Demetrios went out into the night, and there for Sappho the action of the evening ended. A wave of her mother’s large and yellow hand sent her to her little room above the kitchen, and she lay there listening for voices; but there were no voices. She heard Yannie and Christobulos go to the room above the stable, and after that there was more silence. Later, when she was on the edge of drowsiness, she heard voices, and knew that Demetrios had returned. He and Anna Zapta were talking. The murmur of their talk was vague and distant.
“I followed him,” the son was saying; “he did not go to his tent, but wandered up the valley. The moonlight is very bright; I had to be careful. He kept walking round and round where those white stones lie. He sat on one of the stones, and talked.”
“He talked? With nobody there?”
Demetrios nodded.
“It was like a man putting a spell. He held out a hand to the moon. Presently he went away to his tent, and lit a light there. I saw his shadow. When the light went out I crept down to his boat. He had left the doors of the cabin unfastened.”
His mother listened with vast immobility.
“You searched.”
“There was nothing—nothing to show.”
She looked slantwise along the table.
“We must find out. A man does not come to look at old stones. He has heard of the secret; some sailor man has told him. These scholars—cunning people——”
Demetrios’ face showed a vague smile.
“The hoard of Dandolo,” he said. “But if we have searched, and our fathers before us——”
“He has heard of it,” said Anna Zapta. “Perhaps the secret of it was to be found in some old book. We must watch.”
So the game began, for it was not to be believed that a man would sail hundreds of miles in a little white boat just to look at a few old stones on an island. The Zaptas were hard people with gnarled souls. For generations they had torn sustenance from this rocky island; they had suffered the rule of the Turk; life had been grim and careful and secretive. The Englishman’s story was absurd. They had no doubt but that he had heard this Monte Cristo legend, and that he had been lured to Leros by the story of that Venetian hoard buried somewhere. But where? Sundry generations of Zaptas had asked that question and had tried to answer it. They believed in the legend; they had dug and burrowed, delving deep into the cellar of the old Venetian watch-tower. They had hoarded this mysterious and unsolved secret; it belonged to them.
“We must watch. We must find out how much he knows, and what he knows.”
Anna Zapta had spoken.
Merrow, the enthusiast, the dreamer, was like a child in the midst of their imaginings. The sun shone, the sea was blue, and between the grey knees of the hills lay the valley where the Venus of Leros had smiled upon her worshippers. The stones were there, sunk in the soil, looking like the backs of couchant sheep. His enthusiasm began with a swim in the sea, and breakfast under the shade of the poplar. Then he would get to work with measuring tape and notebook and the eyes of the scholar, tracing out the foundations of the temple of the Lady of the Myrtles.
He was watched. And what could be more suspicious than these careful activities, these measurings and scribblings? Even his pocket-book was suspect.
Yet he was to win a disciple.
The girl, leaving her goats, or her work about the house or in the garden or vineyard, would come gliding on those long legs of her, velvet-eyed, hair loose, a veritable Œnone.
The Englishman was a strange creature, mercurial, blue-eyed, incredibly appealing. He smiled at her; he talked. He would let her stand behind him while he sat on one of the old worn stones and drew things in his notebook.
“What do you do, Englishman?”
She was a Greek girl and he accepted her as a fellow enthusiast. The temple of the Venus of the Myrtles! He pictured it to her, its white marble pillars, its light and soaring architrave, the gleaming steps, the forecourt, the groves of cypresses, the mysterious violet-coloured gloom with its portals. And she saw it, its beauty, its symbolical mystery. She saw it in him, and heard it in his voice. He convinced her. He was not like the men—her brothers.
It became a magic game between them. She joined in the dream building of a thing that was dead. She held one end of the measuring tape, and ran about with quick and eager movements, uttering little cries, or looked over his shoulder, and pointed with a slim brown finger, and sparkled, and made sudden discoveries, and was full of quick colour under her olive skin. In three days she knew as much as he did, or all that he knew of the dead temple.
“We must dig,” she said.
“Yes; we must dig.”
It was she who ran up to the farm for a mattock and a long-handled spade, and Anna Zapta, listening with half-closed eyes, put no refusal in the path of the adventure.
“Ah! he wants to dig?”
“Yes; to find the old stones that are buried.”
“Very good,” said the mother; “let him dig.”
When Sappho had gone to bed Kyria Zapta and her sons held council together. They were angry with the Englishman, for it seemed to them that he was treating them as very simple people, fools who would believe anything, and of course all this digging of his appeared the most insolent make-believe. He was even using the girl—their sister, telling her fairy tales. Obviously he had some knowledge that was not theirs, and he had trumped up a pretty story to excuse his playing about with mattock and shovel. He would go on telling Sappho fairy tales, and one night he would dig up something and be off like a thief in that white boat.
“We must find out,” said Anna Zapta.
She stroked a broad nose with a thoughtful finger.
“These English talk easily when they are full of wine. I remember—in the old days. He shall come here and drink wine.”
So it was planned; but Anna Zapta’s Greek wine failed to loosen Merrow’s tongue or to make a babbling and boastful fool of him, for the Englishman was no wine-drinker. The filled glass, sipped at occasionally, remained at his elbow. But he talked, and he talked like a young Homer, while Anna Zapta silently raged.
Obviously, the fellow was cunning.
“Set the girl on him,” said Demetrios with one swarthy, sidelong glance at his mother, when Merrow had gone to his tent.
Anna Zapta’s face became a thunder-cloud.
“What are you saying? My girl is no——”
Demetrios shrugged.
“No; not that. There are different keys to different men’s hearts. The wine will not open him. But some men can be fooled——”
They talked it over, bending forward over the table and looking into each other’s eyes. Demetrios had his say. Some men were soft about women, and though Sappho was little more than a child, the fellow seemed taken with her.
Sappho was fetched out of bed, and made to stand in that grim family circle, listened wide-eyed to the monstrous accusation. Her Englishman was a thief, a cunning fellow who had come to rob poor people, and to dig in the soil and carry away their treasure.
She would not believe it.
But when those intent and greedy faces drew closer about her, and she felt the menace of their anger, and was made to grasp the part she was to play, she grew suddenly and strangely silent. She nodded; she acquiesced. Like a wild thing she was aware of the danger, but she hid her knowledge of it, dissembling, even smiling, while the soul of her fluttered.
“Yes; I will try.”
They made her dress herself next morning in a milk white petticoat and red jacket, with a green sash about her slimness.
“You shall say it is your name-day.”
They gave her red leather shoes and gold earrings.
“Somewhere there is treasure hidden. Make him tell you. One of us will be watching.”
Merrow, sitting on the stones of a foundation wall they had uncovered, with a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, and his notebook beside him, saw this gay figure descending. She came quickly, and yet with an air of unwi
llingness; she had ceased to be the Sappho of yesterday, the fellow-playmate. Her eyes avoided him; she stood there staring into the open trench.
He held his pipe in his hand and smiled.
“What is this? A birthday?”
She raised the two corners of a white apron edged with blue embroidery, and suddenly her impulse had its way.
“They are saying that there is treasure here, and that you have come to take it away from us. They say that you must know where it is hidden.”
Her eyes held his.
“You would not tell me a lie. I do not believe it. But they are angry——”
His inclination had been to laugh, but her eyes were not for laughter. He looked at those gay clothes of hers, and at the figure of her flowering with southern significance.
“Treasure, Sappho? What do they mean?”
“The treasure of the Venetians, hidden here somewhere years and years ago.”
“I know nothing of it. And they think——?”
“Yes.”
Her dark eyes hid something of shame, and her shame was an appeal.
“I swear to you, Sappho, that I know nothing of this treasure.”
“You need not swear to me,” she said quickly. “What you say—I believe.”
He put out a hand, but she stood there, sullen and troubled, struggling with words that were hard to utter.
“But—Kyr Merrow—will they believe——? You see, life is hard here, and money does not come easily. And I am afraid. Oh, go away; go away quickly.”
He climbed out of the trench and stood beside her.
“Oh, but they will believe. I have nothing to fear.”
But she was afraid, and behind her fear were the swarthy faces of her mother and her brothers. She sat down on one of the stones and pleaded with Merrow, showing a sensitiveness that surprised him. She pleaded both for them and for him, understanding their grudging suspicions and Merrow’s lack of seriousness in meeting their suspicion. They would not believe his story, and he could not believe theirs.
The child in her seemed to become aware of the double involvement. She jumped up, and putting her hands upon his shoulders, pushed him gently from her.
“Please—please go away.”
Her earnestness troubled him.
“Well—perhaps—to-morrow.”
“You promise?”
“I will think it over,” he said.
But she would not leave him until he had given her a half promise that he would embark his tent and his belongings in the white boat very early next morning, and sail away from Leros.
“For,” as she said to him, “we and you are strangers. You came here, and they do not understand. I—understand—but they do not. Nor can you understand the suspicions in their hearts. You and they are strangers.”
He tried to smile it off, and to convince himself that he had no cause to feel mortified because his Greeks were not the Greeks of his scholar’s dream.
“If my being here casts a shadow,” he said, “then I will go.”
She folded her hands over her bosom and looked at him with dark and immense self-questioning.
“I will go and tell them. What shall I tell them? It must be a lie. They must think——”
And then she left him, slowly climbing the hillside towards the farm, while Rupert Merrow sat down and smoked a pipe over this problem of the peasant mind. These Zaptas could not believe that a lone man could come to an island, following the light that was in him, but they must needs seek a material purpose, seeing their own narrow greed in the eyes of a stranger.
The truth depressed him, and more than it should have done, for he was one of those men who like to believe people to be better than they are.
“It’s absurd,” he said to himself; “I’ll stay here and see it out. To run away from such a silly fable! To-morrow—perhaps—I will go and talk to that old woman.”
Yet the Zapta mind was to be more previous than the scholar’s, and more quick in action. That night one of the brothers lay across Sappho’s door, listening for any sound from her, while the others spoke their minds.
“It is better to be sure. If he knows anything—he must share it with us.”
The mother, with hands folded over her obese implacability, nodded a ruthless head.
“Let it be done. There will be no boat from Zante for many days. We will say——”
So, by the light of the moon the three brothers went down to the little bay, and unmooring Merrow’s boat, unshipped the mast and sunk the boat in deepish water. They swam ashore, and crept up cautiously to the silent tent where the Englishman lay sleeping.
When Sappho opened the shutter and looked out of her window she saw that the white tent had disappeared, and that Merrow’s boat no longer lay beside Yannie’s caique.
“He has gone,” was the cry of her heart; “he has kept his promise.”
She was both glad and sorry; she put on her old clothes and went down to the day’s work as though nothing had happened, and she pretended to a surprise that hid secret thoughts.
“What, he has gone?”
Her mother had the air of a woman who was not in a temper to be spoken to.
“Yes; and he owes us for a string of onions and six eggs. To sneak away in the night—like that!”
Her face expressed disgusted scorn.
But Anna Zapta was an autocrat, and whatever the mood was that possessed her, she gave way to it, and all the population of Leros bowed the knee, and on the day after the Englishman’s disappearance she appeared to be consumed by a fever of activity. The burden of it was laid upon Sappho’s shoulders. There came the sudden announcement that the whole house was a pigsty, and from the early meal until sunset Sappho toiled and swept and washed, and carried in clean water and carried it out dirty. Anna Zapta was relentless when these restless moods were upon her.
Not till sunset was the girl able to escape from the house, and even then she was watched by Christobulos who sat and smoked upon the yard wall. She went down the hill to the poplar tree, and let the first sadness of her youth spend itself in the blue dusk. She looked at his stones, at the hollows in the valley where they had played that game of rebuilding a dream past.
“It is just like a dream,” she thought. “He came, and he has gone; and my heart is heavy.”
Two days passed, and Anna Zapta’s passion for cleanliness continued, but on the third night a strange and secret restlessness attacked the girl. She had a feeling that something was happening, something that she could neither hear nor see. Her mother was strange, tempestuous, yet sullen. And Demetrios would sit all hunched up at his meals, gnawing his bread with those long teeth of his.
Moreover, she had seen Demetrios—or a figure that was like her eldest brother’s—outlined against the dawn on the ridge where the tower of the Venetians stood. No one ever went there. She had wondered why Demetrios was there.
Such was her restlessness, her intuitive dread of some unknown horror, that she slipped out of her window that third night, and stepping with bare feet on the tiled roof of the pent-house below it, let herself down to the ground. A waning moon was coming up over the sea. She was full of tremors of fear and of nameless excitement. She ran and yet held her breath, climbing through the rough scrub towards the black and squat outline of the ruined tower. It was as though it held something—had a dark and silent mouth that tried to utter a cry of distress.
She was close to the tower, under the bulky shadow of it, when she heard a cry, a faint sound like the cry of someone entombed. Her heart seemed to leap to her mouth. Shivering, she slipped in through the broken doorway, and stood leaning against the wall, the roofless circle above her showing the stars.
Had she imagined that sound?
But no; it came to her again.
“Sappho—Sappho—water.”
In an instant she understood, and understood with horror and tumult and a hurrying tenderness. An old wooden trap-door covered the entrance to the cellar-pit belo
w the floor. She groped and found it, and found it covered with a pile of heavy stones.
Panting, she rolled them away. She fought the door with her thin brown fingers, and with torn finger nails, swung it back and up.
“Is it you?”
His voice came in a dry whisper:
“Sappho—water——”
She brought him water in an earthenware pot, but to descend to him she had to make a second journey to the farm for a rough ladder that hung under the eaves of one of the outhouses. Meanwhile, her terror became a thing of horror and of tenderness. Merrow was very weak. For two days he had had neither food nor water, and she had to support his shoulders while he drank, and in that dark pit their bodies and breath were mingled. She learnt the truth from him. Her brothers had cast him into the pit, and each night he had had the same words thrown down to him:
“Tell us the secret and we will give you water.”
“My Virgin!” she cried, and held his head against her shoulder; “and they are my brothers!”
But she was strong, and she got him up the ladder and down the hillside to the stone jetty where Yannie’s boat lay moored. A dog had begun to bark up at the farm, and in that moment of terror she realized that Merrow was too weak to save himself. He lay there in the bottom of the caique, incapable of hoisting a sail or of pulling at a sweep.
She cast off the moorings, and with a brown foot thrusting against the stones, she scrambled over the gunwale as the caique slid away from the jetty, while Merrow lay there watching her. She got out the light sweeps, and urged the boat slowly towards the open sea. On the island someone was shouting.
Clear of the bay she shipped the sweeps, and went to the sail, but she was not strong enough to hoist it.
“Help. They are coming. They can swim.”
Merrow, struggling to his knees, got hold of the tackle, and adding his weight to hers, they managed to hoist the sail. A light breeze caught it, and Sappho, scrambling over Merrow to the tiller, gave the caique the wind.
“It is over,” she said, and choking suddenly, wept as she held the boat’s head from the island, the exile of circumstance.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 45