CHAPTER VIICHRISTINE AWAKES
“Therewas but one little window in the hut of Orio, and so well did this lie in the shadow of the trees that the sun’s rays hardly searched the room in which Christine slept. Yet so old was the habit of the child that she waked with the first glimmerings of dawn, and sprang up from her bed, thinking that she was in her own home and that the waves of the Adriatic were lapping before her door. It was only when she stood upright, to see all things swim before her eyes and to feel her limbs tremble beneath her, that some consciousness of change came upon her, and she sank back with a little cry of surprise upon her lips. Then for the first time she became aware that she had not slept in her own bed. She saw the remains of the supper which Orio had spread, the fruit in the basket, the baked meats, the half-drunk bottle of wine. She looked at the rough bed upon which she had slept and observed the skins which coveredit—skins both of bear and of wolf. Minute by minute her awakening mind built up for her the picture of the yesterday. She remembered that she had left her own home and had come to a city where the multitudes of men and women and the great shapes of the buildings had frightened her. She recalled the words of the priest upon the island named Incoronata, how that he had spoken gravely of the love and the service which the Sacrament demanded. She fell to thinking of the kisses which her lover had pressed upon her, of his passionate devotion when they had come to the shelter of the hut, of her own coldness and repugnance at his touch. Nor did she forget that she had gone to sleep with her hand in his, that he had promised to watch until she should wake again.
“Remembrances such as these are formed slowly, excellency. The whole of the yesterday was lived again by little Christine, before she realised that the man should have been with her at that moment in the hut. It was plain to her now that she had been ill; that the dreaded fever of the marshes by the sea had scourged her limbs and dried her mouth,and breathed its hot breath upon her parched skin. Yet Ugo had left her—without word or message. Though she cried to him again and again as she dragged herself to the door, and stood shivering in the cool wind of morning, there was no answering voice from the thicket of the forest. The very grandeur of the scene around her, the distant snow mountains, the amphitheatre of the hills, the gloom of the woods, terrified her. She could see the valley lying far below, with its stony road winding sinuously about the heights; but neither man nor beast trod it. No living thing stood out to dispute the lonely glory of the pass; there was no sound—not so much as of a bird’s note or the splash of waters. To her untrained fancy it seemed as though they had set her down in some pit of the world, wherein she was doomed to unending captivity. She brought herself to believe that she had lived the night of death, and was now awake in a kingdom cut off from her God and from humanity. She looked to see the gorge below peopled with ghostly figures of men and beasts; she waited to hear the dirges of damned souls and the cries of the imprisoned spirits.
“Let not this be any matter of wonder to us, signor. Here was one whose only schooling for years past had been the schooling of the hills and the sea. Always a child of a wondrous imagination—a child who saw visions in the glades of her island, and whose quick brain peopled the very shore and sky with phantoms—the weakness of fever had now compelled her mind to conjure up these pictures and these fears. She has told me often that when she awoke in the hut and found that Ugo was not at her side she believed indeed that the shadow of death was upon her. All her old life was left behind for ever, she said. Never again would she hear the sound of human voice, or know anything of the human affections. The ramparts of the hills looked like so many gates of her prison. She thought that she was doomed for unnumbered years to wander through the silent valleys of the pass. Never might she come to the great city for which her ambition hungered, and wherein the triumph of which she had dreamt vaguely awaited her. Yesterday these things might have been; to-day they were for ever done with.
“These, excellency, were the thoughts of her waking moments. They passed away anon as the sun rose and the strength of the fever began to abate. Always the possessor of unsurpassable health, sturdy of limb and body, fortified by plain living, Christine was no subject for malaria. The mountain air and the sweet sleep she had enjoyed brought her speedily to a greater tranquillity and to a clearer understanding. She began to say that Ugo had gone down to one of the villages to get bread for breakfast; or that he was tending the horses in a clearing of the thicket. She expected momentarily to hear his voice or his step. Weak as she was, she ran a little way into the wood and called his name. She stood again to scan the road below her, and observed now that there was a waggon upon it. But there was no answer to her cry; no sign of him she sought. Even his horse and her pony were gone; and not so much as a word to tell her for what cause or at what hour they went. She could make nothing of the enigma, had no clear reasoning powers; and faint and weary she returned to the hut and moistened her lips with the wine which Orio had left. Then she layupon her bed again, and slept until the hills were red with the dying light of the sun and all the western sky was ablaze with flame.
“When she awoke for the second time the fever had left her, and she was conscious no longer of that devouring weakness which had consumed her energies at dawn. She was hungry too, and she ate with relish of the food which remained and drank from the flask which was to serve for her bridal supper. She could think now—think well with that clever little brain of hers; and she began to tell herself that Ugo had left her not because he had wished, but because he must. She recalled his fear that they would make a hussar of him, and remembered his aversion to linger in Sebenico. Possibly, she said, this fear had carried him from her side to some more remote place in the hills, and he would come again when the night fell. That he had been hunted down by the soldiers she did not think; for her sleep had been unbroken, and she knew that he would not have left her without word. And while she in her friendship uttered many a devout prayer for him, she could not think of his return without some displeasure, nor forgetthat there had been a shudder upon her lips when he had held her with his kisses.
“Upon that night and during the week which followed Christine slept in the hut of Orio. Her food was maize bread; her drink was the shepherd’s wine. Yet when the hours passed and no man came to her, when the bread failed and she began to want even water to drink, reason told her that if she would see her lover again she must seek him in the hills. She had suffered bitterly—suffered from weakness and from solitude, from the regret of home and the loneliness of the hills. She had looked out across the mountains, and in her fancy had seen the cities and the men of her dreams lying beyond the ramparts and the eternal snows. That strange and haunting voice which often had bidden her in her childhood to rise up and look upon these things with her own eyes now returned and whispered to her that fortune lay beyond the heights. She had memories still of those early years when love and affection had been hers in a home beyond the seas. It seemed to her that she would find across the mountains a link which would bind her to this unforgotten past, and fulfil that destiny whichinstinct told her was rightly hers. The day upon which she had given herself to Ugo Klun was already being forgotten. The fact that she was the man’s wife was one she ever failed to realise. She cared only to know that she had cut herself adrift from the unchanging years of captivity—that a new world and a new home were hers to seek and hers to make.
“Excellency, it was upon the seventh night after her coming to the hut of Orio that she quitted the thicket of the woods and descended the bridle-path to the high-road of the pass. Three days later, at the full heat of the day, she was picked up insensible upon the road to Jajce by Count Paul Zaloski, who was riding to his home from the mountain town of Livno.”