised by the guides if you find a way up the front of the
Langrev. They would at once clap on a tariff which would make their
fortunes, in order to tempt your wise countrymen, who are willing to pay
vast sums to have the risk of breaking their necks, yet who will not
invest in the best property in Switzerland when it is offered to them
for a song."

The Count is a little sore about his venture and its ill success.

The Countess, who sits opposite to me to-night, looks across and says,
"I am sure that the peak can be climbed. If Mr. Douglas says so, it
can."

"I thank you, Madame," I say, bowing across at her.

Whereat the other two exclaim. It is (they say) but an attempt on my
part to claim credit with a lady, who is naturally on the side of the
adventurous. The thing is impossible.

"Countess," say I, piqued by their insistency, "if you will give me a
favour to be my _drapeau de guerre_, in twenty-four hours I shall plant
your colours on the battlements of the Piz Langrev."

Certainly the Forzato had been excellent.

The Countess Lucia handed a crimson shawl, which had fallen back from
her shoulders, and which now hung over the back of her chair, across the
table to me.

"They are my colours!" she said, with a light in her eye as though she
had been royalty itself.

Now, I had studied the Piz Langrev that afternoon, and I was sure it
could be done. I had climbed the worst precipices in the Dungeon of
Buchan, and looked into the nest of the eagle on the Clints of Craignaw.
It was not likely that I would come to any harm so long as there was a
foothold or an armhold on the face of the cliff. At least, my idiotic
pique had now pledged me to the attempt, as well as my pride, for above
all things I desired to stand well in the eyes of the Countess.

But when we had risen from table, and in the evening light took our
walk, she repented her of the giving of the gage, and said that the
danger was too great. I must forget it--how could she bear the anxiety
of waiting below while I was climbing the rocks of the Piz Langrev? It
pleased me to hear her say so, but for all that my mind was not turned
away from my endeavour.

It was a foolish thing that I had undertaken, but it sprang upon me in
the way of talk. So many follies are committed because we men fear to go
back upon our word. The privilege of woman works the other way. Which is
as well, for the world would come to a speedy end if men and women were
to be fools according to the same follies.

The Countess was quieter to-night. Perhaps she felt that her
encouragement had led me into some danger. Yet she had that sense of the
binding nature of the "passed word," which is perhaps strongest in women
who are by nature and education cosmopolitan. She did not any more
persuade me against my attempt, and soon went within. She had said
little, and we had walked along together for the most part silent.
Methought the stars were not so bright to-night, and the glamour had
gone from the bridge under which the water was dashing white.

I also returned, for I had my arrangements to make for the expedition.
The weather did not look very promising, for the Thal wind was bringing
the heavy mist-spume pouring over the throat of the pass, and driving
past the hotel in thin hissing wisps on a chill breeze. However, even in
May the frost was keen at night, and to-morrow might be a day after the
climber's heart.

I sought the manager in his sanctum of polished wood--a _comptoir_ where
there was little to count. Managers were a fleeting race in the Kursaal
Promontonio. The Count was a kind master. But he was a Russian, and a
taskmaster like those of Egypt, in that he expected his managers to make
the bricks of dividends without the straw of visitors. With him I
covenanted to be roused at midnight.

Herr Gutwein was somewhat unwilling. He had not so many visitors that he
could afford to expend one on the cliffs of the Piz Langrev.

I looked out on the lake and the mountains from the window of my room
before I turned in. They did not look encouraging.

Hardly, it seemed, had my head touched the pillow, when "clang, clang"
went some one on my door. "It is half-past twelve, Herr, and time to get
up!"

I saw the frost-flowers on the window-pane, and shivered. Yet there was
the laughter of Henry and the Count to be faced; and, above all, I had
passed my word to Lucia.

"Well, I suppose I may as well get up and take a look at the thing, any
way. Perhaps it may be snowing," I said, with a devout hope that the
blinds of mist or storm might be drawn down close about the mountains.

But, pushing aside the green window-blind, I saw all the stars
twinkling; and the broad moon, a little worm-eaten about the upper edge,
was flinging a pale light over the Forno glacier and the thick pines
that hide Lake Cavaloccia.

"Ah, it is cold!" I flung open the hot-air register, but the fires were
out and the engineer asleep, for a draft of icy wind came up--direct
from the snowfields. I slammed it down, for the mercury in my
thermometer was falling so rapidly that I seemed to hear it tap-tapping
on the bottom of the scale.

Below there was a sleepy porter, who with the utmost gruffness produced
some lukewarm coffee, with stale, dry slices of over-night bread, and
flavoured the whole with an evil-smelling lamp.

"Shriekingly cold, Herr; yes, it is so in here!" he said in answer to my
complaints. "Yes--but, it is warm to what it will be up there outside."

The pack was donned. The double stockings, the fingerless woollen gloves
were put on, and the earflaps of the cap were drawn down. The door was
opened quietly, and the chill outer air met us like a wall.

"A good journey, my Herr!" said the porter, a mocking accent in his
voice--the rascal.

I strode from under the dark shadow of the hotel, wondering if Lucia was
asleep behind her curtains over the porch.




CHAPTER IX

THE PIZ LANGREV


Past the waterfall and over the bridge--our bridge--ran the path. As I
turned my face to the mountain, there was a strange constricted feeling
about one corner of my mouth, to which I put up a mittened hand. A small
icicle fell tinkling down. My feet were now beginning to get a little
warm, but I felt uncertain whether my ears were hot or cold. There was a
strange unattached feeling about them. Had I not been reading somewhere
of a mountaineer who had some such feeling? He put his hand to his ear
and broke off a piece as one breaks a bit of biscuit. A horrid thought,
but one which assuredly stimulates attention.

Then I took off one glove and rubbed the ear vigorously with the warm
palm of my hand. There was a tingling glow, as though some one were
striking lucifer matches all along the rim; soon there was no doubt that
the circulation was effectually restored. _En avant!_ Ears are useless
things at the best.

I kept my head down, climbing steadily. But with the tail of my eye I
could see that the hills had a sprinkling of snow--the legacy of the
Thal wind which last night brought the moisture up the valley. Only the
crags of the Piz Langrev were black above me, with a few white streaks
in the crevices where the snow lies all the year. The cliffs were too
steep for the snow to lie upon them, the season too far advanced for it
to remain on the lower slopes.

The moon was lying over on her back, and the stars tingled through the
frosty air. The lake lay black beneath on a grey world, plain as a blot
of ink on a boy's copybook.

Yet I had only been climbing among the rocks a very few moments when
every nerve was thrilling with warmth and all the arteries of the body
were filled with a rushing tide of jubilant life. "This is noble!" I
said to myself, as if I had never had a thought of retreat. A glow of
heat came through my woollen gloves from the black rocks up which I
climbed.

But I had gradually been getting out of the clear path on the face of
the rocks into a kind of gully. I did not like the look of the place.
There was a ground and polished look about the rocks at the sides which
did not please me. I have seen the like among the Clints of Minnigaff,
where the spouts of shingle make their way over the cliff. In the cleft
was a kind of curious snow, dry like sand, creaking and binding together
under foot--amazingly like pounded ice.

In the twinkling of an eye I had proof that I was right. There was a
kind of slushy roaring above, a sharp crack or two as of some monster
whip, and a sudden gust filled the gully. There was just time for me to
throw myself sideways into a convenient cleft, and to draw feet up as
close to chin as possible, when that hollow which had seemed my path,
and high up the ravine on either side, was filled with tumbling, hissing
snow, while the rocks on either side echoed with the musketry spatter of
stones and ice-pellets.

I felt something cold on my temple. As the glove came down from touching
it, there was a stain on the wool. A button of ice, no larger than a
shilling, spinning on its edge, had neatly clipped a farthing's-worth
out of the skin--as neatly as the house-surgeon of an hospital could do
it.

At this point the story of a good Highland minister came up in my mind
inopportunely, as these things will. He was endeavouring to steer a
boat-load of city young ladies to a landing-place. A squall was
bursting; the harbour was difficult. One of the girls annoyed him by
jumping up and calling anxiously, "O, where are we going to? Where are
we going to?" "If you do not sit down and keep still, my young leddy,"
said the minister-pilot succinctly, "that will verra greatly depend on
how you was brocht up!"

The place at which I remembered this might have been a fine place for an
observatory. It was not so convenient for reminiscence. Here the path
ended. I was as far as Turn Back. I therefore tried more round to the
right. The rocks were so slippery with the melted snow of yesterday that
the nails in my boots refused to grip. But presently there, remained
only a snow-slope, and a final pull up a great white-fringed bastion of
rock. Here was the summit; and even as I reached it, over the Bernina
the morning was breaking clear.

I took from my back the pine-branch which had been such a difficulty to
me in the narrow places of the ascent; and with the first ray of the
morning sun, from the summit of Langrev the pennon of the Countess Lucia
streamed out. I thought of Manager Gutwein down there on the look-out,
and I rejoiced that I had pledged him to secrecy.

_Gutwein_--there was a sound as of cakes and ale in the very name.

A little way beneath the summit, where the Thal wind does not vex, I sat
me down on the sunny eastern side to consult with the Gutwein breakfast.
A bottle of cold tea--"Hum," said I; "that may keep till I get farther
down. It will be useful in case of emergency--there is nothing like cold
tea in an emergency. _Imprimis_, half a bottle of Forzato--our old Straw
wine. How thoughtless of Gutwein! He ought to have remembered that that
particular sort does not keep. We had better take it now!" There was
also half a chicken, some clove-scented Graubündenfleisch, four large
white rolls, crisp as an Engadine cook can make them, half a pound of
butter in each--O excellent Gutwein--O great and judicious Gutwein!

But no more--for the sun was climbing the sky, and I must go down with a
rush to be in time for the late breakfast of the hotel.

The rocks came first--no easy matter with the sun on them for half an
hour; but they at last were successfully negotiated. Then came the long
snow-slope. This we went down all sails set. I hear that the process is
named glissading in this country. It is called hunker-sliding in
Scotland among the Galloway hills--a favourite occupation of
politicians. It added to the flavour that we might very probably finish
all standing in a crevasse. Snow rushed past, flew up one's nose and
froze there. It did not behave itself thus when we slid down Craig
Ronald and whizzed out upon the smooth breast of Loch Grannoch. I was
reflecting on this unwarrantable behaviour of the snow, when there came
a bump, a somersault, a slide, a scramble. "Dear me!" I say; "how did
this happen?" Ears, eyes, mouth, nose were full of fine powdered
snow--also, there were tons down one's back. Cold as charity, but no
great harm done.

The table was set for the _déjeuner_ in the dining-room of the hotel.
The Count was standing rubbing his hands. Henry, who had been shooting
at a mark, came in smelling of gun-oil; and after a little pause of
waiting came the Countess.

"Where," said the Count, "is our Alpinist?" Henry had not seen him that
day. He was no doubt somewhere about. But Herr Gutwein smiled, and also
the waiter. They knew something. There was a crying at the door. The
porter, full of noisy admiration, rang the great bell as for an arrival.
Gutwein disappeared. The Count followed, then came Lucia and Henry. At
that moment I arrived, outwardly calm, with my clothes carefully dusted
from travel-stains, all the equipment of the ascent left in the wayside
châlet by the bridge. I gave an easy good-morning to the group, taking
off my hat to Madame. The Count cried disdainfully that I was a
slug-a-bed. Henry asked with obvious sarcasm if I had not been up the
Piz Langrev. The Countess held out her hand in an uncertain way.
Certainly I must have been very young, for all this gave me intense
pleasure. Especially did my heart leap when I took the Countess to the
window a little to the right, and, pointing with one hand upwards, put
the Count's binocular into her hands. The sun of the mid-noon was
shining on a black speck floating from the topmost cliff of the Piz
Langrev. As she looked she flung out her hand to me, still continuing to
gaze with the glass held in the other. She saw her own scarlet favour
flying from the pine-branch. That cry of wonder and delight was better
to me than the Victoria Cross. I was young then. It is so good to be
young, and better to be in love.




CHAPTER X

THE PURPLE CHÂLET


Our life at the Kursaal Promontonio was full of change and adventure.
For adventures are to the adventurous. In the morning we read quietly
together, Henry and I, beginning as soon as the sun touched our balcony,
and continuing three or four hours, with only such intermission as the
boiling of our spirit-lamp and the making of cups of tea afforded to the
steady work of the morning.

Then at breakfast-time the work of the day was over. We were ready to
make the most of the long hours of sunshine which remained. Sometimes we
rowed with Lucia and her brother on the lake, dreaming under the
headlands and letting the boat drift among the pictured images of the
mountains.

Oftener the Count and Henry would go to their shooting, or away on some
of the long walks which they took in company.

One evening it happened that M. Bourget, the architect of the hotel, a
bright young Belgian, was at dinner with us, and the conversation turned
upon the illiberal policy of the new Belgian Government. Most of the
guests at table were landowners and extreme reactionaries. The
conversation took that insufferably brutal tone of repression at all
hazards which is the first thought of the governing classes of a
despotic country, when alarmed by the spread of liberal opinions.

I could see that both the Count and Lucia put a strong restraint upon
themselves, for I knew that their sympathies were with the oppressed of
their own nation. But the excitement of M. Bourget was painful to see.
He could speak but little English (for out of compliment to us the Count
and the others were speaking English); and though on several occasions
he attempted to tell the company that matters in his country were not as
they were being represented, he had not sufficient words to express his
meaning, and so subsided into a dogged silence.

My own acquaintance with the political movements in Europe was not
sufficient to enable me to claim any special knowledge; but I knew the
facts of the Belgian dispute well enough, and I made a point of putting
them clearly before the company. As I did so, I saw the Count lean
towards me, his face whiter than usual and his eyes dark and intense.
The Countess, too, listened very intently; but the architect could not
keep his seat.

As soon as I had finished he rose, and, coming round to where I sat,
offered me his hand.

"You have spoken well," he said; "you are my brother. You have said what
I was not able to say myself."

On the next day the architect, to show his friendship, offered to take
us all over a châlet which had been built on the cliffs above the
Kursaal, of which very strange tales had gone abroad. The Count and
Henry had not come back from one of their expeditions, so that only the
Countess Lucia and myself accompanied M. Bourget.

As we went he told us a strange story. The châlet was built and
furnished to the order of a German countess from Mannheim, who, having
lost her husband, conceived that the light of her life had gone out, and
so determined to dwell in an atmosphere of eternal gloom.

To the outer view there was nothing extraordinary about the place--a
châlet in the Swiss-Italian taste, with wooden balconies and steep
outside stairs.

M. Bourget threw open the outer door, to which we ascended by a wide
staircase. We entered, and found ourselves in a very dark hall. All the
woodwork was black as ebony, with silver lines on the panels. The floor
was polished work of parquetry, but black also. The roof was of black
wood. The house seemed to be a great coffin. Next we went into a richly
furnished dining-room. There were small windows at both ends. The
hangings here were again of the deepest purple--so dark as almost to be
black. The chairs were upholstered in the same material. All the
woodwork was ebony. The carpet was of thick folds of black pile on which
the feet fell noiselessly. M. Bourget flung open the windows and let in
some air, for it was close and breathless inside. I could feel the
Countess shudder as my hand sought and found hers.

So we passed through room after room, each as funereal as the other,
till we came to the last of all. It was to be the bedroom of the German
widow. M. Bourget, with the instinct of his nation, had arranged a
little _coup de théâtre_. He flung open the door suddenly as we stood in
one of the gloomy, black-hung rooms. Instantly our eyes were almost
dazzled. This furthest room was hung with pure white. The carpet was
white; the walls and roof white as milk. All the furniture was painted
white. The act of stepping from the blackness of the tomb into this
cold, chill whiteness gave me a sense of horror for which I could not
account. It was like the horror of whiteness which sometimes comes to me
in feverish dreams.

But I was not prepared for its effects upon the Countess.

She turned suddenly and clung to my arm, trembling violently.

"O take me away from this place!" she said earnestly.

M. Bourget was troubled and anxious, but I whispered that it was only
the closeness of the rooms which made Madame feel a little faint. So we
got her out quickly into the cool bright sunshine of the Alpine
pastures. The Countess Lucia recovered rapidly, but it was a long while
before the colour came back to her cheeks.

"That terrible, terrible place!" she said again and again. "I felt as
though I were buried alive--shrouded in white, coffined in mort-cloths!"




CHAPTER XI

THE WHITE OWL


To distract her mind I told her tales of the grey city of the North
where I had been colleged. I told of the bleak and biting winds which
cut their way to the marrow of the bones. I described the students rich
and poor, but mostly poor, swarming into the gaunt quadrangles, reading
eagerly in the library, hasting grimly to be wise, posting hotfoot to
distinction or to death. She listened with eyes intent. "We have
something like that in Russia," she said; "but then, as soon as these
students of ours become a little wise, they are cut off, or buried in
Siberia." But I think that, with all her English speech and descent,
Lucia never fully understood that these students of ours were wholly
free to come or go, talk folly or learn sense, say and do good and evil,
according to the freedom of their own wills. I told of our debating
societies, where in the course of one debate there is often enough
treason talked to justify Siberia--and yet, after all, the subject under
discussion would only be, "Is the present Government worthy of the
confidence of the country?"

"And then what happens? What does the Government say?" asked Lucia.

"Ah, Countess!" I said, "in my country the Government does not care to
know what does not concern it. It sits aloft and aloof. The Government
does not care for the chatter of all the young fools in its
universities."

So in the tranced seclusion of this Alpine valley the summer of the year
went by. The flowers carpeted the meadows, merging from pink and blue to
crimson and russet, till with the first snow the Countess and her
brother announced their intention of taking flight--she to the Court of
the South, and he to his estates in the North.

The night before her departure we walked together by the lake. She was
charmingly arrayed in a scarlet cloak lined with soft brown fur; and I
thought--for I was but three-and-twenty--that the turned-up collar threw
out her chin in an adorable manner. She looked like a girl. And indeed,
as it proved, for that night she was a girl.

At first she seemed a little sad, and when I spoke of seeing her again
at the Court of the South she remained silent, so that I thought she
feared the trouble of having us on her hands there. So in a moment I
chilled, and would have taken my hand from hers, had she permitted it.
But suddenly, in a place where there are sands and pebbly beaches by
the lakeside, she turned and drew me nearer to her, holding me meantime
by the hand.

"You will not go and forget?" she said. "I have many things to forget. I
want to remember this--this good year and this fair place and you. But
you, with your youth and your innocent Scotland--you will go and forget.
Perhaps you already long to go back thither."

I desired to tell her that I had never been so happy in my life. I might
have told her that and more, but in her fierce directness she would not
permit me.

"There is a maid who sits in one of the tall grey houses of which you
speak, or among the moorland farms--sits and waits for you, and you
write to her. You are always writing--writing. It is to that girl. You
will pass away and think no more of Lucia!"

And I--what could or did I reply? I think that I did the best, for I
made no answer at all, but only drew her so close to me that the
adorable chin, being thrown out farther than ever, rested for an instant
on my shoulder.

"Lucia," I said to her--"not Countess any more--little Saint Lucy of the
Eyes, hear me. I am but a poor moorland lad, with little skill to speak
of love; but with my heart I love you even thus--and thus--and thus."

And I think that she believed, for it comes natural to Galloway to make
love well.

In the same moment we heard the sound of voices, and there were Henry
and the Count walking to and fro on the terrace above us in the blessed
dark, prosing of guns and battues and shooting.

Lucia trembled and drew away from me, but I put my finger to her lip and
drew her nearer the wall, where the creepers had turned into a glorious
wine-red. There we stood hushed, not daring to move; but holding close
the one to the other as the feet of the promenaders waxed and waned
above us. Their talk of birds and beasts came in wafts of boredom to us,
thus standing hand in hand.

I shivered a little, whereat the Countess, putting a hand behind me,
drew a fold of her great scarlet cloak round me protectingly as a mother
might. So, with her mouth almost in my ear, she whispered, "This is
delightful--is it not so? Pray, just hearken to Nicholas: 'With that I
fired.' 'Then we tried the covert.' 'The lock jammed.' 'Forty-four
brace.' Listen to the huntsmen! Shall we startle them with the horn,
tra-la?" And she thrilled with laughter in my ear there in the blissful
dark, till I had to put that over her mouth which silenced her.

"Hush, Lucy, they will hear! Be sage, littlest," I said in Italian, like
one who orders, for (as I have said) Galloway even at twenty-three is no
dullard in the things of love.

"Poor Nicholas!" she said again.

"Nay, poor Henry, say rather!" said I, as the footsteps drew away to the
verge of the terrace, waxing fine and thin as they went farther from us.

"Hear me," said she. "I had better tell you now. Nicholas wishes me
greatly to marry one high in power in our own country--one whose
influence would permit him to go back to his home in Russia and live as
a prince as before."

"But you will not--you cannot--" I began to say to her.

"Hush!" she said, laughing a little in my ear. "I certainly shall if you
cry out like that"--for the footsteps were drawing nearer again. We
leaned closer together against the parapet in the little niche where the
creepers grew. And the dark grew more fragrant. She drew the great cloak
about us both, round my head also. Her own was close to mine, and the
touch of her hair thrilled me, quickening yet more the racing of my
heart, and making me light-headed like unaccustomed wine.

"Countess!" I said, searching for words to thrill her heart as mine was
thrilled already.

"Monsieur!" she replied, and drew away the cloak a little, making to
leave me, but not as one that really intends to go.

"Lucia," I said hastily, "dear Lucy--"

"Ah!" she said, and drew the cloak about us again.

And what we said after that, is no matter to any.

But we forgot, marvel at it who will, to hearken to the footsteps that
came and went. They were to us meaningless as the lapse of the waves on
the shore, pattering an accompaniment above the soft sibilance of our
whispered talk, making our converse sweeter.

Yet we had done well to listen a little.

"... I think it went in there," said the voice of the Count, very near
to us and just above our heads. "I judge it was a white owl."

"I shall try to get it for the Countess!" said Henry.

Then I heard the most unmistakable, and upon occasion also the most
thrilling, of sounds--the clicking of a well-oiled lock. My heart leapt
within me--no longer flying in swift, light fashion like footsteps
running, but bounding madly in great leaps.

Silently I swept the Countess behind me into the recess of the niche,
forcing her down upon the stone seat, and bending my body like a shield
over her.

In a moment Henry's piece crashed close at my ear, a keen pain ran like
molten lead down my arm; and, spite of my hand upon her lips, Lucia gave
a little cry. "I think I got it that time!" I heard Henry's voice say.
"Count, run round and see. I shall go this way."

"Run, Lucy," I whispered, "they are coming. They must not find you."

"But you are hurt?" she said anxiously.

"No," I said, lying to her, as a man does so easily to a woman. "I am
not at all hurt. Have I hurt you?"

For I had thrust her behind me with all my might.

"I cannot tell yet whether you have hurt me or not," she said. "You men
of the North are too strong!"

"But they come. Run, Lucy, beloved!" I said.




CHAPTER XII

A NIGHT ASSAULT


And she melted into the night, swiftly as a bird goes. Then I became
aware of flying footsteps. It seemed that I had better not be found
there, lest I should compromise the Countess with her brother, and find
myself with a duel upon my hands in addition to my other embarrassments.
So I set my toes upon the little projections of the stone parapet,
taking advantage of the hooks which confined the creepers, and clutching
desperately with my hands, so that I scrambled to the top just as the
Count and Henry met below.

"Strike a light, Count," I heard Henry say; "I am sure I hit something.
I heard a cry."

A light flamed up. There was the rustling noise of the broad leaves of
the creeper being pushed aside.

"Here is blood!" cried Henry. "I was sure I hit something that time!"

His tone was triumphant.

"I tell you what it is, Monsieur," said the calm voice of the Count: "if
you go through the world banging off shots on the chance of shooting
white owls which you do not see, you are indeed likely to hit
something. But whether you will like it after it is hit, is another
matter."

Then I went indoors, for my arm was paining me. In my own room I eagerly
examined the wound. It was but slight. A pellet or two had grazed my arm
and ploughed their way along the thickness of the skin, but none had
entered deeply. So I wrapped my arm in a little lint and some old linen,
and went to bed.

I did not again see the Countess till noon on the morrow, when her
carriage was at the door and she tripped down the steps to enter.

The Count stood by it, holding the door for her to enter--I midway down
the broad flight of steps.

"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand, from which she deftly drew
the glove. "We shall meet again."

"God grant it! I live for that!" said I, so low that the Count did not
hear, as I bent to kiss her hand. For in these months I had learned many
things.

At this moment Henry came up to say farewell, and he shook her hand with
boyish affectation of the true British indifference, which at that time
it was the correct thing for Englishmen to assume at parting.

"Nice boy!" said the Countess indulgently, looking up at me. The Count
bowed and smiled, and smiled and bowed, till the carriage drove out of
sight.

Then in a moment he turned to me with a fierce and frowning countenance.

"And now, Monsieur, I have the honour to ask you to explain all this!"

I stood silent, amazed, aghast. There was in me no speech, nor reason.
Yet I had the sense to be silent, lest I should say something maladroit.

A confidential servant brought a despatch. The Count impatiently flung
it open, glanced at it, then read it carefully twice. He seemed much
struck with the contents.

"I am summoned to Milan," he said, "and upon the instant. I shall yet
overtake my sister. May I ask Monsieur to have the goodness to await me
here that I may receive his explanations? I shall return immediately."

"You may depend that I shall wait," I said.

The Count bowed, and sprang upon the horse which his servant had saddled
for him.

But the Count did not immediately return, and we waited in vain. No
letter came to me. No communication to the manager of the hostel. The
Count had simply ridden out of sight over the pass through which the
Thal wind brought the fog-spume. He had melted like the mist, and, so
far as we were concerned, there was an end. We waited here till the
second snow fell, hardened, and formed its sleighing crust.

Then we went, for some society to Henry, over to the mountain village of
Bergsdorf, which strings itself along the hillside above the River Inn.

Bergsdorf is no more than a village in itself, but, being the chief
place of its neighbourhood, it supports enough municipal and other
dignitaries to set up an Imperial Court. Never was such wisdom--never
such pompous solemnity. The Burgomeister of Bergsdorf was a great
elephant of a man. He went abroad radiating self-importance. He
perspired wisdom on the coldest day. The other officials imitated the
Burgomeister in so far as their corporeal condition allowed. The _curé_
only was excepted. He was a thin, spare man with an ascetic face and a
great talent for languages. One day during service he asked a mother to
carry out a crying child, making the request in eight languages. Yet the
mother failed to understand till the limping old apparator led her out
by the arm.

There is no doubt that the humours of Bergsdorf lightened our spirits
and cheered our waiting; for it is my experience that a young man is
easily amused with new, bright, and stirring things even when he is in
love.

And what amused us most was that excellent sport--now well known to the
world, but then practised only in the mountain villages--the species of
adventure which has come to be called "tobogganing." I fell heir in a
mysterious fashion to a genuine Canadian toboggan, curled and
buffalo-robed at the front, flat all the way beneath; and upon this,
with Henry on one of the ordinary sleds with runners of steel, we spent
many a merry day.

There was a good run down the road to the post village beneath; another,
excellent, down a neighbouring pass. But the best run of all started
from high up on the hillside, crossed the village street, and undulated
down the hillside pastures to the frozen Inn river below--a splendid
course of two miles in all. But as a matter of precaution it was
strictly forbidden ever to be used--at least in that part of it which
crossed the village street. For such projectiles as laden toboggans,
passing across the trunk line of the village traffic at an average rate
of a mile a minute, were hardly less dangerous than cannon-balls, and of
much more erratic flight.

Nevertheless, there was seldom a night when we did not risk all the
penalties which existed in the city of Bergsdorf, by defying all powers
and regulations whatsoever and running the hill-course in the teeth of
danger.

I remember one clear, starlight night with the snow casting up just
enough pallid light to see by. Half a dozen of us--Henry and myself, a
young Swiss doctor newly diplomaëd, the adventurous advocate of the
place, and several others--went up to make our nightly venture. We gave
half a minute's law to the first starter, and then followed on. I was
placed first, mainly because of the excellence of my Canadian iceship.
As I drew away, the snow sped beneath; the exhilarating madness of the
ride entered into my blood. I whooped with sheer delight.... There was a
curve or two in the road, and at the critical moment, by shifting the
weight of my body and just touching the snow with the point of the short
iron-shod stick I held in my hand, the toboggan span round the curve
with the delicious clean cut of a skate. It seemed only a moment, and
already I was approaching the critical part of my journey. The stray
oil-lights of the village street began to waver irregularly here and
there beneath me. I saw the black gap in the houses through which I must
go. I listened for the creaking runners of the great Valtelline
wine-sledges which constituted the main danger. All was silent and safe.
But just as I drew a long breath, and settled for the delicious rise
over the piled snow of the street and the succeeding plunge down to the
Inn, a vast bulk heaved itself into the seaway, like some lost monster
of a Megatherium retreating to the swamps to couch itself ere morning
light.

It was the Burgomeister of Bergsdorf.

"Acht--u--um--m!" I shouted, as one who, on the Scottish links, should
cry "Fore!" and be ready to commit murder.

But the vision solemnly held up its hand and cried "Halt!"

"Halt yourself!" I cried, "and get out of the way!" For I was
approaching at a speed of nearly a mile a minute. Now, there is but one
way of halting a toboggan. It is to run the nose of your machine into a
snow-bank, where it will stick. On the contrary, you do not stop. You
describe the curve known as a parabola, and skin your own nose on the
icy crust of the snow. Then you "halt," in one piece or several, as the
case may be.

But I, on this occasion, did not halt in this manner. The mind moves
swiftly in emergencies. I reflected that I had a low Canadian toboggan
with a soft buffalo-skin over the front. The Burgomeister also had
naturally well-padded legs. _Eh bien_--a meeting of these two could do
no great harm to either. So I sat low in my seat, and let the toboggan
run.

Down I came flying, checked a little at the rise for the crossing of the
village street. A mountainous bulk towered above me--a bulk that still
and anon cried "Halt!" There was a slight shock and a jar. The stars
were eclipsed above me for a moment; something like a large tea-tray
passed over my head and fell flat on the snow behind me. Then I scudded
down the long descent to the Inn, leaving the village and all its
happenings miles behind.

I did not come up the same way. I did not desire to attract immodest
attention. Unobtrusively, therefore, I proceeded to leave my toboggan in
its accustomed out-house at the back of the Osteria. Then, slipping on
another overcoat, I took an innocent stroll along the village street, in
the company of the landlord.

There was a great crowd on the corner by the Rathhaus. In the centre was
Henry, in the hands of two officers of justice. The Burgomeister,
supported by sympathising friends, limped behind. There is no doubt that
Henry was exercising English privileges. His captors were unhappy. But I
bade him go quietly, and with a look of furious bewilderment he obeyed.
Finally we got the hotel-keeper, a staunch friend of ours and of great
importance in these parts, to bail him out.

On the morrow there was a deliciously humorous trial. The young advocate
was in attendance, and the whole village was called to give evidence.
But, curiously enough, I was not summoned. I had been, it seemed, in
the hotel changing my clothes. However, I was not missed, for everybody
else had something to say. There were excellent plans of the ground,
showing where the miscreant assaulted the magistrate. There, plain to be
seen, was the mark in the snow where Henry, starting half a minute after
me, and observing a vast prostrate bulk on the path, had turned his
toboggan into the snow-bank, duly described his parabola, discuticled
his nose--in fact, fulfilled the programme to the letter. Clearly, then,
he could not have been the aggressor. The villain has remained, up to
the publication of this veracious chronicle, unknown. No matter: I am
not going back to Bergsdorf.

But something had to be done to vindicate the offended majesty of the
law. So they fined Henry seventeen francs for obstructing the police in
the discharge of their duty.

"Never mind," said Henry, "that's just eight francs fifty each. I got in
two, both right-handers."

And I doubt not but the officers concerned considered that he had got
his money's worth.




CHAPTER XIII

CASTEL DEL MONTE


It was March before we found ourselves in the Capital of the South. The
Countess was still there, but the Count, her brother, had not appeared,
and the explanation to which he referred remained unspoken. Here Lucia
was our kind friend and excellent entertainer; but of the tenderness of
the Hotel Promontonio it was hard for me to find a trace. The great lady
indeed outshone her peers, and took my moorland eyes as well as the
regards of others. But I had rather walked by the lake with the scarlet
cloak, or stood with her and been shot at for a white owl in the niche
of the terrace.

In the last days of the month there came from Henry's uncle and
guardian, Wilfred Fenwick, an urgent summons. He was ill, he might be
dying, and Henry was to return at once; while I, in anticipation of his
return, was to continue in Italy. There was indeed nothing to call me
home.

Therefore--and for other reasons--I abode in Italy; and after Henry's
departure I made evident progress in the graces of the Countess. Once or
twice she allowed me to remain behind for half an hour. On these
occasions she would come and throw herself down in a chair by the fire,
and permit me to take her hand. But she was weary and silent, full of
gloomy thoughts, which in vain I tried to draw from her. Still, I think
it comforted her to have me thus sit by her.

One morning, while I was idly leaning upon the bridge, and looking
towards the hills with their white marble palaces set amid the beauty of
the Italian spring, one touched me on the shoulder. I turned, and
lo--Lucia! Not any more the Countess, but Lucia, radiant with
brightness, colour in her cheek for the first time since I had seen her
in the Court of the South, animation sparkling in her eye.

"So I have found you, faithless one," she said. "I have been seeking for
you everywhere."

"And I, have I not been seeking for you all these weeks--and never have
found you till now, Lucia!"

I thought she would not notice the name.

"Why, Sir Heather Jock," she returned, "did you not part with me last
night at eleven of the clock?"

"Pardon me," I replied, letting the love in my heart woo her through my
eyes, and say what I dared not--at least, not here upon the open bridge
over which we slowly walked. "Pardon me, it is true that I parted at
eleven of the clock last night with Madame the Countess of Castel del
Monte. But, on the contrary, this morning I have met Lucia--my little
Saint Lucy of the Eyes."

"Who in Galloway taught you to make such speeches?" she said. "It is all
too pretty to have been said thus trippingly for the first time."

"Love," I made answer. "Love, the Master, taught me; for never before
have I known either a Countess or a Lucia!"

"'Douglas, Douglas, tender and true,' does not your song say?" said she.
"Will you ever be true, Douglas?"

"Lucy, will you ever be cruel? I dare you to say these things to-night
when I come to see you. 'Tis easy to dare to say them in the face of the
streets."

"Ah, Douglas, you will not see me to-night! I have come to bid you
farewell--farewell!" said she, as tragically as she dared, yet so that I
alone would hear her. Her eyes darted here and there, noting who came
near; and a smile flickered about her mouth as she calculated precisely
the breaking strain of my patience, and teased me up to that point. I
can easily enough see her elvish intent now, but I did not then.

"I go this afternoon," she said. "I have come to bid you
farewell--'Farewell! The anchor's weighed! Remember me!'"

"Is that why you are so happy to-day, because you are going away?" I
asked, putting a freezing dignity into my tones.

She nodded girlishly, and I admit, as a critic, adorably.

"Yes," she said, "that is just the reason."

We were now in the Public Gardens, and walking along a more quiet path.

"Good-bye, then," I said, holding out my hand.

"No, indeed!" she said; "I shall not allow you to kiss my hand in
public!"

And she put her hands behind her with a small, petulant gesture. "Now,
then!" she said defiantly.

With the utmost dignity I replied--"Indeed, I had no intention of
kissing your hand, Madame; but I have the honour of wishing you a very
good day."

So lifting my hat, I was walking off, when, turning with me, Lucia
tripped along by my side. I quickened my pace.

"Stephen," she said, "will you not forgive me for the sake of the old
time? It is true I am going away, and that you will not see me
again--unless, unless--you will come and visit me at my country house.
Stephen, if you do not walk more slowly, I declare I shall run after you
down the public promenade!"

I turned and looked at her. With all my heart I tried to be grave and
severe, but the mock-demure look on her face caused me weakly to laugh.
And then it was good-bye to all my dignity.

"Lucy, I wish you would not tease me," I said, still more weakly.

"Poor Toto! give it bon-bons! It shall not be teased, then," she said.

Before we parted, I had promised to come and see her at her country
house within ten days. And so, with a new brightness in her face, Saint
Lucy of the Eyes came back to my heart, and came to stay.

It was mid-April when I started for Castel del Monte. It was spring, and
I was going to see my love. The land about on either side, as I went,
was faintly flushed with peach-blossom shining among the hoary stones.
By the cliff edge the spiny cactus threw out strange withered arms. A
whitethorn without spike or spine gracefully wept floods of blonde
tears.

At a little port by the sea-edge I left the main route, and fared onward
up into the mountains. A mule carried my baggage; and the muleteer who
guided it looked like a mountebank in a garb rusty like withered leaves.
Like withered leaf, too, he danced up the hillside, scaling the long
array of steps which led through the olives toward Castel del Monte.
Some of his antics amused me, until I saw that none of them amused
himself, and that through all the contortions of his face his eyes
remained fixed, joyless, tragic.

Castel del Monte sat on the hill-top, eminent, far-beholding.
Vine-stakes ran up hill and down dale, all about it. White houses were
sprinkled here and there. As we ascended, the sea sank beneath, and the
shining dashes of the wave-crests diminished to sparkling pin-points.
Then with oriental suddenness the sun went down. Still upward fared the
joyless _farceur_, and still upon the soles of my feet, and with my
pilgrim staff in my hand, I followed.

Sometimes the sprays of fragrant blossom swept across our faces.
Sometimes a man stepped out from the roadside and challenged; but, on
receiving a word of salutation from my knave, he returned to his place
with a sharp clank of accoutrement.

White blocks of building moved up to us in the equal dusk of the
evening, took shape for a moment, and vanished behind us. The summit of
the mountain ceased to frown. The strain of climbing was taken from the
mechanic movement of the feet. The mule sent a greeting to his kind; and
some other white mountain, larger, more broken as to its sky-line, moved
in front of us and stayed.

"Castel del Monte!" said the muleteer, wrinkling all the queer puckered
leather of his visage in the strong light which streamed out as the
great door opened. A most dignified Venetian senator, in the black and
radiant linen of the time, came forth to meet me, and with the utmost
respect ushered me within. In my campaigning dress and broad-brimmed
hat, I felt that my appearance was unworthy of the grandeur of the
entrance-hall, of the suits of armour, the vast pictures, and the
massive last-century furniture in crimson and gold.




CHAPTER XIV

AN ERROR IN JUDGMENT


I had expected that Lucia would have come to greet me, and that some of
the other guests would be moving about the halls. But though the rooms
were brightly lit, and servants moving here and there, there abode a
hush upon the place strangely out of keeping with my expectation.

In my own room I arrayed me in clothes more fitted to the palace in
which I found myself, though, after all was done, their plainness made a
poor contrast to the mailed warriors on the pedestals and the scarlet
senators in the frames.

There was a rose, fresh as the white briar-blossom in my mother's
garden, upon my table. I took it as Lucia's gage, and set it in my coat.

"My lady waits," said the major-domo at the door.

I went down-stairs, conscious by the hearing of the ear that a heart was
beating somewhere loudly, mine or another's I could not tell.

A door opened. A rush of warm and gracious air, a benediction of subdued
light, and I found myself bending over the hand of the Countess. I had
been talking some time before I came to the knowledge that I was saying
anything.

Then we went to dinner through the long lit passages, the walls giving
back the merry sound of our voices. Still, strangely enough, no other
guests appeared. But my wonder was hushed by the gladness on the face of
the Countess. We dined in an alcove, screened from the vast dining-room.
The table was set for three. As we came in, the Countess murmured a
name. An old lady bowed to me, and moved stiffly to a seat without a
word. Lucia continued her conversation without a pause, and paid no
further heed to the ancient dame, who took her meal with a single-eyed
absorption upon her plate.

My wonder increased. Could it be that Lucia and I were alone in this
great castle! I cannot tell whether the thought brought me more
happiness or discontent. Clearly, I was the only guest. Was I to remain
so, or would others join us after dinner? My heart beat faint and
tumultuously. At random I answered to Lucia's questionings about my
journey. My slow-moving Northern intelligence began to form questions
which I must ask. Through the laughing charm of my lady's face and the
burning radiance of her eyes, there grew into plainness against the
tapestry the sad, pale face of my mother and her clear, consistent eyes.
I talked--I answered--I listened--all through a humming chaos. For the
teaching of the moorland farm, the ethic of the Sabbath nights lit by a
single candle and sanctified by the chanted psalm and the open Book,
possessed me. It was the domination of the Puritan base, and most
bitterly I resented, while I could not prevent, its hold upon me.

Dinner was over. We took our way into a drawing-room, divided into two
parts by a screen which was drawn half-way. In the other half of the
great room stood an ancient piano, and to this our ancient lady betook
herself.

The Countess sat down in a luxurious chair, and motioned me to sit close
by her in another, but one smaller and lower. We talked of many things,
circling ever about ourselves. Yet I could not keep the old farm out of
my mind--its simple manners, its severe code of morals, its labour and
its pain. Also there came another thought, the sense that all this had
happened before--the devil's fear that I was not the first who had so
sat alone beside the Countess and seen the obsequious movement of these
well-trained servants.

"Tell me, Douglas," at last the Countess said, glancing down kindly at
me, "why you are so silent and _distrait_. This is our first evening
here, and yet you are sad and forgetful, even of me."

What a blind fool I was not to see the innocence and love in her eyes!

"Countess--" I began, and paused uncertain.

"Sir to you!" she returned, making me a little bow in acknowledgment of
the title.

"Lucia," I went on, taking no notice of her frivolity, "I thought--I
thought--that is, I imagined--that your brother--that others would be
here as well as I--"

I got no further. I saw something sweep across her face. Her eyes
darkened. Her face paled. The thin curved nostrils whitened at the
edges. I paused, astonished at the tempest I had aroused by my faltering
stupidities. Why could I not take what the gods gave?

"I see," she said bitterly: "you reproach me with bringing you here as
my guest, alone. You think I am bold and abandoned because I dreamed of
an Eden here with friendship and truth as dwellers in it. I saw a new
and perfect life; and with a word, here in my own house, and before you
have been an hour my guest, you insult me--"

"Lucia, Lucia," I pleaded, "I would not insult you for the world--I
would not think a thought--speak a word--dishonouring to you for my
life--"

"You have--you have--it is all ended--broken!" she said, standing
up--"all broken and thrown down!"

She made with her hands the bitter gesture of breaking.

"Listen," she said, while I stood amazed and silent. "I am no girl. I am
older than you, and know the world. It is because I dreamed I saw that
which I thought truer and purer in you than the conventions of life that
I asked you to come here--"

"Lucia, Lucia, my lady, listen to me," I pleaded, trying to take her
hand. She put me aside with the single swift, imperious movement which
women use when their pride is deeply wounded.

"That lady"--she pointed within to where the silent dame of years was
tinkling unconcernedly on the keys--"is my dead husband's mother. Surely
she abundantly supplies the proprieties. And now you--you whom I thought
I could trust, spoil my year--spoil my life, slay in a moment my love
with reproach and scorn!"

She walked to the door, turned and said--"You, whom I trusted, have done
this!" Then she threw out her hands in an attitude of despair and scorn,
and disappeared.

I sat long with my head on my hands, thinking--the world about me in
ruins, never to be built up. Then I went up to my room, paused at the
wardrobe, changed my black coat to that in which I had arrived, and went
softly down-stairs again. The waning moon had just risen late, and threw
a weird light over the ranges of buildings, the gateways and towers.

I walked swiftly to the outer gate, and, there leaping a hedge of
flowering plants, I fled down the mountain through the vineyards. I
went swiftly, eager to escape from Castel del Monte, but in the tangle
of walls and fences it was not easy to advance. At the parting of three
ways I paused, uncertain in which direction to proceed. Suddenly,
without warning, a dark figure stepped from some hidden place. I saw the
gleam of something bright. I knew that I was smitten. Waves of white-hot
metal ran suddenly in upon my brain, and I knew no more.

When I awoke, my first thought was that I was back again in the room
where Lucia and I had talked together. I felt something perfumed and
soft like a caress. It seemed like the filmy lace that the Countess wore
upon her shoulder. My head lay against it. I heard a voice say, as it
had been in my ear, through the murmuring floods of many waters--"My
boy! my boy! And I, wicked one that I was, sent you to this!"

All the time she who spoke was busy binding something to the place on my
side where the pain burned like white metal. And as she did so she
crooned softly over me, saying as before--"My poor boy! my poor boy!" It
was like the murmuring of a dove over its nestling. Again and again I
was borne away from her and from myself on the floods of great waters.
The universe alternately opened out to infinite horrors of vastness, and
shrank to pinpoint dimensions to crush me. Through it all I heard my
love's voice, and was content to let my head bide just where it lay.

Ever and anon I came to the surface, as a diver does lest he die. I
heard myself say--"It was an error in judgment!" ... Then after a
pause--"nothing but an error in judgment."

And I felt that on which my head rested shake with a little earthquake
of hysterical laughter. The strain had been too great, yet I had said
the right word.

"Yes," she said softly, "my poor boy, it has been indeed an error in
judgment for both of us!"

"But a blessed error, Lucia," I said, answering her when she least
expected it.

A dark shape flitted before my dazzled eyes.

The Countess looked up. "Leonardi!" she called, "tell me, has one of
your people done this?"

"Nay," said the man, "none of the servants of the Bond nor yet of the
Mafia. Pietro the muleteer hath done it of his own evil heart for
robbery. Here are the watch and purse!"

"And the murderer--where is he?" said again Lucia. "Let him be brought!"

"He has had an accident, Excellency. He is dead," said Leonardi simply.

Then they took me up very softly, and bore me to the door from which I
had fled forth. Lucia walked with me. In the dusk of the leaves, while
the bearers were fumbling with the inner doors, which would swing in
their faces, Lucia put her hot lips to my hand, which she had held
kindly in hers all the way.

"Pardon me, Douglas," she said, and there was a break in her voice. I
felt the ocean of tears rising about me, and feared that I could not
find the words fittingly to answer. For the pain had made me weak.

"Nay," I said at last, just over my breath, "it was my folly. Forgive
me, little Saint Lucy of the Eyes! It was--it was--what was it that it
was?--I have forgotten--"

"An error in judgment!" said Saint Lucy of the Eyes, and forgave me,
though I cannot remember more about it.

I suppose I could take the title if I chose, for these things are easily
arranged in Italy; but Lucia and I think it will keep for the second
Stephen Douglas.




IV

UNDER THE RED TERROR

  _What of the night, O Antwerp bells,
    Over the city swinging,
  Plaintive and sad, O kingly bells,
    In the winter midnight ringing?_

  _And the winds in the belfry moan
  From the sand-dunes waste and lone,
    And these are the words they say,
   The turreted bells and they--_

    _"Calamtout, Krabbendyk, Calloo,"
    Say the noisy, turbulent crew;
    "Jabbeké, Chaam, Waterloo;
    Hoggerhaed, Sandvaet, Lilloo,
    We are weary, a-weary of you!
    We sigh for the hills of snow,
    For the hills where the hunters go,
    For the Matterhorn, Wetterhorn, Dom,
    For the Dom! Dom! Dom!
  For the summer sun and the rustling corn,
  And the pleasant vales of the Rhineland valley_."

  "_The Bells of Antwerp_."


I am writing this for my friend in Scotland, whose strange name I cannot
spell. He wishes to, put it in the story-book he is writing. But his
book is mostly lies. This is truth. I saw these things, and I write them
down now because of the love I have for him, the young Herr who saved my
brother's life among the black men in Egypt. Did I tell how our Fritz
went away to be Gordon's man in the Soudan of Africa, and how he wrote
to our father and the mother at home in the village--"I am a great man
and the intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and
he who is our general is hardly a man. He has no fear, and death is to
him as life"? So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own
brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin
between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I
will now tell you the story of how he saved him. It was--

But the Herr has come in, and says that I am a "dumbhead," also
condemned, and many other things, because, he says, I can never tell
anything that I begin to tell straightforwardly like a street in Berlin.
He says my talk is crooked like the "Philosophers' Way" after one passes
the red sawdust of the Hirsch-Gasse, where the youngsters "drum" and
"drum" all the Tuesdays and the Fridays, like the donkeys that they are.
I am to talk (he says violently) about Paris and the terrible time I saw
there in the war of Seventy.

Ah! the time when there was a death at every door, the time which
Heidelberg and mine own Thurm village will not forget--that made grey
the hairs of Jacob Oertler, the head-waiter, those sixty days he was in
Paris, when men's blood was spilt like water, when the women and the
children fell and were burned in the burning houses, or died shrieking
on the bayonet point. There is no hell that the Pfaffs tell of, like the
streets of Paris in the early summer of Seventy-one. But it is necessary
that I make a beginning, else I shall never make an ending, as Madame
Hegelmann Wittwe, of the Prinz Karl, says when there are many guests,
and we have to rise after two hours' sleep as if we were still on
campaign. But again I am interrupted and turned aside.

Comes now the young Herr, and he has his supper, for ever since he came
to the Prinz Karl he takes his dinner in the midst of the day as a man
should.

"Ouch," he says, "it makes one too gross to eat in the evening."

So the Herr takes his dinner at midday like a good German; and when
there is supper he will always have old Jacob to tell him tales, in
which he says that there is no beginning, no era, nor Hegira, no Anno
Domini, but only the war of Seventy. But he is a hard-hearted young
Kerl, and will of necessity have his jesting. Only yesterday he said--

"Jacob, Jacob, this duck he must have been in the war of Siebenzig; for,
begomme, he is tough enough. Ah, yes, Jacob, he is certainly a veteran.
I have broken my teeth over his Iron Cross." But if he had been where I
have been, he would know that it is not good jesting about the Iron
Cross.

Last night the young Herr, he did not come home for supper at all. But
instead of him there came an Officier clanging spurs and twisting at
seven hairs upon his upper lip. The bracing-board on his back was tight
as a drum. The corners stretched the cloth of his uniform till they
nearly cut through.

He was but a boy, and his shoulder-straps were not ten days old; but old
Jacob Oertler's heels came together with a click that would have been
loud, but that he wore waiter's slippers instead of the field-shoes of
the soldier.

The Officier looked at me, for I stood at attention.

"Soldier?" said he. And he spoke sharply, as all the babe-officers
strive to do.

I bowed, but my bow was not that of the Oberkellner of the Prinz Karl
that I am now.

"Of the war?" he asked again.

"Of three wars!" I answered, standing up straight that he might see the
Iron Cross I wear under my dress-coat, which the Emperor set there.

"Name and regiment?" he said quickly, for he had learned the way of it,
and was pleased that I called him Hauptmann.

"Jacob Oertler, formerly of the Berlin Husaren, and after of the
Intelligence Department."

"So," he said, "you speak French, then?"

"Sir," said I, "I was twenty years in France. I was born in Elsass. I
was also in Paris during the siege."

Thus we might have talked for long enough, but suddenly his face
darkened and he lifted his eyes from the Cross. He had remembered his
message.

"Does the tall English Herr live here, who goes to Professor Müller's
each day in the Anlage? Is he at this time within? I have a cartel for
him."

Then I told him that the English Herr was no Schläger-player, though
like the lion for bravery in fighting, as my brother had been witness.

"But what is the cause of quarrel?" I asked.

"The cause," he said, "is only that particular great donkey, Hellmuth.
He came swaggering to-night along the New Neckar-Bridge as full of beer
as the Heidelberg tun is empty of it. He met your Herr under the lamps
where there were many students of the corps. Now, Hellmuth is a beast of
the Rhine corps, so he thought he might gain some cheap glory by pushing
rudely against the tall Englander as he passed.

"'Pardon!' said the Englishman, lifting his hat, for he is a gentleman,
and of his manner, when insulted, noble. Hellmuth is but a Rhine
brute--though my cousin, for my sins.

"So Hellmuth went to the end of the Bridge, and, turning with his
corps-brothers to back him, he pushed the second time against your
Herr, and stepped back so that all might laugh as he took off his cap to
mock the Englishman's bow and curious way of saying 'Pardon!'

"But the Englander took him momently by the collar, and by some art of
the light hand turned him over his foot into the gutter, which ran
brimming full of half-melted snow. The light was bright, for, as I tell
you, it was underneath the lamps at the bridge-end. The moon also
happened to come out from behind a wrack of cloud, and all the men on
the bridge saw--and the girls with them also--so that you could hear the
laughing at the Molkenkur, till the burghers put their red night-caps
out of their windows to know what had happened to the wild Kerls of the
_cafés_."

"But surely that is no cause for a challenge, Excellenz?" said I. "How
can an officer of the Kaiser bring such a challenge?"

"Ach!" he said, shrugging his shoulders, "is not a fight a fight, cause
or no cause? Moreover, is not Hellmuth after all the son of my mother's
sister, though but a Rhineland donkey, and void of sense?"

So I showed him up to the room of the English Herr, and went away again,
though not so far but that I could hear their voices.

It was the officer whom I heard speaking first. He spoke loudly, and as
I say, having been of the Intelligence Department, I did not go too far
away.

"You have my friend insulted, and you must immediately satisfaction
make!" said the young Officier.

"That will I gladly do, if your friend will deign to come up here. There
are more ways of fighting than getting into a feather-bed and cutting at
the corners." So our young Englander spoke, with his high voice, piping
and clipping his words as all the English do.

"Sir," said the officer, with some heat, "I bring you a cartel, and I am
an officer of the Kaiser. What is your answer?"

"Then, Herr Hauptmann," said the Englishman, "since you are a soldier,
you and I know what fighting is, and that snipping and snicking at noses
is no fighting. Tell your friend to come up here and have a turn with
the two-ounce gloves, and I shall be happy to give him all the
satisfaction he wants. Otherwise I will only fight him with pistols, and
to the death also. If he will not fight in my way, I shall beat him with
a cane for having insulted me, whenever I meet him."

With that the officer came down to me, and he said, "It is as you
thought. The Englishman will not fight with the Schläger, but he has
more steel in his veins than a dozen of Hellmuths. Thunderweather, I
shall fight Hellmuth myself to-morrow morning, if it be that he burns so
greatly to be led away. Once before I gave him a scar of heavenly
beauty!"

So he clanked off in the ten days' glory of his spurs. I have seen many
such as he stiff on the slope of Spichern and in the woods beneath St.
Germain. Yet he was a Kerl of mettle, and will make a brave soldier and
upstanding officer.

But the Herr has again come in and he says that all this is a particular
kind of nonsense which, because I write also for ladies, I shall not
mention. I am not sure, also, what English words it is proper to put on
paper. The Herr says that he will tear every word up that I have
written, which would be a sad waste of the Frau Wittwe's paper and ink.
He says, this hot Junker, that in all my writing there is yet no word of
Paris or the days of the Commune, which is true. He also says that my
head is the head of a calf, and, indeed, of several other animals that
are but ill-considered in England.

So I will be brief.

In Seventy, therefore, I fought in the field and scouted with the
Uhlans. Ah, I could tell the stories! Those were the days. It is a
mistake to think that the country-people hated us, or tried to kill us.
On the contrary, if I might tell it, many of the young maids--

Ach, bitte, Herr--of a surety I will proceed and tell of Paris. I am
aware that it is not to be expected that the English should care to hear
of the doings of the Reiters of the black-and-white pennon in the matter
of the maids.

But in Seventy-one, during the siege and the terrible days of the
Commune, I was in Paris, what you call a spy. It was the order of the
Chancellor--our man of blood-and-iron. Therefore it was right and not
ignoble that I should be a spy.

For I have served my country in more terrible places than the field of
Weissenburg or the hill of Spichern.

Ja wohl! there were few Prussians who could be taken for Frenchmen, in
Paris during those months when suspicion was everywhere. Yet in Paris I
was, all through the days of the investiture. More, I was chief of
domestic service at the Hôtel de Ville, and my letters went through the
balloon-post to England, and thence back to Versailles, where my
brothers were and the Kaiser whom in three wars I have served. For I am
Prussian in heart and by begetting, though born in Elsass.

So daily I waited on Trochu, as I had also waited on Jules Favre when he
dined, and all the while the mob shouted for the blood of spies without.
But I was Jules Lemaire from the Midi, a stupid provincial with the
rolling accent, come to Paris to earn money and see the life. Not for
nothing had I gone to school at Clermont-Ferrand.

But once I was nearly discovered and torn to pieces. The sweat breaks
cold even now to think upon it. It was a March morning very early, soon
after the light came stealing up the river from behind Notre-Dame. A
bitter wind was sweeping the bare, barked, hacked trees on the Champs
Élysées. It happened that I went every morning to the Halles to make the
market for the day--such as was to be had. And, of course, we at the
Hôtel de Ville had our pick of the best before any other was permitted
to buy. So I went daily as Monsieur Jules Lemaire from the Hôtel de
Ville. And please to take off your _képis, canaille_ of the markets.

Suddenly I saw riding towards me a Prussian hussar of my old regiment.
He rode alone, but presently I spied two others behind him. The first
was that same sergeant Strauss who had knocked me about so grievously
when first I joined the colours. At that time I hated the sight of him,
but now it was the best I could do to keep down the German "Hoch!" which
rose to the t

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