Bog-Myrtle and Peat Part 17

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

"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 G.o.ds 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude 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 t.i.tle 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; "Jabbeke, 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 pa.s.ses the red sawdust of the Hirsch-Ga.s.se, 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 h.e.l.l 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.